The Politics of Reproduction

A number of seminal studies in the 1980s and 1990s looked at the demography of slave populations and, specifically, debates about the problem of the low fertility of Caribbean slave women in the age of abolition. With the threat of the ending of the British slave trade, the failure of Caribbean slave populations to increase naturally, in contrast with the American slave-owning states, emerged as a central preoccupation of slave owners. British politicians and abolitionists were also concerned about the impact this would have on the colonial economy if slave women were not encouraged to ‘breed’. Katherine Paugh’s study draws on a wide range of contemporary published, and archival, sources to expand upon existing research and claims to adopt a new approach in seeking ‘to trace the consequences of demographic failure for the political and economic history of the British West Indies and the Atlantic world during the age of abolition’ (p. 2). She approaches this in two ways; first, discussion of the debates in England relating to population, race, slavery and medical knowledge concerning fertility, childbirth and sexual diseases and, second, the interleaving of microhistories of three generations of a Barbadian family

Colonialism · Ethnology · Fertility · Genealogy · Political science · Politics · Population · Race (biology · Reproduction · Sociology · Australian History and Society · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Demography · Gender Studies · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law