Reconstructing a slave society: Building the DWI panel, 1760-1914

Abstract

In this article, we discuss the sources employed and the methodological choices that entailed assembling a novel, individual-level, large panel dataset containing an incredible wealth of data for an entire population in the Caribbean over a long time span: the DWI panel. The panel contains over 1.4 million observations spanning 154 years, well over 100 variables, and its records are linked across sources along demographic and geographic lines throughout the entire period. This richness is all the more valuable in light of the limited source availability characteristics of the area and is hoped to lead to a renewed debate on our understanding of former slave societies, while fostering collaborations with scholars who rely on similar datasets for other areas of the world.