The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation by Daina Ramey Berry (review)

Daina Ramey Berry's impressive new book, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh, focuses on how enslaved people "recalled and responded to their monetary value throughout the course of their lives" (p. 2). Berry's elegantly written book is part intellectual history, part social history, and part of the "new economic history" (p. 3). She expertly weaves these methodological approaches together in six well-conceived chapters that follow the life cycle of enslaved people in the United States from the early republic to the outbreak of the Civil War.

Berry's work is part of a large and still growing historical literature that focuses our attention on issues of gender, sexuality, and reproduction in American slavery. She joins a conversation that includes recent works by Stephanie M. H. Camp, Jennifer Morgan, Walter Johnson, Thavolia Glymph, Edward Baptist, Sasha Turner, and Katherine Paugh. These historians have deepened our understanding of the coerciveness associated with American and Caribbean slavery, with particular attention to the violence associated with slave breeding practices and the violent separation of enslaved family members.

Berry's voice in this conversation is forceful, clear, and compelling. This is a powerful book. She begins before life even starts, observing that an enslaved woman's value was routinely tied to her perceived ability to reproduce future generations of enslaved laborers. For slave owners, human reproduction was a source of wealth and a reminder to enslaved people of how the master class perceived their value in monetary terms. A key driver of economic prosperity in the slave South was, therefore, the reproductive capacities of enslaved women, a point that is not new to Berry's analysis but which is nonetheless well made in this book.

In the context of this cruel system, even the unborn had monetary value, as plantation owners and slave traders factored potential values into their projected profits. As she takes us through the life cycle of the enslaved, Berry reveals how the assessed value of enslaved men and women rose as they matured through childhood, into adolescence, and reached their peak values during adult years. Over the course of these years, enslaved people became acutely aware of their enslaved status, something that children became painfully conscious of when they or a parent was sold away. For young women, the terror of enslavement rose precipitously during puberty. As young girls experience menstruation and became young women, rape and forced breeding shadowed them, a violent reminder of how slavery commodified black bodies and their perceived reproductive capabilities for the financial gain of the master class.

The commodification of black bodies did not only involve rape and coercive forms of reproduction; an enslaved person's value, while declining during their elderly years, continued to have financial value after death. The "postmortem commodification" of black bodies has gained growing scholarly attention in recent years (pp. 93, 99). Berry's analysis of grave robbing practices and the "domestic cadaver trade" is, therefore, a reminder of how medical schools profited and accumulated knowledge from the bodies of recently deceased enslaved people (p. 154).

The Price for Their Pound of Flesh makes an important contribution to our historical understanding of the commodification of black bodies. Berry's analysis deserves a wide audience. Readers will find her approach to this topic engaging, and her weaving of African American voices into her narrative enlightening. However, some will be left wanting deeper dives into the economics of enslavement, while others will lament a missed opportunity to discuss the historical significance of "breeding" and the language associated with it ("bucks" and "wenches") with the level of detail this topic deserves. Indeed, basing such analysis on a single email exchange with another historian will strike some readers as a failure to adequately ground this aspect of...