THE PRICE FOR THEIR POUND OF FLESH: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation, capitalism has a lot to answer for

THE PRICE FOR THEIR POUND OF FLESH: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation
DAINA RAMEY BERRY
Beacon Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Groundbreaking look at slaves as commodities through every phase of life, from birth to death and beyond, in early America

In life and in death, slaves were commodities, their monetary value assigned based on their age, gender, health, and the demands of the market. The Price for Their Pound of Flesh is the first book to explore the economic value of enslaved people through every phase of their lives—including preconception, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, the senior years, and death—in the early American domestic slave trade. Covering the full "life cycle," historian Daina Ramey Berry shows the lengths to which enslavers would go to maximize profits and protect their investments. Illuminating "ghost values" or the prices placed on dead enslaved people, Berry explores the little-known domestic cadaver trade and traces the illicit sales of dead bodies to medical schools.

This book is the culmination of more than ten years of Berry's exhaustive research on enslaved values, drawing on data unearthed from sources such as slave-trading records, insurance policies, cemetery records, and life insurance policies. Writing with sensitivity and depth, she resurrects the voices of the enslaved and provides a rare window into enslaved peoples' experiences and thoughts, revealing how enslaved people recalled and responded to being appraised, bartered, and sold throughout the course of their lives. Reaching out from these pages, they compel the reader to bear witness to their stories, to see them as human beings, not merely commodities.

A profoundly humane look at an inhumane institution, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh will have a major impact how we think about slavery, reparations, capitalism, nineteenth-century medical education, and the value of life and death.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Almost ten years ago, I read this appalling chronicle of the profit-and-loss mentality as applied to human beings.

It horrified and appalled me.

Cliometrics, the science of statistical analysis applied to databases of historical origin (eg, census data, tax rolls), is a discipline we've only developed in the past half-century or so. The wealth of data regarding enslaved people collected by different governments and organizations has made tracing the stark outlines of how the property impacted the economy; Author Daina Ramey Berry had to come along before someone got up the support and the courage...it definitely took a lot to do this work in a post-Ferguson/George Floyd world...to merge the statistical analysis of the past with the stories of the people who lived it.

No, it's not a breezy little bagatelle to read. It is a work of solid, enduring value to historians, and to historical researchers in economics and medicine and sociology and anthropology. I'm not going to apply the "a-word" to it, you know the one; it sends all y'all's wallets into torpor. Instead I'll note that the style's readable, there's flashes...rare, but there...of humor; and for the non-fiction snobs, there's no getting away from the fact that it's got deep roots in the primary and secondary sources.

There are quite a number of period illustrations to, um, liven things up. I found them somewhat distracting, which could be good when I was in a darker passage, or bad, if the illustration was cheerless. I'm glad on balance to have them included.