South Carolina Slave Prices, 1722-1809

Based on data from several samples of probate inventories we construct and analyze a time series of slave prices for South Carolina from 1722 to 1809. These estimates reveal that prices fluctuated without trend prior to the 1760s and then began to rise rapidly, more than doubling by the early nineteenth century. Estimates of supply and demand functions indicate that while long-run slave supply was highly elastic, the short-run supply function was quite inelastic. Our analysis of the slave price series indicates that the price of rice was the major determinant of the demand for slaves and in turn largely explains the rise in slave prices. These findings have important implications for the interpretation of evidence on rising yields in rice production over the eighteenth century and the sources of wealth accumulation in South Carolina.

Conjectural Estimates of Economic Growth in the Lower South, 1720 to 1800

This paper describes the first step in a larger project to build up regional estimates of economic growth before 1800 in the parts of North America that became the United States. In it we employ the method of conjectural estimation to develop new estimates of the rate of economic growth in the Lower South (modern day North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee) from 1720 to 1800 for both colonists and the Native American population of the region. Contrary to the widely held view that GDP per capita grew at a rate of 0.3 to 0.6 percent per year during the eighteenth century our best estimate is that per capita GDP grew at just 0.09 percent per year. Despite the slow growth of GDP per capita, however, the region's economy did achieve appreciable extensive growth, and achieving any advance in per capita production can be viewed as a significant accomplishment in light of the challenges that this growth posed for the economy. The difference between our estimate and those of previous studies appears to be the result of earlier scholars' undue focus on export performance. In contrast, our approach allows us to accurately account for the effect of the slowly growing domestic sector of the economy.

Review of \u3ci\u3e The Whiskey Trade of the Northwestern Plains: A Multidisciplinary Approach\u3c/i\u3e by Margaret A. Kennedy

Margaret A. Kennedy marshals three distinct types of evidence here to describe the so-called Whiskey Trade of the nineteenth-century Northwestern Plains, a geographic region that crosses the border between the United States and Canada. The first part of the book presents evidence from the written historical record, a data set that privileges the views of the white traders who organized the commerce in buffalo robes in this part of the Plains. The second part consists of a too-brief ethnographic chapter based on Kennedy\u27s interviews with Native People. In the third and longest part she describes the archaeological record, mostly the results of digs at trading posts and some Native burial sites. Kennedy should be commended for her willingness to undertake this multidisciplinary approach. The argument here is straightforward. During the middle decades of the nineteenth century, merchants came to the Plains to acquire buffalo robes, a commodity that had replaced beaver pelts as the prime article in the fur trade. Traders often employed local Plains peoples to kill the buffalos and process the robes, a task that led to changes within Native communities and encouraged the rise of polygynous households where multiple women did much of the work preparing dead buffalo for traders. As in other parts of North America, the fur trade destabilized Native groups: epidemic diseases led to horrific loss of life; traditional material culture began to fade with the growth in availability of trade goods; and the abuse of alcohol, the commodity that traders always knew would lure Native hunters, led to violence, murder, and presumably impoverishment. By the time the buffalo trade faded in the early 1880s, the culture and society of Plains peoples were far more precarious than they had ever been before, at least in part because the trade led to internecine strife between competing groups

The Role of Exports in the Economy of Colonial North America: New Estimates for the Middle Colonies

Economic historians of the eighteenth-century British mainland North American colonies have given considerable weight to the role of exports as a stimulus for economic growth. Yet their analyses have been handicapped by reliance on one or two time series to serve as indicators of broader changes rather than considering the export sector as a whole. Here we construct comprehensive export measures for the middle colonies. We find that aggregate exports did grow quickly but that this expansion failed to keep pace with population growth during much of the period under consideration. We argue this result challenges the export staples model on the role of foreign demand as a stimulus for economic growth. Instead, these results emphasize the impact of resource abundance and labor and capital scarcity as the defining characteristics of colonial economic growth.

Slave Prices and the South Carolina Economy, 1722–1809

Based on data from probate inventories we construct and analyze an annual time series of slave prices for South Carolina from 1722 to 1809. Comparison of South Carolina slave prices with those in other parts of the Western Hemisphere and the relationship between slave prices and slave imports indicate that while the long-run supply of slaves was highly elastic, over periods of one to two decades the supply curve was upward sloping. Comparison of our slave price series with an index of agricultural export prices indicates that labor productivity growth in agriculture was modest over the eighteenth century

Slave Prices in the Lower South, 1722-1815

Using data from samples of probate inventories we construct a series of slave prices for Low Country South Carolina and Georgia covering the period 1722-1815. Using these data we examine variations in slave prices by age and sex, as well as geographic variations between and within the two colonies/states. Nominal slave prices more than doubled between 1722/29 and 1810/15. In real terms, however, there was essentially no change in slave prices deflated either by a general consumer price index, or the price of rice. Low Country slave prices were well above those in the West Indies and Maryland prior to the 1740s, but were converging toward the level of prices in these regions. After 1740 the three series moved roughly in parallel.

Nostalgic Masculinity: Homosocial Desire and Homosexual Panic in James Ellroy's This Storm

The second volume in James Ellroy's ‘Second LA Quartet’, This Storm (2019), offers a complex miscellany of war profiteering, fifth column sabotage, and institutional corruption, all of which is starkly projected against the sobering backdrop of the internment of Japanese-Americans. Whilst presenting Ellroy's most diverse assemblage of characters to date, the narrative is, nonetheless, principally centred on the intersecting bonds between men. Although the prevalence of destructive masculine authority in Ellroy's works has been widely discussed, what has often been overlooked are the specifically ‘homosocial’ dimensions of these relationships. Whilst these homosocial bonds are frequently energised and solidified by homophobic violence (both physical and rhetorical), this paper will argue that they are simultaneously wrought by ‘homosexual panic’; the anxiety deriving for the indeterminate boundaries between homosocial and homosexual desire. This panic is expressed most profoundly in This Storm in the form of corrupt policeman Dudley Smith. Haunted by a repressed homosexual encounter, Smith's paranoid behaviour and increasingly punitive violence derives from his inability to establish clear boundaries between his intense homosocial bonds and latent homosexual desires. Thus, whilst Ellroy's ‘nostalgic masculinity’ attempts to circumscribe the dimensions and inviolability of male identity, the paranoia and violence that underscores the various machinations of Ellroy's crooked cops ultimately exposes the fragility of such constructions