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. 

Berry’s main objective is to explore the ways that enslaved people think about their commodification under slavery. The related, secondary objective is the analysis of shifting monetary valuation across their life stages. Berry draws a distinction between other scholars’ focus on what enslaved people experience in being commodified and her own focus on what they think in the context of this commodification. The book attempts to provide an “intellectual history” of enslaved people’s “thoughts, expressions, feelings, and reactions” to their commodification (2).

In an attempt to center the lives of enslaved people, the book is organized around their life stages rather than historical periods. In addition, Berry pays particular attention to the stages before conception and birth and also after death, which differentiates her work from other scholars who have examined the commodification of enslaved people mainly in terms of their labor. Berry argues that labor is not always the determining factor in external valuation. One of the fundamental questions of the book is, “What did it mean to have a projected or real price from preconception to postmortem?” (3).