Paugh, Katherine (Author)
Oxford University Press
Physical Details: 304 pp.
Language: English
Many British politicians, planters, and doctors attempted to exploit the fertility of Afro-Caribbean women's bodies in order to ensure the economic success of the British Empire during the age of abolition. Abolitionist reformers hoped that a homegrown labor force would end the need for the Atlantic slave trade. By establishing the ubiquity of visions of fertility and subsequent economic growth during this time, The Politics of Reproduction sheds fresh light on the oft-debated question of whether abolitionism was understood by contemporaries as economically beneficial to the plantation colonies. At the same time, Katherine Paugh makes novel assertions about the importance of Britain's Caribbean colonies in the emergence of population as a political problem. The need to manipulate the labor market on Caribbean plantations led to the creation of new governmental strategies for managing sex and childbearing, such as centralized nurseries, discouragement of extended breastfeeding, and financial incentives for childbearing, that have become commonplace in our modern world. While assessing the politics of reproduction in the British Empire and its Caribbean colonies in relationship to major political events such as the Haitian Revolution, the study also focuses in on the island of Barbados. The remarkable story of an enslaved midwife and her family illustrates how plantation management policies designed to promote fertility affected Afro-Caribbean women during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Politics of Reproduction draws on a wide variety of sources, including debates in the British Parliament and the Barbados House of Assembly, the records of Barbadian plantations, tracts about plantation management published by doctors and plantation owners, and missionary records related to the island of Barbados.
...MoreReview Juanita De Barros (2018) Review of "Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica". American Historical Review (pp. 991-993).
Essay Review Sasha Turner (2018) Slavery and the Production, Circulation and Practice of Medicine. Social History of Medicine (pp. 870-876).
Review Deirdre Cooper Owens (2018) Review of "The Politics of Reproduction: Race, Medicine, and Fertility in the Age of Abolition". Bulletin of the History of Medicine (pp. 704-705).
Similar Citations
Article
Paugh, Katherine;
(2013)
The Politics of Childbearing in the British Caribbean and the Atlantic World during the Age of Abolition, 1776--1838
(/isis/citation/CBB001213845/)
Book
Newman, Simon P;
(2013)
A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic
(/isis/citation/CBB001422269/)
Book
Juanita De Barros;
(2014)
Reproducing the British Caribbean: Sex, Gender, and Population Politics After Slavery
(/isis/citation/CBB749520397/)
Article
Kate Ramsey;
(2021)
Powers of Imagination and Legal Regimes against “Obeah” in the Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century British Caribbean
(/isis/citation/CBB140553807/)
Thesis
Evans, J C;
Evans, C. J.;
(cited 2010)
Procreation, Pleasure and Provokers of Lust in Early Modern England, 1550--1780
(/isis/citation/CBB001567232/)
Article
John Stewart;
(2020)
Chemistry and Slavery in the Scottish Enlightenment
(/isis/citation/CBB766765131/)
Book
Matthew C. Reilly;
(2019)
Archaeology below the cliff : Race, class, and Redlegs in Barbadian sugar society
(/isis/citation/CBB163365604/)
Book
Hayden (Hayden R.) Smith;
(2020)
Carolina's golden fields: inland rice cultivation in the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1670-1860
(/isis/citation/CBB273348836/)
Book
Law, Robin;
Suzanne, Schwarz;
Silke, Strickrodt;
(2013)
Commercial Agriculture, the Slave Trade and Slavery in Atlantic Africa
(/isis/citation/CBB001422242/)
Book
David Richardson;
(2022)
Principles and Agents: the British slave trade and its abolition
(/isis/citation/CBB104965625/)
Book
Kathleen M. Brown;
(2023)
Undoing Slavery: Bodies, Race, and Rights in the Age of Abolition
(/isis/citation/CBB065925879/)
Book
Caitlin Rosenthal;
(2018)
Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management
(/isis/citation/CBB930905007/)
Article
Evans, Jennifer;
(2014)
Female Barrenness, Bodily Access and Aromatic Treatments in Seventeenth-Century England
(/isis/citation/CBB001202089/)
Article
Burnard, Trevor;
Follett, Richard;
(2012)
Caribbean Slavery, British Anti-Slavery, and the Cultural Politics of Venereal Disease
(/isis/citation/CBB001212674/)
Book
Lynn Hollen Lees;
(2018)
Planting Empire, Cultivating Subjects: British Malaya, 1786–1941
(/isis/citation/CBB005182251/)
Book
Holland, Jocelyn;
(2009)
German Romanticism and Science: The Procreative Poetics of Goethe, Novalis, and Ritter
(/isis/citation/CBB001221163/)
Thesis
Otremba, Eric;
(2012)
Enlightened Institutions: Science, Plantations, and Slavery in the English Atlantic, 1626--1700
(/isis/citation/CBB001562784/)
Book
Roberts, Dorothy;
(1997)
Killing the black body: Race, reproduction, and the meaning of liberty
(/isis/citation/CBB000080459/)
Book
Bruce A. Ragsdale;
(2021)
Washington at the plow : The founding farmer and the question of slavery
(/isis/citation/CBB486752354/)
Book
Brooke N. Newman;
(2018)
A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica
(/isis/citation/CBB220585340/)
Be the first to comment!