The Center for the Study of Women and Society and the Society for the Study of Women in the Renaissance present “Jamaica Ladies: Female Slaveholders and the Creation Of Britain’s Atlantic Empire” by Christine Walker.

In this talk, Christine Walker discusses her new book, Jamaica Ladies: Female Slaveholders and the Creation of Britain’s Atlantic Empire. Women propped up the largest slave society in the British Empire. Jamaica Ladies 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 labour regime by acquiring enslaved men, women, and children to protect their own tenuous claims to status and independence.

Christine Walker is an Assistant Professor of history at Yale-NUS College. She specializes in the entangled histories of colonialism, gender and slavery in the Anglo-Atlantic World. Her new book, Jamaica Ladies: Female Slaveholders and the Creation of Britain’s Atlantic Empire, is the first comprehensive study of the women who perpetuated chattel slavery in the early modern era.

Co-sponsored with the Society for the Study of Women in the Renaissance (SSWR) and the CUNY Academy for Humanities and Sciences.

Please reach out to us at csws@gc.cuny.edu for questions or concerns.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.