You will be finishing my 17 page essay. You have to write only 7 last pages. The goal is to analyze the dataset using material from the attached book.
The primary goals of this essay:
• Gain a deeper understanding of the history of Atlantic slavery.
• Humanize the study of slavery by engaging with the history of the individuals who suffered under the institution.
• Engage with issues of family, gender, generational relations, race, ethnicity, and
power in slavery studies
For your primary source of analysis, you will be using, structuring, and modifying BerrySlaveValueDatabase.xlsx
Attached is a large dataset. An economic analysis could be undertaken using the data. Some work has been done on this dataset by me, but there is more to be done. Differences in slave prices/values by state, by gender, within age groups, etc. If prices in the Deep South were higher than in the Upper South, does that explain the 19th century sale of slaves South?
You should compare slave prices/valuations over time in a few states. Say Tennessee, Virginia, and Maryland in the Upper South, and Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi in the Lower South. Are there differences over time? Why? Similar approaches are taken here https://www.nber.org/papers/h0123 and here https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1018598. You could compare your data to some of the conclusions in the latter, demonstrating how and why slave prices fluctuated. For the authors of the latter “Market prices probably reflected slave agriculture productivity (Conrad and Meyer, 1964, pp. 50- 53; Fogel, 1974), and slave prices increased with cotton prices and declined when cotton prices stagnated.”
