Natural rebels

Most accounts of enslaved life in the Americas focus on the United States, leaving the Caribbean comparatively unexamined. This study of enslaved women in Barbados, covering roughly the mid-1600s to the mid-1800s, helps fill that gap, approaching the subject through social, economic and labour history.

By combining official papers, period newspapers and private letters, the author shows that enslaved women were essential to Barbados's sugar plantations. Their worth lay in two capacities: they labored as intensively as men, and they produced the next generation of enslaved people. The book describes their everyday existence under severe exploitation, including brutal punishments, poor nutrition, illness, very high death rates, and the dread of being cast off once they could no longer work.

The author also maps the different roles and classifications within the enslaved population and the place of children in the plantation economy. Family arrangements and the complicated relationships that formed between people of different races receive attention as well.

The book's central argument is that these women never accepted their condition. It documents how they resisted, through both violent and nonviolent means, and fought for survival by whatever means were open to them.