This book is about the price history of the Cuban slave market during the most intense period of slave-based sugar plantation growth in Cuban history. It owes its intellectual origins to general trends in economic history over the past three decades, evolving methodologies for analyzing slave societies in the Americas, and debates about the history of slavery in Cuba.

Because commodity prices provide the basic economic reference points for peoples in most societies, understanding their trends over extended time periods is essential for interpreting economic history and can also provide important insights into noneconomic aspects of human behavior. Although data on prices may serve as valuable analytical tools, price history has only recently become important to Latin American and Caribbean historians despite the early publication of seminal works touching upon Latin America that have had a lasting impact on the historical profession. The most significant was Earl J. Hamilton's 1934 study of European price rises, their linkage to bullion flows from the Americas, and the role which American silver played in stimulating the process of capital accumulation leading to the industrial revolution. Hamilton demonstrated the potential of using price data to examine and interpret long-term historical processes at the regional and international levels.