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Exploration of the economic aspects of slavery has continued without interruption in the 30 years since the publication of Time on the Cross . There is now recognition that plantations were profitable at the time of the abolition of both the slave trade and later slavery itself. It is also generally recognized that in the nineteenth century plantation output in the Americas increased massively, and that even though the price of what slaves in the Americas produced--cotton, coffee, and sugar--declined over several decades, the price of the slaves themselves increased. On the broad interpretation of these patterns, there is, however, much less consensus. Many historians still see slavery as associated with low technology, at least in the field, and as insufficiently flexible to have survived long in an industrial environment.
In the Caribbean the idea of the permanent decline of the British slave economy in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, that originated with nineteenth-century abolitionists, and was developed with racist undertones by Lowell Ragatz in the 1920s, continues to receive support. Indeed, recent work on the pre-1800 period has posed something of a paradox for slave societies. Ever larger estimates of wealth are juxtaposed in the literature with suggestions that sustained productivity gains in slave economies were small or nonexistent. The historical record before 1800 will never provide the rich material sustaining the detailed debates on the economics of slavery that have become the norm for the antebellum South; nevertheless, broad estimates of income and even of productivity trends are gradually emerging. More particularly, it is now possible to compare eighteenth-century trends in produce prices and slave prices--the basis for the striking findings of the last quarter century on productivity in the late slave Americas. In "Slave Prices, the African Slave Trade and Productivity in the Caribbean, 1674-1807," we made use of data on the prices paid for slaves as they arrived in the Americas from Africa in conjunction with prices for the single product that most of these slaves were destined to produce--sugar--to draw inferences about productivity change and other aspects of the slave economy. We concluded that there were significant increases in both average slave productivity and total factor productivity, the latter as much as doubling over the course of the...