Slave demography of the Danish West Indian islands

Abstract

In recent years a number of studies have investigated demographic and social conditions among the slaves of the West Indies and the American mainland. A vital problem in many of these studies has been the fact that the source-data have been of more fragmentary character than in similar studies of European demographic and social history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where population censuses and parish registers have been available to constitute a central core of material. In the case of slaves on the plantations it has been necessary to make do to a much greater extent with private types of sources and taxation records. Source-material of private origin is often limited to individual plantations, the representativeness of which is unknown, while taxation records by their very nature may have occasioned attempts to evade liability, so that these too can give a biased picture of the situation.

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Hans Chr. Johansen

Hans Chr. Johansen, born 1935, Professor of economic and social history at the University of Odense, Denmark. He has written books and articles on Danish economic and social history, mainly in the eighteenth century