From bondage to the free labor market: wages, prices and living standards in the Caribbean for a century after emancipation

How have the living standards of workers worldwide developed historically, and what has determined this development?

To answer these questions of comparative development, scholars have been collecting a plethora of historical wages and prices from various parts of the world.

Quite surprisingly, however, an important part of the world has to-date been missed; the former slave-based societies in the Caribbean.

Theoretically, underdevelopment of Caribbean societies has been explained by extractive institutions, such as those of colonialism and slavery and factor endowments. And yet, to-date, the empirical evidence on living standards from precisely these societies is extremely scarce. This project aspires to fill this gap of knowledge by making both an empirical and a theoretical contribution.

This project will construct a unique historical wages and commodity prices database for countries in the Caribbean for a period of more than 100-years between ca. 1838-1945 using original archival material.

The database will reconstruct this regions’ wage and price history and will be one of the major contributions of this project.

The database will be used to estimate the living standards of workers in these societies and to compare how Caribbean living standards developed in comparison with those elsewhere in the world.

The role played by market forces, institutions, and factor endowments will then be investigated as explanatory factors of their development.