Calumet Links

I am an economist and economic historian at Stellenbosch University. My research uses quantitative methods — including panel data econometrics and machine learning — to study labour markets, coercion, wages, and inequality in the colonial Cape of Good Hope.

My current work centres on the economic lives of the Khoesan: their wages and working conditions under settler employment, their accumulation pathways on mission stations, and their role in the pastoral economy of the Cape's northeastern frontier. I am a researcher on the Cape of Good Hope Panel Project, one of the largest historical microdata initiatives in the world, funded by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation.

I hold affiliations with the Becker Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago and Lund University. I was a Visiting Scholar at MIT (2023) and have been named a University of Michigan African Presidential Scholar (2026).