Home-grown Slaves: Women, Reproduction, and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, Jamaica 1788-1807

Abstract

Once the British transatlantic slave trade came under abolitionists' scrutiny in 1788, West Indian slaveholders had to consider alternative methods of obtaining well-needed laborers. This article examines changes in enslaved women's working lives as planters sought to increase birth rates to replenish declining laboring populations. By focusing more on variances in work assignment and degrees of punishment rather than their absence, this article establishes that enslaved women in Jamaica experienced a considerable shift in their work responsibilities and their subjection to discipline as slaveholders sought to capitalize on their abilities to reproduce. Enslaved women's reproductive capabilities were pivotal for slavery and the plantation economy's survival once legal supplies from Africa were discontinued.

Entangled Archives

“…60 As it has been widely studied in the Caribbean, once the legal enslavement trade from Africa was discontinued, the "enslaved women's reproductive capabilities became pivotal for slavery and the plantation economy's survival." 61 Abildgaard was a professor at the Art Academy from around 1778 and the director from 1789-1791, and the professor of the renowned sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen. It is said that the bronze coin was cast by Pietro Leonardo Gianelli, who was also a member of the Academy and a friend of Thorvaldsen.…”

Cutting the Contact Zone: Race, Temporality and History in Peter Lotharius Oxholm’s Map of St. Croix (1799)

“…30 Following the Slave Trade Act of 1788 to regulate the number of slaves allowed on each vessel, planters in the British West Indies were spurred to reform labour practices and import a higher proportion of enslaved women. 31 In the United States planters were less reliant on the slave trade for the reproduction of their labour force, where better living conditions and different economic strategies underpinned enslavement. 32 Oxholm, however, argued that the impossibility of reproduction necessitated the continued slave trade.…”

Maternal struggles and the politics of childlessness under pronatalist Caribbean slavery

“…12 A new generation of historians, including Katherine Paugh, Sasha Turner, and Colleen Vasconcellos, is now working more specifically on questions directly related to the management and politics of reproduction, and to women's ability to contest planter policies. 13 This article seeks to connect these historiographies, which touch on similar themes but often seem to have little to do with one another. It aims to maintain the first wave of Caribbean women's history's attention to women's experience and oppression, while drawing both on recent feminist historiography's emphasis on the complexity of gendered power relations, and the detailed empirical focus of the demographic studies.…”