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Race in the Atlantic World, 1700–1900
Enterprising Women: Gender, Race, and Power in the Revolutionary Atlantic
In the Caribbean colony of Grenada in 1797, Dorothy Thomas signed the manumission documents for her elderly slave Betty. Thomas owned dozens of slaves and was well on her way to amassing the fortune that would make her the richest black resident in the nearby colony of Demerara. What made the transaction notable was that Betty was Dorothy Thomas’s mother and that fifteen years earlier Dorothy had purchased her own freedom and that of her children. Although she was just one remove from bondage, Dorothy Thomas managed to become so rich and powerful that she was known as the Queen of Demerara.
Dorothy Thomas’s story is but one of the remarkable acounts of pluck and courage recovered in Enterprising Women. As the microbiographies in this book reveal, free women of color in Britain’s Caribbean colonies were not merely the dependent concubines of the white male elite, as is commonly assumed. In the capricious world of the slave colonies during the age of revolutions, some of them were able to rise to dizzying heights of success. These highly entrepreneurial women exercised remarkable mobility and developed extensive commercial and kinship connections in the metropolitan heart of empire while raising well-educated children who were able to penetrate deep into British life.
Dorothy Thomas’s story is but one of the remarkable acounts of pluck and courage recovered in Enterprising Women. As the microbiographies in this book reveal, free women of color in Britain’s Caribbean colonies were not merely the dependent concubines of the white male elite, as is commonly assumed. In the capricious world of the slave colonies during the age of revolutions, some of them were able to rise to dizzying heights of success. These highly entrepreneurial women exercised remarkable mobility and developed extensive commercial and kinship connections in the metropolitan heart of empire while raising well-educated children who were able to penetrate deep into British life.
- GenresHistory
256 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2015
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July 3, 2023
Along the way we were hugely surprised to find quite a few more entrepreneurial black women in the archives we consulted, and even more surprised to find that they were comparatively wealthy. This was so unexpected that we felt it was crucial to reconstruct these contradictory colonial lives to provide much- needed nuance to the historiography and to give greater texture to the story of the Caribbean slave colonies.
While my selfish motivation for reading this was descent from one of the women featured, Enterprising Women is an interesting book on the intersectionality of gender and race. Further, it gives agency to its actors, challenging negative portrayals in (semi)-popular literature.
The interaction of race and gender is the key issue here. In the twenty- first century we have seen a deepening awareness among scholars of the Anglo Atlantic world that race is historically contingent, politically inflected, and culturally malleable.
The book is a collection of micro-biographies of free coloured women in the Southern Caribbean, along with the efforts of several of their descendants to merge into British Imperial society with varying success. Not only do we deal with their acts, but also the direct discriminations and negative portrayals they faced.
The major limitation is with documentation. There are “plenty” of slave registers, wills and advertisements. Direct correspondence between parties is harder to find, particularly around the turn of the eighteenth century (it improves later). The book also struggles against portrayals of its subjects in novels written by ostensible eyewitnesses. There are a lot of suppositions about relationships between parties, a spinning of a narrative from very rough threads. However, I still consider it a commendable effort to give voice to those often ignored.
The consequences of slavery, while not ignored, are subsumed in the main theme of free coloured women having agency. That most of those women had children with multiple white fathers during their enslavement is left as an uncomfortable implication. However, they were more than concubines.
In this narrative, free women of color, who have long been an acknowledged presence in Caribbean colonies, are confined to a marginal role in a narrow sphere of activity: as the dependent concubines of the white male elite. Our research has yielded another narrative where white men certainly feature in the lives of free colored women, but in much more nuanced ways.
I enjoyed this, it’s a rich tapestry of life on the frontier told by those who had to work a bit harder to make it.
While my selfish motivation for reading this was descent from one of the women featured, Enterprising Women is an interesting book on the intersectionality of gender and race. Further, it gives agency to its actors, challenging negative portrayals in (semi)-popular literature.
The interaction of race and gender is the key issue here. In the twenty- first century we have seen a deepening awareness among scholars of the Anglo Atlantic world that race is historically contingent, politically inflected, and culturally malleable.
The book is a collection of micro-biographies of free coloured women in the Southern Caribbean, along with the efforts of several of their descendants to merge into British Imperial society with varying success. Not only do we deal with their acts, but also the direct discriminations and negative portrayals they faced.
The major limitation is with documentation. There are “plenty” of slave registers, wills and advertisements. Direct correspondence between parties is harder to find, particularly around the turn of the eighteenth century (it improves later). The book also struggles against portrayals of its subjects in novels written by ostensible eyewitnesses. There are a lot of suppositions about relationships between parties, a spinning of a narrative from very rough threads. However, I still consider it a commendable effort to give voice to those often ignored.
The consequences of slavery, while not ignored, are subsumed in the main theme of free coloured women having agency. That most of those women had children with multiple white fathers during their enslavement is left as an uncomfortable implication. However, they were more than concubines.
In this narrative, free women of color, who have long been an acknowledged presence in Caribbean colonies, are confined to a marginal role in a narrow sphere of activity: as the dependent concubines of the white male elite. Our research has yielded another narrative where white men certainly feature in the lives of free colored women, but in much more nuanced ways.
I enjoyed this, it’s a rich tapestry of life on the frontier told by those who had to work a bit harder to make it.
Displaying 1 of 1 review