Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica by Sasha Turner (review)

Sasha Turner's fresh examination of slavery in Jamaica, Contested Bodies, centers on the experience of women and children from the rise of metropolitan antislavery activism in the 1780s to the Slave Emancipation Act of 1833. She uses a wide range of primary sources produced by abolitionists, doctors, and planters, all of whom commented on the health and fertility of childbearing enslaved women, and analyzes them with sensitive attention to enslaved perspectives. Turner's scholarship is a tour de force for Caribbean archival history, based on an exhaustive search for private correspondence, government records, and rare newspaper holdings in twelve libraries and archives in Jamaica, England, and the United States. Turner's especially deep digging in Jamaican repositories attests to her formative training at the University of the West Indies (under the renowned Verene Shepherd) and deep familiarity with underused local sources such as vestry minutes, parish registers, and estate papers. Her bibliography of archival sources will itself be of great interest to future researchers heading to Jamaica to look for on-the-ground evidence to complement well-trodden published or archival sources from Britain. Turner uses this wealth of evidence to argue not only that enslaved women's bodies were put to political use during the rise of abolitionism but also that those women understood English gender norms and deployed their own embodied experiences to contest imperial pursuits of profit over humanity.

Turner's monograph is structured around thematic issues related to gender, pregnancy, and childbearing, but it closely follows chronological shifts of imperial interest in enslaved women's bodies during the decades prior to emancipation. The first three chapters present an overview of the debates and examine abolitionists' tactics, particularly focusing on the issues that affected enslaved women's lives and bodies after the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade began circulating antislavery tracts denouncing slaveholders' treatment of enslaved women in the 1780s. Turner shows how abolitionist campaigns used revelations of widespread gendered violence and low rates of reproduction among enslaved women in the West Indies to garner moral support for reform.

Such facts were readily available in planters' correspondence and overseers' notes, but the planter class only felt the need to defend themselves when facing the subsequent parliamentary inquiries and passage of amelioration laws (including the abolition of the slave trade in 1807). In response to these laws, West Indian proprietors began to propose solutions to their labor needs, instructing their agents to purchase prepubescent girls who could soon become healthy "breeders" and providing incentives for enslaved women to bear children. Turner's in-depth demographic analysis of multiple sets of estate records from the 1760s to the 1810s allows for helpful charts and graphs, confirming that Jamaican estates shared structural problems that hindered planters efforts to promote childbearing. For example, prior to reforms on Golden Grove estate, "most women were field workers with 'reputed age' between thirty and seventy years and therefore had a much lower reproductive potential" (50). Turner also discovers in estate correspondence explicit discussion of how to promote reproduction. Turner avoids categorical statements regarding forced breeding but provides ample examples of planters' increasing attention to ways to increase pregnancies among enslaved women—whether encouraging pairings of supposedly "domestic," fertile Igbo women with "enterprising" (63), warlike Coromantees, or turning a blind eye to enslaved women's vulnerability to sexual assault. Although Turner does less in these first two chapters to envision what enslaved people thought of these cultural shifts in white society, she makes a powerful gesture to recent scholarship on trauma with her concluding frame: "Biological reproduction as a means of amelioration exploited enslaved women" (66).

Antislavery activists' moral outrage about the physical and sexual abuse of black women did not preclude deep racism, of course. Although they disagreed with planters about whether Africans were "innately inferior and incapable of reform or working without brute force" (42), abolitionists agreed that the enslaved lacked proper moral education and would...