The scale and the trend of slave prices are essential features of the regime which most economists have ignored and for which the rest have had too little data.  For colonial times the quotations are scant.  An historian of the French West Indies, however, has ascertained from the archives that whereas the prices ranged perhaps as low as 200 francs for imported Africans there at the middle of the seventeenth century, they rose to 450 francs by the year 1700 and continued in a strong and steady advance thereafter, except in war times, until the very eve of the French Revolution.  Typical prices for prime field hands in San Domingo were 650 francs in 1716, 800 in 1728, 1,160 in 1750, 1,400 in 1755, 1,180 in 1764, 1,600 in 1769, 1,860 in 1772, 1,740 in 1777, and 2,200 francs in 1785.[8]

[Footnote 8:  Lucien Peytraud, L’Esclavage aux Antilles Francaises avant 1789 (Paris, 1897), pp. 122-127.]

In the British West Indies it is apparent from occasional documents that the trend was similar.  A memorial from Barbados in 1689, for example, recited that in earlier years the planters had been supplied with Africans at L7 sterling per head, of which forty shillings covered the Guinea cost and L5 paid the freightage; but now since the establishment of the Royal African company, “we buy negroes at the price of an engrossed commodity, the common rate of a good negro on shipboard being twenty pound.  And we are forced to scramble for them in so shameful a manner that one of the great burdens of our lives is the going to buy negroes.  But we must have them; we cannot be without them."[9] The overthrow of the monopoly, however, brought no relief.  In 1766 the price of new negroes in the West Indies ranged at about L26;[10] and in 1788-1790 from L41 to L49.  At this time the value of a prime field hand, reared in the islands, was reported to be twice as great as that of an imported African.[11]

[Footnote 9:  Groans of the Plantations (1679), p. 5, quoted in W. Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce (Cambridge, 1892), II, 278, note.]

[Footnote 10:  Abridgement of the Evidence taken before a Committee of the whole House:  The Slave Trade, no. 2 (London, 1790), p. 37.]

[Footnote 11:  “An Old Member of Parliament,” Doubts on the Abolition of the Slave Trade (London, 1790), p. 72, quoting Dr. Adair’s evidence in the Privy Council Report, part 3, Antigua appendix no.  II].

In Virginia the rise was proportionate.  In 1671 a planter wrote of his purchase of a negro for L26. 10_s_ and said he supposed the price was the highest ever paid in those parts; but a few years afterward a lot of four men brought L30 a head, two women the same rate, and two more women L25 apiece; and before the end of the seventeenth century men were being appraised at L40.[12] An official report from the colony in 1708 noted a great increase of the slave supply in recent years, but observed that the prices had