IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/yor/yorken/09-03.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Surviving Slavery. Mortality at Mesopotamia, a Jamaican sugar estate, 1762 - 1832

Author

Listed:
  • Martin Forster
  • Simon D. Smith

Abstract

We use survival analysis to study the mortality experience of 1111 slaves living on the British West Indian sugar plantation of Mesopotamia for seven decades prior to the Emancipation Act of 1833. Using three different concepts of analysis time and employing non-parametric and semi-parametric models, our results suggest that female slaves first observed under Joseph Foster Barham II's period of ownership (1789-1832) faced an increased hazard of death compared with those first observed during his predecessor's tenure. We find no such relationship for males. We cite as a possible explanation the employment regime operated by Foster Barham II, which allocated increasing numbers of females to gang labour in the cane fields. A G-estimation model used to compensate for the 'healthy worker survivor effect' estimates that continuous exposure to such work reduced survival times by between 20 and 40 per cent. Our findings are compared with previous studies of Mesopotamia and related to the wider literature investigating the roles of fertility and mortality in undermining the sustainability of Caribbean slave populations.

Suggested Citation

  • Martin Forster & Simon D. Smith, 2009. "Surviving Slavery. Mortality at Mesopotamia, a Jamaican sugar estate, 1762 - 1832," Discussion Papers 09/03, Department of Economics, University of York.
    • Handle: RePEc:yor:yorken:09/03
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.york.ac.uk/media/economics/documents/discussionpapers/2009/0903.pdf
    File Function: Main text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Tunali, Insan & Pritchett, Jonathan B, 1997. "Cox Regression with Alternative Concepts of Waiting Time: The New Orleans Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1853," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 12(1), pages 1-25, Jan.-Feb..
    2. Martin, Emily C. & Betensky, Rebecca A., 2005. "Testing Quasi-Independence of Failure and Truncation Times via Conditional Kendall's Tau," Journal of the American Statistical Association, American Statistical Association, vol. 100, pages 484-492, June.
    3. Stanley L. Engerman, 1976. "Some Economic and Demographic Comparisons of Slavery in the United States and the British West Indies'," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 29(2), pages 258-275, May.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. J. R. Ward, 2023. "Demographic trends in late‐slavery Jamaica, 1817–32," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 76(1), pages 60-86, February.
    2. J. R. Ward, 2018. "The amelioration of British West Indian slavery: anthropometric evidence," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 71(4), pages 1199-1226, November.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Yu Shen & Jing Ning & Jing Qin, 2017. "Nonparametric and semiparametric regression estimation for length-biased survival data," Lifetime Data Analysis: An International Journal Devoted to Statistical Methods and Applications for Time-to-Event Data, Springer, vol. 23(1), pages 3-24, January.
    2. Kirdar, Murat, 2007. "Labor market outcomes, capital accumulation, and return migration: Evidence from immigrants in Germany," MPRA Paper 2028, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    3. Lior Rennert & Sharon X. Xie, 2022. "Cox regression model under dependent truncation," Biometrics, The International Biometric Society, vol. 78(2), pages 460-473, June.
    4. Martin Forster & Andrew M. Jones, 2001. "The role of tobacco taxes in starting and quitting smoking: Duration analysis of British data," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 164(3), pages 517-547.
    5. Moreira, C. & de Uña-Álvarez, J. & Meira-Machado, L., 2016. "Nonparametric regression with doubly truncated data," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 93(C), pages 294-307.
    6. Murat G. Kirdar, 2007. "Labor Market Outcomes, Capital Accumulation, and Return Migration: Evidence from Immigrants in Germany," ERC Working Papers 0703, ERC - Economic Research Center, Middle East Technical University, revised Jan 2007.
    7. Honjo, Yuji, 2000. "Business failure of new firms: an empirical analysis using a multiplicative hazards model," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 18(4), pages 557-574, May.
    8. Austin, Matthew D. & Betensky, Rebecca A., 2014. "Eliminating bias due to censoring in Kendall’s tau estimators for quasi-independence of truncation and failure," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 73(C), pages 16-26.
    9. Martin Forster & Andrew M. Jones, "undated". "The role of tobacco taxes in starting and quitting smoking," Discussion Papers 00/51, Department of Economics, University of York.
    10. van den Berg, Gerard J. & Effraimidis, Georgios, 2014. "Dependence Measures in Bivariate Gamma Frailty Models," IZA Discussion Papers 8083, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    11. Deresa, N.W. & Van Keilegom, I. & Antonio, K., 2022. "Copula-based inference for bivariate survival data with left truncation and dependent censoring," Insurance: Mathematics and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 107(C), pages 1-21.
    12. Lunde, Asger & Timmermann, Allan & Blake, David, 1999. "The hazards of mutual fund underperformance: A Cox regression analysis," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 6(2), pages 121-152, April.
    13. Naohito Abe & Taehun Jung, 2004. "Cross-Shareholdings, Outside Directors, and Managerial Turnover: The Case of Japan," Hi-Stat Discussion Paper Series d04-38, Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University.
    14. Hesselius, Patrik, 2007. "Does sickness absence increase the risk of unemployment?," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 36(2), pages 288-310, April.
    15. Lior Rennert & Sharon X. Xie, 2018. "Cox regression model with doubly truncated data," Biometrics, The International Biometric Society, vol. 74(2), pages 725-733, June.
    16. Takeshi Emura & Chi-Hung Pan, 2020. "Parametric likelihood inference and goodness-of-fit for dependently left-truncated data, a copula-based approach," Statistical Papers, Springer, vol. 61(1), pages 479-501, February.
    17. Stephan M. Bischofberger, 2020. "In-Sample Hazard Forecasting Based on Survival Models with Operational Time," Risks, MDPI, vol. 8(1), pages 1-17, January.
    18. Mackenzie Todd, 2012. "Survival Curve Estimation with Dependent Left Truncated Data Using Cox's Model," The International Journal of Biostatistics, De Gruyter, vol. 8(1), pages 1-20, October.
    19. Jing Qian & Sy Han Chiou & Rebecca A. Betensky, 2022. "Transformation model based regression with dependently truncated and independently censored data," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series C, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 71(2), pages 395-416, March.
    20. Emura, Takeshi & Konno, Yoshihiko, 2012. "A goodness-of-fit test for parametric models based on dependently truncated data," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 56(7), pages 2237-2250.

    More about this item

    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:yor:yorken:09/03. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: Paul Hodgson (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/deyoruk.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.