Daina Ramey Berry. (2017). The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation. Beacon Press.

Daina Ramey Berry. 2017. The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, From Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation. Beacon Press.

Daina Ramey Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, From Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation. Beacon Press, 2017.

Daina Ramey Berry. The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, From Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation. Beacon Press, 2017.

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Price for Their Pound of Flesh The Value of the Enslaved from Womb to Grave in the Building of a Nation

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The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation

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1. • value: us history
2. • value: racism
3. • value: Slaves
4. • value: Slave trade
5. • value: Black history
6. • value: american slavery
7. • value: World History
8. • value: Civil Rights
9. • value: african american history
10. • value: economic history
11. • value: early america
12. • value: Slavery
13. • value: African American
14. • value: discrimination
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16. • value: History
17. • value: inequality
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19. • value: Black History Month
20. • value: colonial america
21. • value: history of slavery
22. • value: black lives matter
23. • value: history books
24. • value: historical books
25. • value: black authors
26. • value: african american books
27. • value: American history books
28. • value: black history books
29. • value: systemic racism
30. • value: sociology books
31. • value: books by black authors
32. • value: slavery books

creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Berry, Daina Ramey
   • bioText: Daina Ramey Berry is Michael Douglas Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a scholar of the enslaved and Black Women’s History and the award-winning author/editor of several books including A Black Women’s History of the United States.
   • name: Daina Ramey Berry

publishDate

2017-01-24T00:00:00-05:00

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title

The Price for Their Pound of Flesh

fullDescription

A groundbreaking look at slaves as commodities in early America that “reminds us of the cold calculus at the intersection of slavery and capitalism” (Kirkus Reviews).
“Searing, revelatory, and vital to understanding our nation’s inequities.” —Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns
 
In life and in death, slaves were commodities, their monetary value assigned based on their age, gender, health, and the demands of the market. The Price for Their Pound of Flesh is the first book to explore the economic value of enslaved people through every phase of their lives—including preconception, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, the senior years, and death—in the early American domestic slave trade. Covering the full “life cycle,” historian Daina Ramey Berry shows the lengths to which enslavers would go to maximize profits and protect their investments. Illuminating “ghost values” or the prices placed on dead enslaved people, Berry explores the little-known domestic cadaver trade and traces the illicit sales of dead bodies to medical schools.
This book is the culmination of more than 10 years of Berry’s exhaustive research on enslaved values, drawing on data unearthed from sources such as slave-trading records, insurance policies, cemetery records, and life insurance policies. Writing with sensitivity and depth, she resurrects the voices of the enslaved and provides a rare window into enslaved peoples’ experiences and thoughts, revealing how enslaved people recalled and responded to being appraised, bartered, and sold throughout the course of their lives.
A profoundly humane look at an inhumane institution, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh will have a major impact how we think about slavery, reparations, capitalism, 19th-century medical education, and the value of life and death.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
   • content: "Berry's groundbreaking work in the historiography of American slavery deserves a wide readership beyond academia."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Kirkus Reviews
   • content: "In this sharp, affecting study, Berry reminds us of the cold calculus at the intersection of slavery and capitalism...A well-researched, effectively presented piece of scholarship that forthrightly confronts slavery's brute essence."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Library Journal
   • content: "...highly readable and addressing the most heartbreaking and starkly gruesome aspects of slavery."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Essence Magazine
   • content: "With The Price for Their Pound of Flesh, Berry is now seen as a breakthrough writer who completed the herculean task of filling in the blanks of one of the darkest episodes in American history."
5. • premium: False
   • source: Adam Rothman (professor of history at Georgetown University), American Historical Review
   • content: "Brings to light the gruesome history of the desecration and dissection of black bodies after death, especially by professors of anatomy in American colleges and medical schools."
6. • premium: False
   • source: Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
   • content: "A brilliant resurrection of the forgotten people who gave their lives to build our country. Rigorously researched and powerfully told, this book tallies the human price paid for the nation we now live in and restores these unrecognized Americans--their hopes, loves, and disregarded dreams--to their rightful place in history. Searing, revelatory, and vital to understanding our nation's inequities."
7. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from December 5, 2016
     In this “financial recapitulation of black bodies and souls,” Berry, associate professor of history and African and African diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Austin, examines how slaveholders ascribed pecuniary worth to women, men, and children. Slavery took many forms across the antebellum U.S., but all enslaved people experienced their reduction to the status of chattel, bought and sold at their owner’s will. Yet surprisingly little scholarship has examined the monetary value of these individuals, whose worth increased from infancy through adolescence, peaking at the height of their productive and reproductive capacities, and declining steadily to the point where the elderly were considered nearly valueless. Upon their deaths, they might regain some financial significance, as the bodies of many were sold to medical schools for purposes of dissection. Crucially, Berry also delves into the annals of slave communities to explore the emotional strategies by which the enslaved resisted their reduction to an “exchangeable commodity,” centering their lives on spiritual beliefs that defined the soul, rather than the body, as the true location of their individuality. Berry’s groundbreaking work in the historiography of American slavery deserves a wide readership beyond academia.

8. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     November 1, 2016
     What was the assigned value, the price tag, placed on the bodies of the enslaved?In this sharp, affecting study, Berry (History and African and African Diaspora Studies/Univ. of Texas; Swing the Sickle for the Harvest Is Ripe: Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia, 2007, etc.) reminds us of the cold calculus at the intersection of slavery and capitalism. Assessed at each stage of their lives, in the womb and even after death, the sale price of the enslaved depended upon a number of variables: the needs, desires, and location of the buyer and the particular skills, perceived attractiveness, and sex of the bought. Beginning each of her chapters with an auction and an inventory of the economic imperatives at work, the author movingly vivifies this brutal commodification of the men, women, and children in bondage with the horrid details attending their sale: the male bodies "greased up and groomed for the auction block," the forced breeding that accounted for many family separations, the incomprehension of children sold away, the five-point scale (Berry compares it to U.S. Department of Agriculture meat grades) used to rate the health and utility of the enslaved, and the role of "breeding wenches" in populating the workforce. In addition, the author explores the flourishing cadaver trade, in which black bodies still had a post-mortem value; remarks on the emerging field of gynecology, built on research conducted on enslaved women's bodies; and touches on the matters of insurance, coroners' inquiries, and autopsies, all part of the grim calculation. Most movingly, Berry discusses what she calls "soul value," the deeply personal, spiritual value the enslaved assigned to themselves. From this place came the strength that inspired Ponto to boldly correct his auctioneer, Isaac to cheat the hangman by jumping from the gallows to meet death on his own terms, Madeline to drown herself rather than suffer repeated rape, and Celia to club her rapist to death. A well-researched, effectively presented piece of scholarship that forthrightly confronts slavery's brute essence.

     COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

9. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     October 15, 2016
     

     Debut author Berry (history, African diaspora studies, Univ. of Texas, Austin) focuses primarily on the sale price and appraised value of enslaved people in the United States in the early 19th-century. Utilizing the statistics compiled by Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman for their book Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Slavery, Berry adds her own data and finds new evidence within the records of life insurance companies. In addition, she analyzes "soul value," or enslaved people's rejection of the capitalization of their bodies. The first chapters are tightly focused on the values of enslaved children, young adults, and women of reproductive age. But Berry's section on the values of adults veers off-topic with long discussions of the rebellions of Nat Turner and John Brown. The author concludes with an examination of how medical schools paid for and stole enslaved dead bodies for research, which she terms "ghost value." VERDICT Although highly readable and addressing the most heartbreaking and starkly gruesome aspects of slavery, this book doesn't add much new information to the topic. Recommended for serious scholars of slavery and African American history.--Kate Stewart, American Folklife Ctr., Washington, DC

     Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

10. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      January 1, 2017
      

      This first study of its kind follows an enslaved person's life through the lens of their monetary value, from University of Texas at Austin history professor Berry. (LJ 10/15/16)

      Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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shortDescription

A groundbreaking look at slaves as commodities in early America that “reminds us of the cold calculus at the intersection of slavery and capitalism” (Kirkus Reviews).
“Searing, revelatory, and vital to understanding our nation’s inequities.” —Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns
 
In life and in death, slaves were commodities, their monetary value assigned based on their age, gender, health, and the demands of the market. The Price for Their Pound of Flesh is the first book to explore the economic value of enslaved people through every phase of their lives—including preconception, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, the senior years, and death—in the early American domestic slave trade. Covering the full “life cycle,” historian Daina Ramey Berry shows the lengths to which enslavers would go to maximize profits and...

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The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation

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Beacon Press

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2. • code: SOC001000
   • description: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Cultural & Ethnic Studies / American / African American & Black Studies
3. • code: SOC054000
   • description: Social Science / Slavery