Wealth and marriage at the Cape: consanguineous unions as a strategy

Abstract

Marriage is among the most fundamental social relationships undergirding the transmission of cultural norms and family property. How marital partnerships are formed is of considerable interest to a broad range of social scientists, particularly when and whether partners are sought from within the family or from the outside. We study the relatively high levels of cousin marriage characteristic of European settler families in the Cape Colony in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, using a unique linked data sample that combines marital choices with information on taxable wealth, and frontier settlement. This permits us to test two common explanations for cousin marriage in the European demographic literature, a wealth-consolidation strategy versus a geographic isolation hypothesis. While we do find that parents of cousin marriages were wealthier, we find no evidence of these marriages facilitating differential wealth consolidation in the next generation, suggesting that if this was a deliberate strategy to accumulate wealth, it was not a very successful one. Higher rates of cousin marriage in frontier areas suggest a role for geographic isolation.