Collaborative Research: The Differential Impact of Morbid Diseases on the Productivity of Black and White Labor in the Agricultural South

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The efficiency and profitability of American slavery have been subject to extensive debates in economic history. In comparing the agricultural outputs of free and slave farms, the modern economic history literature has ignored the disparate effects of diseases on different ethnic groups. Yet there is ample evidence, empirical, scientific, and historical, that populations of different ethnic heritages have different responses to many disease pathogens. In particular, people of tropical West African ancestry tend to have much milder reactions to the "warm weather" diseases that are endemic to tropical West Africa than do most people of European ancestry. These "warm weather" diseases became endemic to the Americas as a result of the African slave trade. The present study examines the role that the differential ethnic reactions to disease played in American economic history. The study models and estimates the impact of a specific disease, hookworm, on human productivity and its disparate effects on peoples of different ancestry. The disparate ethnic effects of hookworm differentially affect human productivity, and consequently raise questions about the existing analysis of the economics of slavery in Antebellum America. The study examines the interactions of the biological environment with the human economy and society, integrating biological science, history, and economic analysis.Specifically, the study estimates the differences in total factor productivity between white and black farms in the American South that can be attributed to the impact of endemic hookworm on white and black agricultural labor. To accomplish this, it employs data on the prevalence and intensity of hookworm in a specific area in the early twentieth-century South. The data on the hookworm burden of whites and blacks, and agricultural inputs and outputs on white and black farms are employed in the productivity estimates. With the data, estimates are made for the impact that hookworm had on differences in productivity between farms that employed labor of African ancestry and farms that employed labor of European ancestry. The study employs estimation techniques that control for other potential confounding variables. The estimates for the impact of hookworm on black and white productivity in the early twentieth-century agricultural South are used to assess the relative efficiency and productivity of slave and free farms in the Antebellum South.