Numeracy and the legacy of slavery: age-heaping in the Danish West Indies before and after emancipation from slavery, 1780s-1880s

In many slave societies, enslaved persons were barred from acquiring much education. What skills the enslaved persons nonetheless were able to acquire, and how this changed following emancipation from slavery, is not well known. We study quantitatively how a legacy of slavery impacted upon the development of basic numeracy skills. Our results show that numeracy skills started to improve in the population under study following the legal abolition of slavery. Investments in public schooling during this period thus seem to have been important for the increased learning of basic numeracy skills.