Slave Prices, the African Slave Trade, and Productivity in Eighteenth-Century South Carolina: A Reply

The comment by David Eltis, Frank Lewis, and David Richardson brings to the fore issues about productivity growth in slave-based economies, and about broader interpretations of those societies and their successor economies. Their assessment confirms that prices derived from probate inventories behaved like those derived from market transactions, suggesting that rich data available in probate inventories can be brought to bear on important issues in colonial economic history. We disagree, however, with their finding that slave productivity in the Lower South grew much more rapidly than we estimated. They maintain that our estimates of productivity growth are biased downward because the export price series we used to deflate the nominal slave prices rises too rapidly for two reasons. First, they argue that the rice price we used for the period 1722– 1731 is conceptually different from the price we used for the period after 1731. Second, they contend that Philadelphia rice prices, which were higher and rose more slowly than Charleston prices, would be a better measure of the prices received by rice producers. They also exaggerate the differences between their estimates and ours when they contend that “The lack of productivity growth is especially puzzling given our estimate that during the period 1722 to 1775 slave prices in South Carolina were increasing somewhat faster than in the Caribbean.” Our finding of “the lack of productivity growth” to which they refer is for the entire period 1722 to 1800, not 1722 to 1775, a period when slave prices were rising rapidly. Their focus on the period down to the end of the century obscures an important point, namely that we also find slave productivity growth in the period before 1775. They alluded to this in a footnote, but it needs greater stress. We estimated that real slave prices rose between 1722–1724 and 1770–1774 at an annual rate of 0.8 percent, well above the 0.4 rate they report for the Caribbean. Although our estimated increase is well below the 1.65 percent annual rate of growth that they estimate for the Lower