Calendrier du 15 février 2023
Economic History Seminar
Du 15/02/2023 de 12:00 à 13:30
R1.09, Campus Jourdan
BEIGELMAN Marie (ETH Zurich)
Intergenerational Impact of Labor Coercion
This paper studies the intergenerational impact of labour coercion in the French West Indies. I investigate how conditions in which slave ancestors were exploited affected descendants’ health, family structure, and criminal behaviour over more than five generations. To do so, I undertake a massive digitation effort of handwritten administrative records (census, civil records, convicts’ registries) on slaves and descendants, using surnames as a quasi-perfect identifier of an individual’s ancestor. Using information on slave mortality in the decades preceding abolition, I document sizable difference in labour coercion intensity depending on the crop produced: sugar or coffee. These differences are partly driven by a plausibly exogenous shock on sugarcane prices prior to the abolition of slavery. I build on this finding to construct a surname-level measure of labour coercion intensity with two levels of variation: at the county of enslavement level, depending on past sugarcane production intensity; at the ancestor level, whether she experienced slave trade. The second on-going part of this project investigates the intergenerational impact of labour coercion intensity on child mortality, family structure, and criminal behaviour at different points in time: in the aftermath of the abolition of slavery (1852-1856), thirty years afterwards, a century later.