Joseph C. Miller Memorial Lecture by Christine Walker

In this talk, Christine Walker discusses her book, Jamaica Ladies: Female Slaveholders and the Creation of Britain’s Atlantic 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. 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.