In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Introduction Slaveowners in the early English colonies depended upon and exploited African women. They required women’s physical labors in order to reap the profits of the colonies and they required women’s symbolic value in order to make sense of racial slavery. Women were enslaved in large numbers, they performed critical hard labor, and they served an essential ideological function. Slaveowners appropriated their reproductive lives by claiming children as property, by rewriting centuries-old European laws of descent, and by defining a biologically driven perpetual racial slavery through the real and imaginary reproductive potential of women whose ‘‘blackness’’ was produced by and produced their enslavability. African women were to be found throughout the early Atlantic world, as forced and free laborers, as wives of traders and settlers, and as traders and travelers in their own right. A narrowly proscriptive religious doctrine and an ultimate turn toward settler societies based on family migration on the part of the English (late starters in the scramble for New World possessions ) tend to hide or obscure the extent to which black women figured in colonial settlements. Loudly voiced colonial complaints about too few (white) women on the one hand and the desirability of (black) male laborers on the other illustrate the problems of primary sources whose authors were concerned with social and political issues and were uninterested in revealing the lives on which so much depended. But ultimately the archive will give voice to not only the presence of these women but also the ways in which their lives explicate some of the connections and mobility that have come to drive historical studies of the early Atlantic. This book explores the ways in which enslaved women lived their lives in the crux of slaveowners’ vision of themselves as successful white men and thus shouldered burdens connected to but distinct from those borne by enslaved men. This book examines colonies in both the English West Indies and on the North American mainland. The connections between the two are myriad . Ties of family and commerce supported by a vibrant maritime presence meant that the exchange of goods and information brought settlers and 2 Introduction merchants in Jamaica and, say, Philadelphia into close proximity.1 These exchanges facilitated shared ideologies of race and racial slavery among those who were becoming slaveowners and thus provided the basis for a common set of experiences on the part of the enslaved. The tension between the unifying reality of racial slavery and the wide-ranging, divergent , and complicated experiences of labor that fell under the rubric of ‘‘slavery’’ has been a central force driving scholarship on forced labor in the Americas for more than forty years. Historians studying men and women caught in the crosscurrents of English colonial ambitions, have often understood geography as paramount. Ira Berlin and Philip Morgan are not alone in demanding that historians pay careful attention to the nuances of time and space when exploring the history of American slavery.2 Distinctive labor regimes, shaped in crucial ways by the particularities of different crops and the always-waning frontier, defined the lives of enslaved Africans in ways that do not always progress singularly and steadily toward racism. Power is negotiated; mutual respect, affection, and even intimacy across cultures was possible and, in the context of a shared environment, transformed ‘‘blacks’’ and ‘‘whites’’ into trading partners, shipmates, servants, allies, and lovers. Such relationships belied fixed racial categories even as those racial identities came firmly and irrevocably into being. It is precisely the sense of ‘‘what could have been’’ that has shaped some of the most important studies of early American slave societies.3 In other words, as scholarship about colonial encounters has revealed the contradictory expectations , situational ethics, and slowly evolving legal parameters of racial identity and racial slavery, it has become more than clear that those encounters embodied a wide range of possible outcomes and were shaped by the particularities of an evolving colonial landscape. This sense of possibility , however, must always be balanced by its existence inside a rubric in which ‘‘Negro’’ equals ‘‘Slave,’’ with all the false simplicity that such a formulation engenders. One of the projects of this book is to look at women’s lives across time and space, to grapple with the ways in which ideologies of race and gender under English colonialism contributed to a set of common experiences for enslaved women that interrupt the specificities of place. In many ways, this book is concerned with...

Share