IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/ereveh/v29y2025i2p161-185..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

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

Author

Listed:
  • Klas Rönnbäck
  • Stefania Galli
  • Dimitrios Theodoridis

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 from slavery, 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 following the legal abolition of slavery. Investments in public schooling during this period thus seem to have been important for the increased learning of basic numeracy skills.

Suggested Citation

  • Klas Rönnbäck & Stefania Galli & Dimitrios Theodoridis, 2025. "Numeracy and the legacy of slavery: age-heaping in the Danish West Indies before and after emancipation from slavery, 1780s–1880s," European Review of Economic History, European Historical Economics Society, vol. 29(2), pages 161-185.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:ereveh:v:29:y:2025:i:2:p:161-185.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/ereh/heae013
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    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:oup:ereveh:v:29:y:2025:i:2:p:161-185.. 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: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/ereh .

    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.