Weaning among West Indian Slaves: Historical and Bioanthropological Evidence from Barbados

Abstract

I N an innovative article of I978 Herbert S. Klein and Stanley L. Engerman, addressing the problem of fertility differentials between slave populations of the United States and the British Caribbean, emphasized that the significant difference between the two areas in rates of natural increase is largely explainable by the higher fertility of American slaves. They contended that differences in the child-spacing period could partially account for differences in fertility rates: in the West Indies, birth interval ranged between three and four years, while in the United States it close to three years. While acknowledging that spacing could result from several factors, Klein and Engerman focused on the lactation period and found that the breast-feeding interval for North American slave women was generally about one year, while for the West Indies it typically at least two years.1 Students of Caribbean slave life have long accustomed themselves to working with limited information. Although sources for investigating the institution of slavery and its political and economic dimensions are abundant, the more mundane aspects of slave sociocultural and domestic life were much less apt to be recorded by contemporary white observers. Whatever the implications for understanding slave fertility patterns, the topics of lactation and weaning very well illustrate the limited data base that scholars often have been obliged to employ in treating the domestic behavioral patterns of Caribbean slaves.

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