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She “Never borrowed a shilling”:
Caribbean Slavery in the Colonial North
她“从未借过一便士”：北方殖民地的加勒比奴隶制
In 1732, Josiah Martin, a wealthy sugar planter from the island of Antigua, penned a furious letter to his former friend, Shippen Lawrence of New York, calling him a man of “vile and dishonest principles.” This paper begins with consideration of the event that sparked Martin’s outrage. It involved three women—Martin’s wife, Lawrence’s wife, and an enslaved woman named Abigail—and focused on who had the right to command Abigail’s labor. Mrs. Martin had agreed to hire Abigail out to Mrs. Lawrence as a servant. When the Martin family returned to Antigua after living in New York for a few years, they left Abigail behind. In an era when chattel slavery was legal throughout the British empire, there was nothing unusual about this arrangement. Yet, each colony passed its own laws related to marriage and slavery. When the agreement between the two women soured, questions about the relationship between gender, marital status, and slaveholding in different localities surfaced.
Christine Walker is an Associate Professor of history at the University of Hong Kong. She specializes in the history of colonialism, gender and slavery in the Atlantic World. Her first book, Jamaica Ladies: Female Slaveholders and the Creation of Britain’s Atlantic Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, June 2020), examines the crucial roles played by women of European and African descent in making Jamaica the wealthiest and the largest slaveholding colony in the Anglo-Atlantic world. Her new book project, “Imperial Kin,” studies families who gained control of local governance in the Caribbean, regional rule of North America, and eventually, the administration of the British empire.
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