Linen Market, Dominica ca. 1780 by Agostino Brunias. Wikimedia Commons.
Racial difference was invoked to justify the forced transportation and enslavement of an estimated thirteen million African people via the Transatlantic slave trade. This enduring system not only involved the deployment of racist images regarding what it meant to be black, it also required reflection on what it meant to be white. It is within this context that the valorisation of whiteness went hand in hand with the devaluation of blackness, with gender playing a key role in both sides of the equation. Rational, white masculinity came to symbolise culture and civilisation, while moral virtue, sexual piety, and physical fairness came to define the parameters of white womanhood. This image of a ‘pure’ white womanhood stood in sharp contrast to the supposedly grotesque sexuality, physical ugliness and excessive fertility—a metaphorical trope for Africa itself—of “hot constitution’d” African women.
These enduring images of gender and race frequently made white women into a social and political problem. Colonial slavery was not exclusively perpetrated by men. European women were also deeply implicated within its structures, both ‘at home’ and ‘out there’ in the colonies. Wealthy women made profitable investments in the apparatus of slavery, financing shipbuilding and associated slave trade industries, including the insurance and banking houses that underwrote slavery. Many, of course, owned slaves themselves. Women of the poorer classes also found opportunities for economic and social advancement in the colonies. They farmed small plots of land, ran taverns and shops, and imported consumer goods and labourers for road and bridge building works. They also worked as domestics on plantations and as itinerant traders. Colonialism created opportunities for socioeconomic advance for white women, particularly the unmarried and widowed.
