The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation

Content Warning: This section discusses the system of race-based slavery in the United States, the commodification of enslaved people, execution, sexual assault, rape, and trafficking in human corpses. 

Human slavery is the relationship between two humans in which one human claims to own another human. This ownership generally entails commodification and thus a “market” for enslaved people, though not always.

Slavery is a global phenomenon, stretching back to ancient and even prehistoric cultures. Enslavement often occurred as a result of warfare, where prisoners of war were enslaved by those who subdued them. Often, enslavement was a temporary situation, and some even voluntarily entered into temporary enslavement as a result of debt or other life-constraining circumstances.

The chattel-slavery system that is the focus of Berry’s book is a race-based system according to which an enslaved person is rendered the personal, commodified property of an enslaver, able to be bought or sold at the will of the enslaver and against the will of the enslaved person, without regard for factors such as the enslaved person’s place of birth, family ties, or personal relationships (“Language of Enslavement.” National Park Service, 2022). This disregard underscores the ways in which the enslaved person is treated as “chattel,” or property, an objectifying designation that reduces the enslaved person to the same status as livestock.