Scandinavian Working Papers in Economics

Göteborg Papers in Economic History,
University of Gothenburg, Unit for Economic History

No 36: Numeracy and the legacy of slavery Age-heaping in the Danish West Indies before and after emancipation from slavery, 1780s-1880s

Klas Rönnbäck (), Stefania Galli and Dimitrios Theodoridis
Additional contact information
Klas Rönnbäck: Unit for Economic History, School of Business, Economics and Law, Göteborg University, Postal: Box 720, SE 40530 Göteborg, Sweden
Stefania Galli: Unit for Economic History, School of Business, Economics and Law, Göteborg University, Postal: Box 720, SE 40530 Göteborg, Sweden
Dimitrios Theodoridis: Unit for Economic History, School of Business, Economics and Law, Göteborg University, Postal: Box 720, SE 40530 Göteborg, Sweden

Abstract: In many slave societies, enslaved persons were barred from acquiring much education. What skills the enslaved persons nonetheless were able to acquire, and how this changed following emancipation, is not well known. We study quantitatively how a legacy of slavery impacted upon the development of basic numeracy skills. Our results show that numeracy skills started to improve in the population under study well before emancipation from slavery. We also show that the formal public and private schooling seems to have played a marginal role in this process. We therefore conclude that much of this learning was acquired in informal ways.

Keywords: Numeracy; age-heaping; slavery; colonialism; human capital

JEL-codes: N36

Language: English

37 pages, February 1, 2024

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