Fertility Differentials between Slaves in the United States and the British West Indies: A Note on Lactation Practices and Their Possible Implications

Abstract

RECENT studies of the Atlantic slave trade by Philip Curtin and others have demonstrated that the United States received a relatively small share of the total African migration to the Americas.' Yet, the United States emerged by the end of slavery with a black population comparable in size to those of the Brazilian and West Indian slave societies which experienced much greater migrations of Africans. The causes of these differential rates of population growth have long been debated by contemporaries and by historians, and have been most frequently attributed to differing planter attitudes toward slave reproduction and material treatment, particularly as they were influenced by the opportunity to obtain new slaves from Africa. We shall argue, however, that explanations resting solely on planter attitudes are insufficient, and, based upon available data, other forces must be considered. Interpretation of the data is made difficult by the fact that newly imported Africans formed greatly different proportions of the total slave population in these societies. Inferences drawn without distinguishing between these imported slaves and those Creoles born in the New World are apt to be highly misleading.2 Nevertheless, even after allowing for these