Author’s Note
Preface
List of Images
INTRODUCTION
The Value of Life and Death
CHAPTER 1
Preconception: Women and Future Increase
CHAPTER 2
Infancy and Childhood
CHAPTER 3
Adolescence, Young Adulthood, and Soul Values
CHAPTER 4
Midlife and Older Adulthood
CHAPTER 5
Elderly and Superannuated
CHAPTER 6
Postmortem: Death and Ghost Values
EPILOGUE
The Afterlives of Slavery
Acknowledgments
Appendix: A Timeline of Slavery, Medical History, and Black Bodies
Note on Sources: A History of People and Corpses
Notes
Index
About the Author

Daina Ramey Berry is Michael Douglas Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a scholar of the enslaved and Black Women’s History and the award-winning author/editor of several books including A Black Women’s History of the United States.

Groundbreaking look at slaves as commodities through every phase of life, from birth to death and beyond, in early America
In life and in death, slaves were commodities, their monetary value assigned based on their age, gender, health, and the demands of the market. The Price for Their Pound of Flesh is the first book to explore the economic value of enslaved people through every phase of their lives-including preconception, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, the senior years, and death-in the early American domestic slave trade. Covering the full "life cycle," historian Daina Ramey Berry shows the lengths to which enslavers would go to maximize profits and protect their investments. Illuminating "ghost values" or the prices placed on dead enslaved people, Berry explores the little-known domestic cadaver trade and traces the illicit sales of dead bodies to medical schools.
This book is the culmination of more than ten years of Berry's exhaustive research on enslaved values, drawing on data unearthed from sources such as slave-trading records, insurance policies, cemetery records, and life insurance policies. Writing with sensitivity and depth, she resurrects the voices of the enslaved and provides a rare window into enslaved peoples' experiences and thoughts, revealing how enslaved people recalled and responded to being appraised, bartered, and sold throughout the course of their lives. Reaching out from these pages, they compel the reader to bear witness to their stories, to see them as human beings, not merely commodities.
A profoundly humane look at an inhumane institution, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh will have a major impact how we think about slavery, reparations, capitalism, nineteenth-century medical education, and the value of life and death.
Winner of the 2018 Hamilton Book Award - from the University Coop (Austin, TX)
Winner of the 2018 Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Book Prize (SHEAR)
Winner of the 2018 Phillis Wheatley Literary Award, from the Sons and Daughters of the US Middle Passage
Finalist for the 2018 Frederick Douglass Book Prize from Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition