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

The historiography of African slavery in the English-speaking Caribbean is exceptionally rich. Historians have mined slave trade and plantation records and travelers' accounts and diaries to produce a series of well-written and smartly conceived accounts of how sugar production in particular ebbed and flowed in the region. Sasha Turner's Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica joins this strong tradition, pushing its empirical and theoretical boundaries in much needed and challenging directions.

Turner's work is part of a vibrant and significant movement away from the theoretical and methodological emphases of post–World War II era scholarship. Influenced by Trinidadian historian Eric Williams's important Capitalism and Slavery, scholarship of the period debated the broadly material conditions of sugar production by slave labor: how slaves were procured and employed on Caribbean sugar plantations, relative levels of labor productivity, plantation organization and efficiency, threats of global competition to planters and their international backers. This research and analysis complemented the work of anthropologists and geographers who studied the exigencies of monoculture utilizing forced labor in various historical and national contexts and concomitant trends in the study of slave-based export commodity production in the United States.

Whatever its strengths in establishing material constraints and opportunities and drawing on interdisciplinary trends, the historiography of the late 1940s through the 1960s also reflected the contours of the data most readily available, that provided by the social classes in charge of this system of production. These records related largely to economic dimensions of plantation slavery, telling only part of the story of how plantation slavery in the English-speaking and other areas of the Caribbean functioned and shaped the lives of the cruelly exploited labor force. The 1970s brought a flurry of books and articles on plantation life and culture, mining new data sources and directing the attention of the scholarly community to the work and family lives of the slaves. We saw innovative research and analysis of slaves' health, food production and consumption, means of resistance and escape, and the various, often complex ways in which labor was divided and categorized on plantations, in the household and in other areas of production. Gendered divisions of labor and women's work became especially important themes in scholarship on the region.

Turner goes a step further in the analysis of women and gender in slavery, making slaves' bodies an orienting category in the discussion of how Jamaican slave plantations were organized. More critically, she demonstrates how various political and economic actors considered the slave body as the crucible in the evolution of Caribbean slavery, its endurance, and its demise, as slaves struggled in kind to control their labor and families. In her introduction, she pays homage to related work by women historians of Caribbean and US slavery, in particular that of Stephanie Camp, which brought women's physical and emotional experience and agency to the foreground in the analysis of these plantation systems.

Taking on the Jamaican case, Turner explains first that from the 1780s through the 1807 abolition of the slave trade, British abolitionists campaigned to force planters to adopt policies that would increase slaves' birthrates and the development of child-rearing practices meant to generate a stable work force and eventually lead to emancipation. This liberal attitude did not challenge contemporary European racist attitudes about African slaves as inferior and different in fundamental ways, but advocated for more humane treatment on religious and moral grounds.

Jamaica and other Caribbean sugar-producing islands rarely experienced the reproduction of slave populations, and the efforts of abolitionists to encourage births in fact yielded little in the way of positive results. Many plantation owners and managers resisted ameliorative efforts of any kind, wishing instead to wring every bit of labor out of the often largely male work force in order to maintain high levels of labor productivity. The Jamaican legislature was eventually pushed by the British government to adopt various reforms, including laws that...