Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- Preface
- 1 The Atlantic slave trade and the early development of the English West Indies
- 2 Shipping and mortality
- 3 Slave prices in the Barbados market, 1673–1723
- 4 On the order of purchases by characteristics at slave sales
- 5 The demographic composition of the slave trade: an economic investigation
- 6 Estimating geographic persistence from market observations: population turnover among estate owners and managers in Barbados and Jamaica, 1673–1725
- 7 The economic structure of the early Atlantic slave trade: the challenge of Adam Smith's analysis
- Appendixes
- A The Royal African Company's homeward bound invoice account books
- B Data used in the analysis of passage mortality, 1720–5
- C Measuring persistence rates and the problem of common names
- Notes
- Selected bibliography
- Index
C - Measuring persistence rates and the problem of common names
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- Preface
- 1 The Atlantic slave trade and the early development of the English West Indies
- 2 Shipping and mortality
- 3 Slave prices in the Barbados market, 1673–1723
- 4 On the order of purchases by characteristics at slave sales
- 5 The demographic composition of the slave trade: an economic investigation
- 6 Estimating geographic persistence from market observations: population turnover among estate owners and managers in Barbados and Jamaica, 1673–1725
- 7 The economic structure of the early Atlantic slave trade: the challenge of Adam Smith's analysis
- Appendixes
- A The Royal African Company's homeward bound invoice account books
- B Data used in the analysis of passage mortality, 1720–5
- C Measuring persistence rates and the problem of common names
- Notes
- Selected bibliography
- Index
Summary
The problem posed by common names, in which the presence in a sample of different individuals with the same names can result in false linkages and thereby cause estimates of persistence rates to be biased upward, has of course been encountered by previous persistence studies. One solution, used by Stephan Thernstrom in his study of Boston, was to omit from his base-year samples any individual with a common name, with the latter defined as any name (first and last) that appeared two or more times in the Boston city directory for the base year from which the sample was drawn.
Lacking complete listings of the population of Barbados for the appropriate period, a different procedure was followed here. After obtaining the persistence estimates of Table C.1, which use all the names of purchasers that appear in the Royal African Company invoices, all the names of purchasers in the sample were compared to the listing of names obtained by the first federal census of South Carolina in 1790. Two groups of common names from the Barbados sample were then identified on the basis of comparison with the South Carolina listings. One group was the most common names, defined as those names (first and last) that appeared two or more times in the South Carolina census. Of the total of 2,886 names in the Barbados sample of purchasers, there were found to be 234 of these most common names.
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- Information
- Traders, Planters and SlavesMarket Behavior in Early English America, pp. 167 - 172Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1986