Previously circulated under ‘Impact of Enslavement Conditions on Families’ Winner of Best Paper Awards at: QMUL Graduate Workshop 2023, UB Graduate Workshop 2021.

Colonial slavery was not a monolithic institution: sugarcane plantations were deadlier and more violent than coffee or cotton plantations. How did heterogeneity in the experience of slavery shape post-emancipation immediate disadvantages? Using a novel, individual-level dataset covering the universe of formerly enslaved people in the French West Indies immediately after emancipation in 1848, I follow two generations into freedom and explore how within-slavery heterogeneity in exposure to sugarcane affected intergenerational outcomes. I exploit a unique institutional feature of distinctive surname giving at emancipation to link families to their former parish of enslavement. Sugarcane exposure generated two opposing forces: economic advantages through skill acquisition, but worse intergenerational health through non-economic channels. Children born free whose fathers were enslaved in the most sugarcane-intensive parishes face a 40% higher risk of death before age five. This effect is concentrated when fathers are physically present, pointing to negative paternal inputs rather than absent ones. Exploiting within-parish, across-cohort variation in parents’ exposure to hardship when enslaved, I show these intergenerational effects stem from past experience of extreme hardship. Criminal records confirm that men from extreme sugarcane parishes were disproportionately convicted for violence against women and children.

This paper shows that firms relying on forced labor may intensify coercion in response to long-term economic threats. Focusing on French Caribbean slavery, I examine how the decline in sugarcane producers’ revenue prospects—driven by the rise of beet sugar production in mainland France—affected coercion on sugarcane plantations. Using exogenous variation in soil suitability for sugarcane, I find that increases in competitor’s beet sugar production were met by increases in enslaved workers’ death in the most sugarcane intensive areas. This excess mortality is not accounted for by changes in population composition or non-coercion related causes (natural disasters, diseases, etc.). When workers’ outside options are nonexistent, pushing some to exhaustion—and death—could be profit-maximizing for planters facing the end of their market dominance. This response to being cornered has implications for policies aimed at combating forced labor.