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“The Curse of the Caribbean”? Agency’s Impact on the Productivity of Sugar Estates on St. Vincent and the Grenadines, 1814–1829

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 June 2018

S. D. Smith  and
Martin Forster
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Abstract

This study estimates agency’s impact on sugar plantation productivity using a unique early nineteenth-century panel data set from St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Results of fixed effects models, combined with a qualitative and quantitative analysis of potential endogeneity of the agency variable, provide no evidence that estates managed by agents were less productive than those managed by their owners. We discuss the results in the context of the historical and recent, revisionary, interpretations of agency, and the emergence of managerial hierarchies in the Atlantic economy.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 78 , Issue 2 , June 2018 , pp. 472 - 499
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 The Economic History Association 

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Footnotes

We thank the editors and three anonymous referees for comments on earlier versions of this work. We thank Thomas Cornellisen, Silvio Daidone, Nick Draper, Giacomo De Luca, Barry Higman, Tony Hill, Levent Kutlu, Stephen Martin, Andrew Pickering, Ferdinand Rauch, and Matthias Winkel for their feedback on earlier versions. The work has been presented at the following conferences: the European Workshop on Efficiency and Productivity Analysis, Helsinki, 2013; the Society for Historical Archaeology conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology, Leicester, 2013; the Association of Business Historians’ conference on Global Business and Global Networks, York, 2010; and the British Group of Early American Historians’ conference, Stirling, 2009, and we thank participants for their comments. Analysis was carried out using Stata v.14. IV models used the official xtivreg and the xtivreg2 (Schafer 2010) commands. Mistakes remain our own.

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