In his 1978 essay in this journal, Robert E. Gallman praised but also criticized my work on the “egalitarian myth,” arguing that it had not in fact “dealt a death blow to the ‘egalitarian hypothesis’“ (1978:194). In my response the following year, I tried to show that his criticism was based in large part on a misreading of what I had written, attributing to me “statements I had never made and viewpoints I do not hold.” He thus had created “an elaborate model to refute a point that I had not made” (1979a: 208). Although I argued that his overall criticism was invalid, primarily because it was not based on “germane historical evidence,” I closed by praising the “admirably reasoned spirit that infuses Professor Gallman’s essay,” praise I publicly repeated in the American Historical Review (1979a: 224, 1980b: 1163).

In his essay in this issue, Stuart Blumin attempts to sort out the debate between Edward Pessen and me. Professor Blumin begins: “Gallman advances the view that inequality between generations—the association between age and wealth—does explain nearly all of the very striking differences in personal fortune that Pessen and others have discovered.” This is not the view I had intended to advance and is certainly not a view I hold. Many factors bore on the wealth distribution of the United States in the “age of the common man.” The age structure of population surely did not account for “nearly all” of the observed wealth differences. (See, for example, my treatment of this subject— based on manuscript census data for 1860—in Davis et al., 1972: 31-32. This discussion treats the influences on wealth holding of age, sex, nativity, color, occupation, and inheritance.) How Professor Blumin came to misunderstand me so badly I cannot say, but I suspect he was misled by my ill-advised comparison of the results drawn from my model with the actual distribution of wealth in 1860 (Gallman, 1978:198).

Early nineteenth-century Trinidad was one of the most efficient sugar producers in the British West Indies with output per slave three times as high as in Barbados and 70% higher than in Jamaica (Ward, 1978; Ragatz, 1963:332). Slave prices reflected Trinidad’s greater productivity. The Commissioners of Compensation reported in 1837 that between 1822 and 1830 the price of a Trinidad field hand was 64% greater than the price of one in Jamaica (Great Britain Parliamentary Papers, 1837–1838).

Despite Trinidad’s natural advantages as a sugar producer, the island’s first sugar estate was established only in 1787. Spain controlled Trinidad until the British conquest in 1797 and prohibited non-Spanish settlement until 1783. The island’s population in 1783 consisted of only some one thousand Amerindians and an equal number of inhabitants of European or African descent who grew cocoa as well as subsistence crops. Rapid population growth began in 1783 when the Spanish opened the island to settlement by any Roman Catholic. French West Indian slave owners in particular took advantage of this opportunity to settle a nearly unpopulated island and brought the cultivation of sugar cane and coffee to Trinidad. The slave rebellion in Haiti sparked a still larger inflow of French planters and their slaves, and brought the slave population to over 10,000 in 1797 (Fraser, 1891; Carmichael, 1961; Anthony, 1975).

In recent years the nutritional adequacy of the slave diet has received increasing attention from historians. Scholars have analyzed a wide array of sources such as the manuscript censuses of agriculture and population, the ex-slave narratives, diaries, plantation account books, and agricultural and medical journals to shed new light on the quantities, varieties, and nutritional content of foods consumed by slaves (Fogel and Engerman, 1974; Owens, 1976; Sutch, 1975; Kiple and Kiple, 1977; Savitt, 1978; Crawford, 1980; Kahn, 1983). While these studies have yielded considerable information on the average quality of the slave diet in the American South or for slaves in particular localities, relatively little systematic evidence has been available to date on how the level of nutrition varied among different groups in the slave population, and over time.

The diversity of opinions about the extent and importance of migration during the colonial era testifies to the paucity of direct information on the subject. Beyond the desire for a purely demographic explanation of the differences in regional rates of population growth, the need for a better understanding of the changes in the supply and distribution of labor before the Industrial Revolution has spurred recent research on internal migration. Some of this work has grown out of studies of the censuses and vital records of various New England towns (such as those cited in Jones, 1981). However, although these sources testify that an individual existed in a specific place and time, and thus provide valuable indirect glimpses of migration, they rarely furnish the information necessary to locate him or her a second time—either earlier or later in the life cycle. Names appear and disappear from such lists over time, but several intervening assumptions are required before we can infer that migration was involved. Similarly, although differences in sex ratios and age distributions reflect the movement of population, they reveal little about the absolute magnitude or direction of net migration, let alone gross flows.

Auxology, the study of physical growth (from auxein, to increase), has long been pressed into service as a measure of human welfare. In the sixteenth century Levinus Lemnius, doctor and later priest in the Low Countries, castigated “schoolmasters and others that take upon them to teach and boord young boyes (and) pinch their poore Pupils and Boorders by the belly, and allow them meate neither sufficient nor yet wholesome.” “Whereby it cometh to passe,” he continued,