The Price for Their Pound of Flesh

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

Bibliographic Data

ID4858056
AuthorsJames Simeone (Illinois Wesleyan University, Bloomington, Illinois, corresponding author)
Year2018
Volume105
Issue3
Pages677-678
Publication date2018-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeREVIEW
Review ofThe Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation, Daina Ramey Berry, 2017
VenueJournal of American History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/jahist/jay330
OpenAlexW2906499985
LanguageEN

In The Price for Their Pound of Flesh, Daina Ramey Berry has produced a rich compendium of hidden transcripts documenting how American slaves viewed their lives. The book “is organized around the life cycle of an enslaved person's body” and examines each stage of a slave's life from “preconception” (i.e., the unborn children of expectant mothers) to “postmortem” (i.e., the cadaver trade) (p. 3). Her method is more qualitative than quantitative. Berry has worked to reconstruct not just the monetary value of black bodies as capitalists saw them but also the lived experiences and self-actualized personal value posited by the slaves themselves, their internal spiritual or “soul value” (p. 6). Indeed, while she pitches the book as a contribution to “a new economic history of American slavery,” Berry is more concerned with the slaves' inner lives (p. 5). Her “goal is to highlight the voices of the enslaved,” which she pursues wherever evidence can be found, however fragmentary (p. 9

Biology · Compendium · Flesh · Political science · Pound (networking · Sociology · Soul · Theology · Value (mathematics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Law · Philosophy · Race, History, and American Society

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