The Caribbean Slave
A Biological History

A comprehensive analysis of the biological experience of black slaves in the Caribbean.

Kenneth F. Kiple (Author)

9780521524704, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 20 June 2002

292 pages
22.8 x 15.3 x 2 cm, 0.475 kg

This study focuses on the black biological experience in slavery, in the Caribbean. It begins with a consideration of the rapidly changing disease environment after the arrival of the Spaniards; it also looks at the slave ancestors in their West African homeland and examines the ways in which the nutritional and disease environments of that area had shaped its inhabitants. In a particularly innovative chapter, he considers the epidemiological and pathological consequences of the middle passage for newly enslaved blacks. The balance of the book is devoted to the health of the black slave in the West Indies. Using the general health and level of nutrition of the island whites as a control, Kiple pays especially close attention to the role that nutrition played in the development of diseases. The study closes with a look at the continuing demographic difficulties of the black West Indian from the abolition of slavery.

List of tables
Preface
Acknowledgments
Part I. Background and Biology: Introduction
1. The peoples and their pathogens
2. West African diet and disease
3. The parameters of West African survival
Part II. Diet, Disease, and Demography: Introduction
4. The middle passage and malnutrition
5. Plantation nutrition
6. Malnutrition: morbidity and mortality
7. Slave demography
8. Slave infant and child mortality
9. Black diseases and white medicine
Part III. Pathogens and Politics: Introduction
10. Fevers and race
11. Epilogue: diet, disease, and displacement
Notes
Bibliographic essay
Index.

Subject Areas: Black & Asian studies [JFSL3], Social & cultural history [HBTB]