Numeracy and the legacy of slavery: age-heaping in the Danish West Indies before and after emancipation from slavery, 1780s–1880s.

This article quantitatively examines the development of basic numeracy skills in St. Croix, a Caribbean cash-crop colony in the Danish West Indies (now the US Virgin Islands), before and after the abolition of slavery in 1848. Using age-heaping—a tendency to round ages—as a proxy for numeracy, the study analyzes eight full-population censuses spanning from 1846 to 1911, encompassing over 86,000 individual observations. The findings indicate that numeracy levels were relatively high compared to other Caribbean and Latin American regions, with a notable increase among cohorts born after emancipation, likely reflecting the impact of public schooling investments following abolition. The study finds no significant association between religious affiliation and numeracy, and suggests that pre-emancipation numeracy estimates may be affected by measurement errors due to census reporting practices. Overall, emancipation and subsequent educational reforms appear to have facilitated improved numeracy skills in the formerly enslaved population.