Prices and living standards: evidence from Cape Colony auction rolls

Abstract We construct an annual price index for the Cape Colony, 1718–1812, from more than 200,000 transactions recorded in estate-auction rolls. These records allow us to compute Laspeyres indices for a broad set of goods, including productive assets (livestock, equipment, and enslaved persons) and household durables (major, minor, and luxury items). By moving beyond subsistence baskets, we capture both the cost of acquiring inputs used to generate income and the cost of furnishing a household in a pre-industrial, highly regulated settler economy where wage data are sparse or distorted. We show that auction-derived price movements align with independent proxies for economic conditions—such as ship traffic, pacht prices, consumer prices, and GDP per capita—and that household durables became cheaper relative to productive assets over the long run. These patterns suggest that auction prices provide a useful complementary lens on living standards in colonial contexts where conventional real wage series are unavailable or institutionally constrained.