Kingston
Chapter Two focuses on the urban and seafaring pursuits of a diverse group of women living in early eighteenth-century Kingston. Women of European, Euro-African, and African descent comprised a considerable portion of the city’s free population. They worked in a range of occupations. Some were wealthy merchants who participated in privateering ventures while others operated small-scale shops and taverns. The majority of Kingston’s women entrepreneurs were also enslavers. After gaining a monopoly on the slave trade with the Spanish Empire, the South Sea Company made Kingston its base. The city’s female inhabitants readily exploited their access to the burgeoning market in captive Africans. By the mid-eighteenth century, slaveholding was nearly ubiquitous among Kingston’s free and freed women, who treated enslaved people as crucial laborers and as valuable property.