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. By owning others, they wielded forms of legal, social, economic, and cultural authority not available to them in Britain. 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.įemale colonists employed slaveholding as a means of advancing themselves socially and financially on the island. Their actions helped transform Jamaica into the wealthiest slaveholding colony in the Anglo-Atlantic world. Jamaica Ladies: Female Slaveholders and the Creation of Britain's Atlantic Empire (Omohundro Institute/University of North Carolina Press, 2020) 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.
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