Jamaica Ladies: Female Slaveholders and the Creation of Britain's Atlantic Empire

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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Academic

329 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 8, 2020

Reviews

[Abigail Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learned a lot about how women helped to maintain the establishment of slavery. The author does a deep dive into the wills left behind which is eye opening!

[Erin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was looking forward to reading this book, as I think it covers an important topic. It was well researched and thoroughly cited. I wish it had been written as carefully, with less editorializing (so many adverbs giving speculation about the women's attitudes and motives without academic backing!) and more attention to proper grammar and syntax (so many sentences ended with prepositions!). This could have been a very important work; instead it has the feel of the rushed final paper of a high school student with access to, but no understanding of, a "contemporary academic buzzwords" thesaurus.

[Chloe Northrop · Rating 5 out of 5]

Christine Walker presents a thoroughly researched monograph on female slave owners in Jamaica. By examining the ways in which women navigated the British Empire through slave owning in the first half of the eighteenth century, Walker contributes valuable case studies of women who benefited from enslavement in this colonial outpost. Her exhaustive archival work challenges previous notions concerning women in Jamaica.