The Politics of Reproduction: Race, Medicine, and Fertility in the Age of Abolition by Katherine Paugh (review)

Over the past half decade, the fields of slavery, gender, abolition, and the history of medicine have flourished, especially on the Caribbean world. New monographs by Marisa Fuentes, Rana Asali Hogarth, Natasha Lightfoot, and Sasha Turner have contributed to this renaissance in Caribbean slavery history, and Katherine Paugh’s first monograph, The Politics of Reproduction, is a welcome addition to this field of study.¹ Paugh’s work departs from the cohort of scholars I listed by focusing on the political and economic history of the British West Indies by examining the reproductive lives of several generations of a Barbadian family through its women members. She highlights the fragility of the archives and the reproductive dilemmas and choices enslaved and free women of color faced during the “Age of Abolition” in the Caribbean and reveals how slavery and capitalism were tied to the “political economy of reproduction” on various Caribbean plantations (p. 8). This monograph is a critically important book for understanding the role of health, fertility, and governance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the larger Caribbean world.

One of the biggest intellectual takeaways from Paugh’s exhaustively researched study is the destructive effect of abolition by well-intentioned men who also held firmly to antiblack beliefs about people of African descent. Through Paugh’s use of plantation records, parliamentary and governmental records, personal papers, and early medical texts, readers see how various actors and agencies transformed black people’s sexual relationships, fertility/infertility, pregnancies, and births into political debates about their morality, biological inferiority, spiritual natures, and economic worth and whether they were worthy of living outside of white people’s supervision and ownership. In one of her strongest chapters, the third one, titled “Conceiving Fertility in the Age of Abolition: Slavery, Sexuality, and the Politics of Medical Knowledge,” Paugh traces a sociopolitical genealogy that showed the deeply bound connections abolitionists had to the British Parliament and their linkages to the reigning medico-scientific knowledge about black people’s reproductive abilities. Writing about Afro-Caribbean women, colonial leaders pushed forth the ideas that black women “did not fully understand the processes of reproduction . . . and need the guidance of white, male medical authorities” (p. 106). Ultimately, these writings influenced government decisions that affected the larger world of Atlantic slavery for generations.

Divided into six chapters and an introduction and afterword, The Politics of Reproduction is wide ranging in its scope and breadth (although three of the chapters are based on articles she published earlier). This book is a dense read for a lay audience and is most certainly meant for academic readers. I believe it would be especially useful for graduate students taking race, gender, slavery, and history of medicine courses. The book’s chapters center on an enslaved woman, Dolly, and her children and grandchildren in Barbados and their often-tenuous relationships to slavery, freedom, labor, and interracial and intraracial sexual relationships. Paugh uncovers how Afro-Caribbean women’s roles in slavery during the Age of Abolition were fragile and depended heavily on the reproductive labor they provided for owners, colonial lords, the larger slave community, white families, their children, and the larger Atlantic slave world (the penultimate chapter does a good job of revealing the larger contexts of Afro-Caribbean reproductive policies on slavery across the transatlantic slave world). There are moments that I did want the author to delve a bit more deeply into the medical side of reproductive politics, for example, explaining in more detail why natural increase did not happen for female bondswomen made to work in sugar fields. I wanted to know more about how this kind of physical work affected one’s ability to maintain a pregnancy. Also, another quibble I have is Paugh’s reluctance to identify coercive sex between white men and black women as such. I appreciate her...