A unique historical endowment

The special character and course of South Africa's economic history was profoundly influenced by its unique endowment of human and natural resources. This created the context within which individuals, ideologies, and institutions shaped the precise outcomes. Other countries possessed one or two of these distinguishing features, but only in South Africa were all of them present together, and it was this combination which proved to be so powerful. The first of these features was that large numbers of Khoisan and Africans already occupied the southern part of the African continent long before the first Europeans arrived from Holland in the second half of the seventeenth century with the intention to settle. There is no basis for an accurate estimate of the size of this population, but a figure of about 1,500,000 may serve as a rough order of magnitude for the beginning of the nineteenth century (see Annexe 1 for an account of the available information on population size). A century later it was close to 4,000,000. The presence of this substantial, and increasing, indigenous population differentiated South Africa from four other regions of European settlement, the United States of America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.