Jamaica Ladies by Christine Walker

Jamaica Ladies by Christine Walker

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.

Christine Walker is assistant professor of history at Yale-NUS College in Singapore.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781469658797
ISBN 10	1469658798
Title	Jamaica Ladies
Author	Christine Walker
Series	Published By The Omohundro Institute Of Early American History And Culture And The University Of North Carolina Press
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	The University of North Carolina Press
Year published	2020-06-30
Number of pages	336
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.