While there have been studies of women's roles in African societies and of Atlantic history, the role of women in West and West Central Africa during the period of the Atlantic slave trade and its abolition remains relatively unexamined. This book brings together scholars from Africa, North and South America and Europe to show, for the first time, the ways in which African women participated in economic, social and political spaces in Atlantic coast societies. Focusing on diversity and change, and going beyond the study of wealthy merchant women, the contributors examine the role of petty traders and enslaved women in communities from Sierra Leone to Benguela. They analyse how women in Africa used the opportunities offered by relationships with European men, Christianity and Atlantic commerce to negotiate their social and economic positions; consider the limitations which early colonialism sought to impose on women and the strategies they employed to overcome them; the factors which fostered or restricted women's mobility, both spatially and socially; and women's economic power and its curtailment.
Author(s): Mariana Pinto Candido, Adam Jones
Series: Western Africa Series
Publisher: James Currey/Boydell & Brewer
Year: 2019
Language: English
Pages: 306
Tags: Women: Africa: History, Women: Africa: Social Conditions, Slavery: Africa: History, Women Slaves: Atlantic Ocean Region: History, Slavery, Women, Women Slaves, Women: Social Conditions, Africa, Atlantic Ocean Region, History
Frontcover......Page 1
Contents......Page 6
Acknowledgements......Page 9
List of Illustrations......Page 10
Contributors......Page 12
Introduction......Page 16
Part One: Property......Page 32
1
Adaptation in the Aftermath of Slavery
Women, Trade & Property in Sierra Leone, c. 1790–1812......Page 35
2
Women, Land & Power in the Lower Gambia River
Region......Page 53
3
Women & Food Production
Agriculture, Demography & Access to Land in Late
Eighteenth-Century Catumbela......Page 70
4
Women’s Material World in Nineteenth-Century
Benguela......Page 85
Part Two: Vulnerability......Page 102
5
Prostitution, Polyandry or Rape?
On the Ambiguity of European Sources for the West African
Coast, 1660–1860......Page 104
6
Parrying Palavers
Coastal Akan Women & the Search for Security in the
Eighteenth Century......Page 124
7
To be Female & Free
Mapping Mobility & Emancipation in Lagos, Badagry &
Abẹokuta 1853–1865......Page 146
8
Gendered Authority, Gendered Violence
Family, Household & Identity in the Life & Death of a Brazilian
Freed Woman in Lagos......Page 163
Part Three: Mobility......Page 184
9
From Child Slave to Madam Esperance
One Woman’s Career in the Anglo-African World
c. 1675–1707......Page 186
10
Writing the History of the Trans-African Woman
in the Revolutionary French Atlantic......Page 206
11
Spouses & Commercial Partners
Immigrant Men & Locally Born Women in Luanda
1831–1859......Page 232
12
Women, Family & Daily Life in Senegal’s Nineteenth-
Century Atlantic Towns......Page 248
Bibliography......Page 263
Index......Page 294
