Slave Prices, the African Slave Trade, and Productivity in Eighteenth-Century South Carolina: A Reply

Abstract

comment by David Eltis, Frank Lewis, and David Richardson brings to fore issues about productivity in slave-based economies, and about broader interpretations of those societies and their successor economies. Their assessment confirms that prices derived from probate inventories behaved like those derived from market transactions, suggesting that rich data available in probate inventories can be brought to bear on important issues in colonial economic history. We disagree, however, with their finding that slave productivity in Lower South grew much more rapidly than we estimated. They maintain that our estimates of productivity are biased downward because export price series we used to deflate nominal slave prices rises too rapidly for two reasons.' First, they argue that rice price we used for period 17221731 is conceptually different from price we used for period after 1731. Second, they contend that Philadelphia rice prices, which were higher and rose more slowly than Charleston prices, would be a better measure of prices received by rice producers. They also exaggerate differences between their estimates and ours when they contend that The lack of productivity is especially puzzling given our estimate that during period 1722 to 1775 slave prices in South Carolina were increasing somewhat faster than in Caribbean.2 Our finding of the lack of productivity growth to which they refer is for entire period 1722 to 1800, not 1722 to 1775, a period when slave prices were rising rapidly. Their focus on period down to end of century obscures an important point, namely that we also find slave productivity in period before 1775. They alluded to this in a footnote, but it needs greater stress. We estimated that real slave prices rose between 1722-1724 and 1770-1774 at an annual rate of 0.8 percent, well above 0.4 rate they report for Caribbean. Although our estimated increase is well below 1.65 percent annual rate of that they estimate for Lower