Plantation Slave Mortality in Trinidad

Recent interest by historians in slavery in the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean has resurrected questions about the life and death of slaves, first voiced in eighteenth and nineteenth century parliamentary debates on slavery, but largely left unanswered, for want of data or lack of technique. In the present study, upper and lower bounds for period life tables for plantation slaves in Trinidad are estimated from data on 17,087 slaves, collected during the Trinidad slave registrations of 1813 and 1816. In addition, many of the pivotal demographic queries raised during the parliamentary debate on the abolition of the slave trade and the emancipation of slaves are finally resolved by the application of life tables with covariates - hazard models - to the Trinidad slave registration data.