{"title":"Numeracy and the legacy of slavery: age-heaping in the Danish West Indies before and after emancipation from slavery, 1780s–1880s","authors":"Klas Rönnbäck, Stefania Galli, Dimitrios Theodoridis","doi":"10.1093/ereh/heae013","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"In many slave societies, enslaved persons were barred from acquiring much education. What skills the enslaved persons nonetheless were able to acquire, and how this changed following emancipation from slavery, is not well known. We study quantitatively how a legacy of slavery impacted upon the development of basic numeracy skills. Our results show that numeracy skills started to improve in the population under study following the legal abolition of slavery. Investments in public schooling during this period thus seem to have been important for the increased learning of basic numeracy skills.","PeriodicalId":51703,"journal":{"name":"European Review of Economic History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2000,"publicationDate":"2024-09-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"European Review of Economic History","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ereh/heae013","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"ECONOMICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
In many slave societies, enslaved persons were barred from acquiring much education. What skills the enslaved persons nonetheless were able to acquire, and how this changed following emancipation from slavery, is not well known. We study quantitatively how a legacy of slavery impacted upon the development of basic numeracy skills. Our results show that numeracy skills started to improve in the population under study following the legal abolition of slavery. Investments in public schooling during this period thus seem to have been important for the increased learning of basic numeracy skills.
期刊介绍:
European Review of Economic History has established itself as a major outlet for high-quality research in economic history, which is accessible to readers from a variety of different backgrounds. The Review publishes articles on a wide range of topics in European, comparative and world economic history. Contributions shed new light on existing debates, raise new or previously neglected topics and provide fresh perspectives from comparative research. The Review includes full-length articles, shorter articles, notes and comments, debates, survey articles, and review articles. It also publishes notes and announcements from the European Historical Economics Society.