An economic rationale for the different methods of feeding enslaved people in the antebellum South and British West Indies

Eleanor Brown and Ian Ayres

International Review of Law and Economics, 2024, vol. 79, issue C

Abstract: This article focuses on two different systems of feeding enslaved people. In the first system, primarily associated with the cotton, tobacco, and rice plantations of antebellum South and the early sugar plantations of the British West Indies, the obligation to feed enslaved people was executed by the plantation. In contrast, under a second system known as provisioning associated with the later British West Indian colonies, the master allocated land to enslaved people on which they would grow their own food. Over time, this land was understood, in the wider community of both those enslaved and the planters, to be the “property” of the enslaved person. This article offers potential explanations both for why provisioning was adopted in the West Indies, and why provisioning did not take hold in southern U.S. plantations. Following Ronald Coase’s Nature of the Firm, we should expect to see provisioning when doing so economizes on transaction and agency costs. As it became more difficult to purchase imported food, plantations had to provide their own food. Provisioning sacrificed the plantations’ claims to surplus food, but in the West Indies such decentralized production could enhance incentives for enslaved people to produce their own food while economizing on the need for supervision.

Keywords: Enslaved people; Plantation slavery; Property; Ownership; Provision grounds; Coase; British West Indies; American colonies; Caribbean colonies; Antebellum South; Decentralized food production; Outsourced feeding; Absentee ownership; Subcontracting; Transactions costs; Agency costs (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:irlaec:v:79:y:2024:i:c:s0144818824000267

DOI: 10.1016/j.irle.2024.106206

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