The Price for Their Pound of Flesh
The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A groundbreaking look at slaves as commodities in early America that “reminds us of the cold calculus at the intersection of slavery and capitalism” (Kirkus Reviews).
“Searing, revelatory, and vital to understanding our nation’s inequities.” —Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns
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 10 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.
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, 19th-century medical education, and the value of life and death.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this "financial recapitulation of black bodies and souls," Berry, associate professor of history and African and African diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Austin, examines how slaveholders ascribed pecuniary worth to women, men, and children. Slavery took many forms across the antebellum U.S., but all enslaved people experienced their reduction to the status of chattel, bought and sold at their owner's will. Yet surprisingly little scholarship has examined the monetary value of these individuals, whose worth increased from infancy through adolescence, peaking at the height of their productive and reproductive capacities, and declining steadily to the point where the elderly were considered nearly valueless. Upon their deaths, they might regain some financial significance, as the bodies of many were sold to medical schools for purposes of dissection. Crucially, Berry also delves into the annals of slave communities to explore the emotional strategies by which the enslaved resisted their reduction to an "exchangeable commodity," centering their lives on spiritual beliefs that defined the soul, rather than the body, as the true location of their individuality. Berry's groundbreaking work in the historiography of American slavery deserves a wide readership beyond academia.
Customer Reviews
Tough read
Great perspective. Difficult content.