Timeline for Was it ever cheaper to starve slaves and replace them than to provide them with food?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
18 events
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| Sep 11, 2020 at 9:02 | comment | added | Just J for now | It seems that we have a shy down-voter, I sure wish he or she explained his or her actions so that I can improve my post. | |
| Sep 7, 2020 at 8:11 | comment | added | IMSoP | I've deleted my previous comments and accepted this answer. While I still think it would be interesting to have a source discussing the costs of food for the slaves, I agree that would be difficult to pin down, and this answer makes a clear argument for its position. | |
| Sep 7, 2020 at 8:09 | vote | accept | IMSoP | ||
| Sep 6, 2020 at 8:35 | history | edited | Just J for now | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Some final notes
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| Sep 6, 2020 at 8:21 | comment | added | Just J for now | @phoog, thank you! I indeed misread it as pounds/cwt. My calculations show that a slave was worth 420KG, but I think we can both agree that is more than enough to make the first interpretation implausible. | |
| Sep 6, 2020 at 8:17 | history | edited | Just J for now | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Sep 5, 2020 at 17:54 | comment | added | phoog | My figures are off because this would have been a "long" hundredweight of 112 pounds (8 stone), so it's actually more like 550 times. | |
| Sep 5, 2020 at 16:19 | comment | added | phoog | "survival time of slaves is influenced by multiple factors": this may be the key. Look at the death rate of white settlers. Slaves would surely be done at a higher rate even if well fed. If they were expected to die in short order regardless, there may well have been some slave owners who reduced rations somewhat in some economic climates, giving credence to the claim, even if the practice was not universal across all slave owners at all times and even if nobody withheld food completely. One can imagine a businessman under pressure making repeated incremental reductions in rations. | |
| Sep 5, 2020 at 16:06 | comment | added | phoog | I don't follow your arithmetic from that chart to "a slave was worth about 20 kg of sugar." It seems that you may have overlooked the units in which sugar prices are given, namely shillings per hundredweight. A hundredweight is roughly 45.36 kilograms, and the prices in the table are between roughly 20 and 40 s. (£1 and £2) per hundredweight, so between roughly £0.45 and £0.9 per 20 kg. In 1700-04, with the lowest ratio in the last column, sugar was roughly one shilling per kilo, and a slave cost roughly 470 shillings, so a slave cost roughly as much as 470 kg of sugar. | |
| Sep 5, 2020 at 7:50 | comment | added | Schmuddi | Jordy, @IMSoP: Your exchange is an exellent example why theoretical answers are problematic on skeptics.SE. | |
| Sep 4, 2020 at 17:25 | history | edited | Just J for now | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Sep 4, 2020 at 17:12 | comment | added | Just J for now | Now that look closer, I could use extra info from that article in the answer. Thanks @BrianZ! | |
| Sep 4, 2020 at 16:51 | comment | added | Just J for now | @BrianZ, nice find, I spotted that too. But after that I found Eltis, et al. (added to further reading for your convenience) which has the same info with sterling pound (see table 2). The numbers are very similar. | |
| Sep 4, 2020 at 16:45 | history | edited | Just J for now | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Sep 4, 2020 at 15:54 | comment | added | Brian Z | @Jordy That Table 2 from Galenson says underneath: "The unit of the price estimates is local Barbados currency", so the conversion you give (for pounds Sterling) is probably not relevant. | |
| Sep 4, 2020 at 11:08 | history | edited | Just J for now | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Sep 4, 2020 at 2:14 | comment | added | Mark | @IMSoP, for most of history, the price of feeding someone for a day was a few pence. If the cheapest available slave goes for an average of 1560 pence, you don't need to look up exact prices -- it's self-evident that starving slaves and replacing them costs at least two orders of magnitude more than feeding them. | |
| Sep 3, 2020 at 16:52 | history | answered | Just J for now | CC BY-SA 4.0 |