Jamaica Ladies

<i>Jamaica Ladies</i> is the first systematic study of the free and freed women of European Euro-African and African descent who perpetuated chattel slavery and reaped its profits in the British Empire. Their actions helped transform Jamaica into the wealthiest slaveholding colony in the Anglo-Atlantic world. Starting in the 1670s a surprisingly large and diverse group of women helped secure English control of Jamaica and crucially aided its developing and expanding slave labor regime by acquiring enslaved men women and children to protect their own tenuous claims to status and independence.<br/><br/>Female colonists employed slaveholding as a means of advancing themselves socially and financially on the island. By owning others they wielded forms of legal social economic and cultural authority not available to them in Britain. In addition slaveholding allowed free women of African descent who were not far removed from slavery themselves to cultivate perform and cement their free status. Alongside their male counterparts women bought sold stole and punished the people they claimed as property and vociferously defended their rights to do so. As slavery’s beneficiaries these women worked to stabilize and propel this brutal labor regime from its inception.