The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation

Content Warning: This section discusses the system of race-based slavery in the United States, the commodification of enslaved people, execution, sexual assault, rape, and trafficking in human corpses. 

Human slavery is the relationship between two humans in which one human claims to own another human. This ownership generally entails commodification and thus a “market” for enslaved people, though not always.

Slavery is a global phenomenon, stretching back to ancient and even prehistoric cultures. Enslavement often occurred as a result of warfare, where prisoners of war were enslaved by those who subdued them. Often, enslavement was a temporary situation, and some even voluntarily entered into temporary enslavement as a result of debt or other life-constraining circumstances.

The chattel-slavery system that is the focus of Berry’s book is a race-based system according to which an enslaved person is rendered the personal, commodified property of an enslaver, able to be bought or sold at the will of the enslaver and against the will of the enslaved person, without regard for factors such as the enslaved person’s place of birth, family ties, or personal relationships (“Language of Enslavement.” National Park Service, 2022). This disregard underscores the ways in which the enslaved person is treated as “chattel,” or property, an objectifying designation that reduces the enslaved person to the same status as livestock.

Modern, race-based chattel slavery refers specifically to the matrilineally inherited condition of slavery into which one was born. According to this system, anyone birthed by an enslaved person inherits the status of enslavement, a life-long political status reducing them to property (Elliott, Mary and Jazmine Hughes. “A Brief History of Slavery that You Didn’t Learn in School.” New York Times, 2019).

This chattel-slavery system developed as a result of the trans-Atlantic trade of enslaved people, where Africans were taken to Europe and the Americas against their will. As this system was increasingly brought under scrutiny and outlawed in the US during the 19th century, enslavers relied increasingly on the people they enslaved to produce children in order to maintain their access to future generations of enslaved people. This meant that enslavers subjected enslaved people to rape, either perpetuated by the enslaver himself or via forced sexual relations between enslaved people (Foster, Thomas. “Sexual Exploitation of the Enslaved.” Encyclopedia Virginia, 2022), which Berry calls “third-party rape.” Furthermore, once enslaved people bore children, they had no parental rights to those children; because they children inherited the status of enslavement, the children were deemed the personal property of the enslaver and could be bought and sold as the enslaver desired.

Enslavers would conduct valuations of enslaved people for insurance purposes, similar to financial and economic measures used for livestock and inanimate property. In the event that an enslaved person died or was injured, the enslaver could seek compensation. In opposition to the democratic tenet that “all men are created equal” and endowed with inviolable human rights, the chattel-slavery system placed a market value on enslaved people, wherein those who were younger, healthy, fit, able to produce children, or who possessed special skills were valued at higher prices than others (Mintz, Steven. “Historical Context: Facts About the Slave Trade and Slavery.” The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History).

As Berry shows in the text, the rendering of enslaved people as chattel entailed that they were given a valuation in correlation with their profitability. This included higher valuations for factors such as the enslaved person’s capacity to labor but also factors such as reproductive capacity and, as Berry emphasizes, the value of the enslaved person’s body for scientific and medical purposes. This factor also meant that enslaved people were commodified after death, as their corpses were used for the purpose of conducting autopsies and dissections (Kenny, Stephen. “How Black Slaves Were Routinely Sold as ‘Specimens’ to Ambitious White Doctors.” IFL Science, 2015).

The chattel-slavery system was deeply rooted in the US economy, and the US economy was deeply dependent upon the chattel-slavery system. The labor of enslaved people was vital for industries such as agriculture, as the lack of compensation allowed enslavers to sell goods such as crops at cheaper prices. This had the effect of making US products competitive in a burgeoning international trade market. This also further fueled the trans-Atlantic trading of enslaved people, since a “triangular trade” system developed whereby raw materials such as tobacco, sugar, and rice were exported from the US and were then turned into manufactured goods in Europe that were later sent to the African colonies to be traded for enslaved people. These enslaved people were then forcibly transferred to the Americas via the Middle Passage to supply more forced labor (“Middle Passage.” Britannica).

The cheaper prices for goods produced by enslaved people furthermore ensured higher profits for enslavers; these profits helped to build generational wealth for the descendants of enslavers, creating wealth gaps between white and Black people that continue to exist many years after the abolition of slavery (“400 Years Since Slavery: A Timeline of American History.” The Guardian, 2019).

Twenty-first-century definitions of contemporary human slavery do not always require that a human be owned or considered literal property. Instead, the definition of contemporary slavery is grounded in whether a person is being held against their will. Thus, 21st-century slavery is often defined as the imposed physical inability to leave a situation that is abusive. It is the condition of being forcibly held against one’s will.

Though human slavery is now outlawed across the globe, slavery continues, and it is estimated that one in 200 humans are currently enslaved. This enslavement often occurs in the production of agricultural goods for wealthy countries, such as in cocoa, coffee, and cashew production, as well as in urban areas in what are referred to as “sweat shops,” where clothing and other manufactured goods are again produced for wealthier countries. In sweatshops, workers are often locked in, unable to leave. In addition, humans are enslaved for the purposes of sexual exploitation and domestic labor, which occurs frequently in wealthy countries (“Slavery Today.” End Slavery Now).

Berry’s research focuses on 19th-century chattel slavery in the American South, with particular attention to commodification and how valuation of enslaved people was imposed on them and determined externally, as well as how enslaved people determined their own value internally, cultivating a “soul value.”