Manumissions

The final chapter probes the ambivalent and varied intimate connections between free, formerly enslaved, and enslaved people from another angle, investigating women’s manumission practices. Manumission or legal freedom has typically been portrayed as a reward offered by white men to the enslaved women whom they maintained largely coercive sexual relationships with. Focusing on women’s manumission directives tells a different story. Whereas men preferred to manumit their biological children, female slaveholders largely freed other adult women whom they perceived to be intimate companions. Women also displayed an interest in manumitting enslaved children, whom they treated as surrogate kin. Women sought to blend these children into their own families, bestowing money, education, and enslaved people on them. A notable portion of female enslavers bestowed money, property, and slaves on the people whom they manumitted. Their actions had multivalent consequences. On the one hand, women who manumitted captives aggregated the community of free people of African descent on the island. On the other, they used slaveholding to co-opt freed people into Jamaica’s slaveholding system. In a place where liberty and slavery were mutually constitutive, enslaving others became a key means of securing and protecting one’s free status.

Introduction

The introduction uses a single document, the 1713 will of Elizabeth Keyhorne, a widowed free woman of African descent living in Kingston who was both a slaveholder and had children who were still enslaved, to illustrate the book’s key themes. In the first half of the eighteenth century, a remarkably diverse group of free and freed women of European, Euro-African, and African descent helped to make Jamaica the wealthiest and largest slaveholding colony in the British Empire. As slaveholders, female colonists augmented their wealth, status, and legal independence on the island. Yet, many, like Keyhorne, maintained complicated and ambiguous relationships with enslaved people.

Conclusion

The book concludes in the 1760s, the era when most of the scholarship on Jamaica begins. It uses a unique set of letters written by a Euro-African woman, Mary Rose, to her former paramour and patron, Rose Fuller, to frame a moment of violence and change in the colony. Between 1760 and 1761, enslaved people launched a massive uprising called Tacky’s Revolt on the island. Tacky’s Revolt challenged slaveholder hegemony and threatened British power in Jamaica. Rose occupied a liminal position in colonial society during this moment of crisis. She was a free woman of European and African descent of middling wealth who commanded enslaved people and worked as a rancher to earn additional income. Yet, her authority was fragile and dependent on Fuller’s support. Rose thus foregrounds the precarious position occupied by free and freed women with African ancestry at a moment when some local officials, together with imperial authorities, determined that white solidary was the solution to extinguishing slave insurgencies. The local government sought to limit the material wealth held by free people of Euro-African descent. Yet, this population continued to grow, adding to the diverse group of women who remained deeply invested in slaveholding.

Port Royal

Chapter One explores the gendered nature of the imperial policies that shaped early English settlement of Jamaica after the island’s seizure from Spain in 1655. Strategists in London and Jamaica envisioned women playing important roles in their capacities as wives and mothers on the island. They sought to attract families, not single men, to Jamaica. However, the colony’s entrepreneurial focus and its lax enforcement of sexual behavior thwarted metropolitan plans to establish well-ordered patriarchal households and enforce normative gender roles there. In the 1670s and 1680s, a motley group of wives, widows, indentured servants, and prisoners migrated to the island. These settlers seized on the economic opportunities on offer in Port Royal. Female inhabitants helped to turn Port Royal into the epicenter of licit and illicit trade in the Caribbean. Foreshadowing what was to come, this initial group of women also invested in Atlantic slavery. Soon after they settled on the island, women began acquiring slaves. In doing so, they ensured the participation of future generations of female islanders in slaveholding.

Nonmarital Intimacies

Chapter Five surveys the varied intimate and nonmarital relationships formed between free and freed people. A comprehensive survey of more than two thousand baptism records demonstrates that Jamaica had the highest illegitimacy rate in the British Empire. One in four of the children baptized on the island was born out of wedlock. This chapter explores the confluence of factors that led to the development of a sexual culture in Jamaica that afforded unmarried women more autonomy in their intimate lives. In contrast with other colonies in British North America, Jamaica adopted a remarkably lenient approach toward female sexuality. Women also commanded more authority and wealth, largely owing to their participation in slavery. In the absence of social censure and legal repercussions, a large number of free couples established families outside of marriage. Doing so protected women’s material assets and legal autonomy, which would otherwise be comprised by coverture—a set of laws that ceded a wife’s property to her husband. Instead, colonists used baptism rather than marriage to recognize, legitimize, and even legalize intimate relationships with free and enslaved partners.

Plantations

Chapter Three explores women’s roles in propelling the growth of Jamaica’s plantation economy. It uses a rare collection of letters authored by a female planter, Mary Elbridge, to explore the varied agricultural activities of women living in the island’s rural regions. This chapter complicates a narrative of plantation slavery that centers on sugar cultivation. Although some women did cultivate sugar, others worked as ranchers, grew pimento, ginger, cotton, and provisions. Regardless of the size of their agricultural ventures, women relied intensively on the labor of enslaved people. This chapter scrutinizes their exploitative, coercive, and violent treatment of captive Africans during the volatile era of the Maroon War. Female inhabitants in Spanish Town, the seat of the colonial government, were especially involved in the livestock industry, and many operated ranches on the outskirts of the town. Altogether, women planters and ranchers contributed to the growth of a symbiotic and incredibly profitable plantation economy.

Inheritance Bequests

Drawing on 1,200 colonial wills made between 1670 and 1760, Chapter Four explores the inheritance strategies devised by colonists to cope with Jamaica’s catastrophic mortality rates. Free families divided estates more equitably between male and female heirs and took measures to protect married women’s property, especially in the form of enslaved people. Loosening the gendered practices that governed marriage and inheritance enabled colonists to secure their property, and captive Africans in particular, from one generation to the next. These legal alterations influenced the lives of enslaved people, who were treated as moveable property. Thus, they became a form of gendered currency used by colonial families to support female kin. Cumulatively, colonists’ bequests transferred considerable wealth into women’s hands and deepened their involvement in slavery. Female heirs, in turn, used the fruits of inheritance to purchase more enslaved Africans, further tying the material wealth of colonial families to the Atlantic slave trade.

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.