Testing the reliability of prices from the British West Indies Blue Books

Abstract

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 focus upon the reliability of commodity price data reported in this source. There is some recent research (see Westland, 2022) on the reliability of market retail prices found in the African colonial Blue Books, showing that reliability may potentially be an issue with these sources. The current paper extends the research frontier by investigating the reliability of commodity prices found in the Blue Books from other British colonies, specifically the ones in the British West Indies. We compare Blue Book prices with commodity price information collected from various Caribbean newspapers. In contrast to Westland’s findings on African Blue Books, we find the British West Indies Blue Books to report reliable representations of commodity market prices across commodities and colonies in the region in general. We therefore deem the price information reported in these Blue Books as an invaluable resource for many future research endeavors.