Jamaica Ladies - (Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American Histo) by Christine Walker (Paperback)

About the Book

"'Jamaica Ladies' is the first systematic study of the free and freed women of European, Euro-African, and African descent who perpetuated chattel slavery and reaped its profits in the British Empire. Their actions helped transform Jamaica into the wealthiest slaveholding colony in the Anglo-Atlantic world. Starting in the 1670s, a surprisingly large and diverse group of women helped secure English control of Jamaica and, crucially, aided its developing and expanding slave labor regime by acquiring enslaved men, women, and children to protect their own tenuous claims to status and independence"--

Book Synopsis

Jamaica Ladies is the first systematic study of the free and freed women of European, Euro-African, and African descent who perpetuated chattel slavery and reaped its profits in the British Empire. Their actions helped transform Jamaica into the wealthiest slaveholding colony in the Anglo-Atlantic world. Starting in the 1670s, a surprisingly large and diverse group of women helped secure English control of Jamaica and, crucially, aided its developing and expanding slave labor regime by acquiring enslaved men, women, and children to protect their own tenuous claims to status and independence.

Female colonists employed slaveholding as a means of advancing themselves socially and financially on the island. By owning others, they wielded forms of legal, social, economic, and cultural authority not available to them in Britain. In addition, slaveholding allowed free women of African descent, who were not far removed from slavery themselves, to cultivate, perform, and cement their free status. Alongside their male counterparts, women bought, sold, stole, and punished the people they claimed as property and vociferously defended their rights to do so. As slavery's beneficiaries, these women worked to stabilize and propel this brutal labor regime from its inception.

Review Quotes

"Far from the traditional story of oppression and disempowered women, . . . Walker's study offers an alternative narrative that recognizes 'women as powerful agents of slavery and colonialism' whilst calling into question 'normative European gender ideologies'. . . . Walker makes a significant contribution to scholarship by forcing us to reconsider old archive sources from the perspective of gender studies."--Eighteenth Century Studies

"In exploring the gendering of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Jamaica and the lives of those who perpetuated and profited from chattel slavery Jamaica Ladies demonstrates unequivocally that we cannot understand the development of colonial society and the system of enslavement on which it depended without thinking about the role that free and freed women played in that process."--Journal of British Studies

About the Author

Christine Walker is associate professor of history at the University of Hong Kong.