Winner of Best Paper Awards at: QMUL Graduate Workshop 2023, UB Graduate Workshop 2021. Presented at: NEUDC 2023 in Harvard.

How violence during slavery might have affected formerly enslaved families remains an empirically unanswered question. I exploit local variation in enslaved workers’ exposure to coercion in two French Caribbean islands: Guadeloupe and Martinique. Using county-level data on enslaved mortality prior to abolition, I document that enslavement conditions were heavily influenced by planters’ economic incentives and significantly deteriorated on sugarcane plantations compared to coffee, following heightened competition in the sugar market. I then digitize individual data from handwritten administrative records on all formerly enslaved families that had children five years after abolition. My main finding is that the presence of fathers exposed to the worst conditions during slavery had a sizable negative effect on the quality of childhood environment, with 40% higher chances of child death respective to families with less coerced or absent fathers. This effect holds regardless of fathers’ occupation, place of residence, or mothers’ characteristics. I find suggestive evidence that this could be driven by worse enslavement conditions leading to more violent men, to which mothers may have responded through strategic matching decisions with less coerced partners. Taken together, my findings point to substantial inequality among descendants of formerly enslaved individuals. I highlight a yet understudied mechanism of slavery’s legacy: which is that adverse events pass through families – possibly through paternal violence.

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 a 1% increase in beet sugar production led to a 2% increase in enslaved workers’ deaths, but only in sugarcane-suitable areas. This resulted in +10% increase in enslaved workers death in sugarcane counties in less than a decade. To interpret this finding, I develop a model where firms choose coercion levels based on expected returns, costs, and market share. 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.