JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. IN THE RECENT RESURGENCE OF INTEREST in slavery and slave societies in America,price data have been a fundamental source for historical and economic analyses of the nature of the slave economy. Following the work of Alfred H. Conrad and John R. Meyer on "The Economics of Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South" (1958), scholars have attempted to make inferences about the behavior, expectations, and beliefs of planters through an analysis of the pattern of changes in the price of slaves over time. Slave prices reflected the expectations of planters about a slave's net productivity and the period over which a slave would be productive. The output of the slave, the market value of the goods and services produced, and the value of the goods consumed by the slave all influenced net productivity. The period over which a slave was expected to be productive was determined by the anticipated lifetime of the individual slave and, important for slave societies in the mid-nineteenth century, the expected duration of slavery as a system of labor control.Despite their importance, surprisingly little systematic price data is available other than the crucial series developed for slave markets in the United States.' Only recently have series been generated systematically for other large American slave All of the Cuban documents used in this article are housed at the Archivo Nacional de Cuba, Fondo "Escribanias" (Judiciales). They were selected by a historical studies group headed by ManuLel Moreno Fraginals. The initial data processing was carried out in the Centro de Computaci6n del Poder Popular de la Ciudad de Habana under the technical direction of Ivan Lejardi, whose collaboration and valuable suggestions are greatly appreciated. Further technical assistance was provided by Tito Diaz. Subsequent processing of the data was carried out by the co-authors at the computing centers at Columbia University and the University of Rochester, with the help of James Irwin.

No abstract

En el resurgir contemporáneo del interés por la esclavitud y las sociedades esclavistas en América, el uso de datos de precios ha sido una de las fuentes fundamentales que han utilizado los historiadores y los economistas para analizar la naturaleza de la economía esclavista. Después del trabajo de Conrad y Meyer, los estudiosos han intentado interpretar la conducta de los hacendados, así como sus expectativas y creencias, mediante un detallado análisis de la pauta de cambios de los precios de los esclavos a lo largo del tiempo. A pesar de su importancia, se han recogido sorprendentemente pocos datos sistemáticos de precios, aparte de las series cruciales elaboradas para los mercados de esclavos de Estados Unidos. Sólo recientemente se han generado series de una forma sistemática para las demás sociedades esclavistas importantes, como Brasil y las Indias occidentales británicas. Varias economías esclavistas importantes y secundarias del resto del Nuevo Mundo todavía carecen de esa información. En este contexto, la principal área que menos

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract