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Population Turnover in the English West Indies in the Late Seventeenth Century: A Comparative Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

David W. Galenson
David W. Galenson
Affiliation:
The author is Associate Professor, Department of Economics, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637, and Research Associate, National Bureau of Economic Research.
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Abstract

I present estimates here of the geographic persistence of estate owners and managers in Barbados during 1673–1723. The estimates are based on evidence generated by the functioning of an economic market; the evidence was produced by tracing the names of purchasers over time through the invoice accounts of slave sales held by the Royal African Company on the island.Estimated rates of out-migration from Barbados were low during the 1670s, comparable in magnitude to those found in colonial New England towns, but the rates rose considerably during the following decades. The initially low rates of out-migration might have been the result of the great profitability of sugar planting in early Barbados, while the subsequent increase might have been due to the development of methods of plantation management that allowed estate owners to earn profits as absentees.

Type
Papers Presented at the Forty-fourth Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 45 , Issue 2 , June 1985 , pp. 227 - 235
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1985

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References

1 For references to the studies mentioned in the text and a number of others, see Thernstrom, Stephan, The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880–1970 (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), chap. 9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 The homeward bound invoice account books of the Royal African Company are held in the Public Record Office, London, as Treasury 70/936–70/959.Google Scholar

3 Although space does not permit extended consideration, some difficulties involved in using market observations for studies of persistence must be noted. One is the problem of defining precisely the population at risk to appear in a given market's records. The characteristics of the commodity traded, however, can give indications of those likely to participate: in the present case, these are a subset of the Barbados estate owners and managers. Linkage to other types of records can also help to define the characteristics of market participants relative to larger populations; the results obtained by tracing the purchasers from the invoices used here to a census taken in Barbados in 1679 are reported in Galenson, “Estimating Geographic Persistence from Market Observations.” A second problem is possible incomplete recording of market transactions; this will generally tend to produce downward bias in measured persistence rates, in the same way as underenumeration in censuses. A third problem is that people might choose to withdraw from participation in a market while remaining in the same location; this will again tend to lower measured persistence rates.Google Scholar

4 An attempt to eliminate false linkages due to the presence of purchasers with common names in the invoices was made in producing the estimates of Table I. For the procedure used and discussion, see Galenson, “Estimating Geographic Persistence from Market Observations.”Google Scholar

5 Among many possible examples, compare Zuckerman, Michael, Peaceable Kingdoms: New England Towns in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1970)Google Scholar, with Carl, and Bridenbaugh, Roberta, No Peace Beyond the Line: The English in the Caribbean, 1624–1690 (New York, 1972).Google Scholar

6 Jones, Douglas Lamar, Village and Seaport: Migration and Society in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts (Hanover, N.H., 1981), p. 106.Google Scholar

7 This is the mortality rate obtained as a weighted average of the age-specific rates for males aged 21 and above given by the Model west Level 1 life table of Coale, Ansley J. and Demeny, Paul, Regional Model Life Tables and Stable Populations, 2nd ed. (New York, 1983), p. 42. The weights used are the relative numbers of adult men present in the stable population produced by this mortality regime with an intrinsic rate of growth (r) of zero. The use of a lower bound mortality rate in the calculations done here will bias upward the estimates of out-migration rates from Barbados.Google Scholar

8 This is the mortality rate obtained as a weighted average of the age-specific rates for males aged 21 and above given by the Model West Level 10 life table of Coale and Demeny, Regional Model Life Tables and Stable Populations, p. 46. The weights are again the relative numbers of adult men present in the stable population produced by this mortality regime with an intrinsic rate of growth of zero.Google Scholar On the selection of this model life table, see Smith, Daniel Scott, “The Demographic History of Colonial New England,” this Journal, 22 (03 1972), pp. 171–72.Google Scholar The mortality rate employed here appears to be a generous upper bound of the one that would apply to rural colonial New England males, thus tending to bias downward the estimated out-migration rates; for additional discussion see Galenson, “Estimating Geographic Persistence from Market Observations.”Google Scholar

9 The mean ten-year persistence rate for Barbados for base years in the 1670s, weighted by the number of buyers in each base year, was 35.1 percent, which implies an average annual rate of out- migration of 6.6 percent. The weighted mean ten-year persistence rate from base years in the 1680s was 25.4 percent, which implies an annual out-migration rate of 9.5 percent. The weighted ten-year persistence rate from base years in the 1690s was 18.8 percent, which implies an annual outmigration rate of 12.1 percent.Google Scholar

10 Ligon, Richard, A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbados (London, 1657), p. 21.Google Scholar

11 On English attitudes toward the climate of the colonial West Indies, see Kupperman, Karen Ordahl, “Fear of Hot Climates in the Anglo-American Colonial Experience,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 41 (04 1984), pp. 213–40.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

12 In a transatlantic labor market operating at this time, the distaste of Europeans for conditions in the West Indies meant that English indentured servants had to be compensated for migrating there rather than to the American mainland colonies through the use of shorter contracts or implicitly higher wage rates; see Galenson, David W., White Servitude in Colonial America: An Economic Analysis (Cambridge, 1981), chap. 7.Google Scholar

13 See the analysis of the wealth of the Barbados planters in 1680 in Dunn, Richard S., Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill, 1972)Google Scholar, chap. 3. On the early profitability of sugar planting in Barbados, also see Ward, J. R., “The Profitability of Sugar Planting in the British West Indies, 1650–1834,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 31 (05 1978), p. 208.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 Ligon, History of the Island of Barbados, pp. 55–57.Google Scholar

15 Sheridan, Richard B., Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies, 1623–1775 (Barbados, 1974), chap. 16Google Scholar. Also see Hall, Douglas, “Absentee-Proprietorship in the British West Indies, to about 1850,” Jamaican Historical Review, 4 (1964), pp. 15–35.Google Scholar

16 Jeaffreson, John Cordy, ed., A Young Squire of the Seventeenth Centuty, From The Papers (A.D. 1676–1686) of Christopher Jeaffreson (London, 1878)Google Scholar, 2 vols. Also see Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, pp. 200–1; Bridenbaugh and Bridenbaugh, No Peace Beyond the Line, pp. 304–5.Google Scholar

17 Some evidence consistent with this was found when the names of slave purchasers from the Royal African Company invoices were linked to a census of property taken in Barbados in late 1679: this revealed that owners of large estates in Barbados in the 1670s and 1680s were likely to remain on the island longer than poorer planters, and longer than those slave purchasers, whose number included many hired estate managers, who did not appear in the census (see Galenson, “Estimating Geographic Persistence from Market Observations”). While not conclusive, this is the opposite of what might have been expected if in this period the wealthiest planters had quickly been leaving Barbados to become absentees.Google Scholar