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Many of our seminars and public events this year will continue as in person or as hybrid (online and in person) events.

Please check our website listings and social media feeds @STICERD_LSE at X and @LSE-STICERD-CASE at Bluesky for updates.

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Unless otherwise specified, in-person seminars are open to the public. Please ensure you have informed the event contact as early as possible.

Those unable to join the seminars in-person are welcome to participate via zoom if the event is hybrid.

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About this event

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, and best explained by 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.