Authors: Klas Rönnbäck, Stefania Galli, and Dimitrios Theodoridis
It is widely recognized that the education and learning of the population is a vital requirement for the socio-economic development of a society. Historically, one key barrier for such development was the institution of slavery. Many slave societies were characterized by outright prohibitions against the education of enslaved individuals – fearing that an educated person would be more likely to rebel against the institution. In other societies, the education of the enslaved was not criminalized, but was hardly a priority of the government.
To what extent enslaved individuals living in slave societies were able to acquire basic learning, in spite of such barriers, has not been well-researched previously. How this changed with emancipation is even less understood.
In this article, we study the population of St. Croix, in what was then the Danish West Indies (current-day U.S. Virgin Islands), during a period of more than a century, from the late 18th to the late 19th centuries. St. Croix was at this time a quite typical Caribbean plantation colony, focused on cash crop production for export, primarily sugar. As for many other slave societies, slavery was abolished on St. Croix in the mid-19th century in a sudden turn of events.
We study the level of age-heaping of the population before and after emancipation. Age-heaping – overreporting of rounded ages, e.g., over-reporting of ages 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50, 55 and 60, and under-reporting of ages in between – is a measure that has been used in much previous research as an indicator of the numeracy of a population, and numeracy is arguably a fundamental basic skill in a modern economy. The idea, simply put, is that a high degree of age-heaping indicates a low level of numeracy in the population.
The figure below shows the frequency of reported ages of the population for the whole of the period under study in the article, including all birth cohorts from the 1780s to the 1880s.
The figure shows ample proof of age-heaping on certain rounded ages – all of them multiples of five.
Further, we show that the level of numeracy – as indicated by the level of age-heaping – was higher in the Danish colony than the levels found in previous research in many other contemporary societies in Latin America or the Caribbean.
The evidence furthermore shows that emancipation of the enslaved had a substantial impact upon the levels of numeracy. After emancipation, public education was provided more generally, not excluding large segments of the population as had been the case before emancipation. The figure below shows the ABCC-index – a common measure of numeracy – for men and women in the population on St. Croix, by birth cohort.
Following emancipation in 1848, the birth cohorts from 1850 onwards were thus all born into freedom, legally, whereas the majority of the population born before 1848 had been born into slavery. The data on age-heaping seems to indicate that the level of numeracy might have decreased over time for all birth cohorts prior to emancipation. As we discuss in the article, this decrease might be an artefact of the data underlying our study. The decrease is furthermore not entirely robust when analyzing the data through a multivariate logistic regression. Emancipation – and investments in public education following emancipation – did, however, introduce a sharp break in the time-series shown in the figure for birth cohorts after 1850. This break is also confirmed by the logistic regressions undertaken in the paper. The ABCC-index thus increased substantially for these birth cohorts, suggesting a much higher numeracy (i.e., lower level of age-heaping) among those born after emancipation.
Slavery was a highly oppressive and exploitative system, and a tragedy for those enslaved. What our research can show is that it also was burden for the economic development of slave societies, by prohibiting or (as was the case on the island under study) limiting the basic education of the enslaved population. While emancipation was far from a panacea in terms of fostering economic development, it was one crucial ingredient for such a process.