IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hhs/gunhis/0036.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Numeracy and the legacy of slavery Age-heaping in the Danish West Indies before and after emancipation from slavery, 1780s-1880s

Author

Listed:
  • Rönnbäck, Klas

    (Unit for Economic History, School of Business, Economics and Law, Göteborg University)

  • Galli, Stefania

    (Unit for Economic History, School of Business, Economics and Law, Göteborg University)

  • Theodoridis, Dimitrios

    (Unit for Economic History, School of Business, Economics and Law, Göteborg University)

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Rönnbäck, Klas & Galli, Stefania & Theodoridis, Dimitrios, 2024. "Numeracy and the legacy of slavery Age-heaping in the Danish West Indies before and after emancipation from slavery, 1780s-1880s," Göteborg Papers in Economic History 36, University of Gothenburg, Unit for Economic History.
    • Handle: RePEc:hhs:gunhis:0036
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://hdl.handle.net/2077/80218
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Numeracy; age-heaping; slavery; colonialism; human capital;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • N36 - Economic History - - Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and Philanthropy - - - Latin America; Caribbean

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hhs:gunhis:0036. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Jens Anmark (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dehguse.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.