In this article, we discuss the sources employed and the methodological choices that entailed assembling a novel, individual-level, large panel dataset containing an incredible wealth of data for a full population in ...

It has been proposed that slave societies were the most unequal societies in recorded human history. What little evidence there is shows an ambiguous picture. We contribute with a study on the wealth distribution in a ...

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, is not well known. We ...

In this article, we study what individual and social characteristics made it more likely for an individual to resist slavery. We employ a unique census from the Caribbean island of St. Croix in 1846, which allows us to ...

The issue of how elites as a social group come to be, how they maintain their position and how they affect the society they come to control is very much at the centre of the inequality debate. The present paper studies ...

We have created the first longitudinal dataset following European employees of the English Royal African Company during their time in West Africa, 1683–1766. The mortality was catastrophically high with limited geographical ...

Was there any redistribution of resources in the Caribbean societies after emancipation from slavery? What were ex-slaves’ prospects to improve their socioeconomic status after emancipation? To shed some light on these ...

The British colonial Blue Books are a commonly used statistical source for historical research. There is, however, surprisingly little research on the reliability of the statistical information reported in them. We here ...