Numeracy and the legacy of slavery Age-heaping in the Danish West Indies before and after emancipation from slavery, 1780s-1880s

Abstract

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 study quantitatively how a legacy of slavery impacted upon the development of basic numeracy skills. Our results show that numeracy skills started to improve in the population under study well before emancipation from slavery. We also show that the formal public and private schooling seems to have played a marginal role in this process. We therefore conclude that much of this learning was acquired in informal ways.