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It is often thought that slaveholders only began to show an interest in female slaves' reproductive health after the British government banned the importation of Africans into its West Indian colonies in 1807. However, as Sasha Turner shows in this illuminating study, for almost thirty years before the slave trade ended, Jamaican slaveholders and doctors adjusted slave women's labor, discipline, and health care to increase birth rates and ensure that infants lived to become adult workers. Although slaves' interests in healthy pregnancies and babies aligned with those of their masters, enslaved mothers, healers, family, and community members distrusted their owners' medicine and benevolence. Turner contends that the social bonds and cultural practices created around reproductive health care and childbirth challenged the economic purposes slaveholders gave to birthing and raising children. Through powerful stories that place the reader on the ground in plantation-era Jamaica,Contested Bodiesreveals enslaved women's contrasting ideas about maternity and raising children, which put them at odds not only with their owners but sometimes with abolitionists and enslaved men. Turner argues that, as the source of new labor, these women created rituals, customs, and relationships around pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing that enabled them at times to dictate the nature and pace of their work as well as their value. Drawing on a wide range of sources-including plantation records, abolitionist treatises, legislative documents, slave narratives, runaway advertisements, proslavery literature, and planter correspondence-Contested Bodiesyields a fresh account of how the end of the slave trade changed the bodily experiences of those still enslaved in Jamaica.

Jamaica's criminalization of Obeah after Tacky's 1760 Revolt resulted in many accusations and prosecutions of alleged clients and practitioners by planters who intended to prevent similar future slave rebellions and eliminate rivals who competed for enslaved people's loyalty. Such efforts produced many slave laws and policing efforts, which legitimized and expanded slaveholders' dominance and power, but ironically, increased enslaved people's bargaining powers. Exploring how legal definitions of poison and Obeah changed over time and the political and social purposes poison and Obeah accusations served, reveals the complex ways in which the enslaver and enslaved struggled for dominance and survival within Jamaica's slave society. While poison and Obeah laws, accusations and prosecutions give us good insights into the complicated conflicts, tensions and negotiations between enslaver and enslaved and among members of slave communities, they yield an unfortunate legacy that defame Obeah as witchcraft and fraud and erroneously attribute poison as a key element. La criminalización del Obeah en Jamaica después de la Revolución de Tacky en 1760 resultó en numerosas acusaciones y persecuciones a los alegados clientes y practicantes por parte de dueños de plantaciones que deseaban evitar futuras rebeliones de esclavos y eliminar rivales que competían con ellos para obtener la lealtad de los esclavos. Estos esfuerzos resultaron en numerosas leyes de esclavos y prácticas policiales, que legitimizaron y expandieron la dominación y el poder de los dueños de esclavos, pero irónicamente, les otorgaron a los esclavos más poderes de negociación. El explorar cómo las definiciones legales de envenenamiento y el Obeah cambiaron a través del tiempo y los propósitos políticos y sociales de las acusaciones de envenenamiento y el Obeah, revela las complejas maneras en que los dueños de esclavos y los esclavos pelearon por la sobrevivencia y el dominio en la sociedad esclavista de Jamaica. Las leyes sobre envenenamiento y el Obeah, las acusaciones y persecuciones nos ofrecen una buena perspectiva sobre los complicados conflictos, las tensiones y negociaciones entre el dueño y sus esclavos y entre los miembros de las comunidades de esclavos, pero también han dejado un legado desafortunado que difama el Obeah como brujería y fraude y erróneamente atribuye el veneno como un elemento clave. Les crimes de Obeah en Jamaïque après la Révolte de Tacky en 1760 ont donné lieu à de nombreuses accusations et poursuites judiciaires de clients présumés et praticiens par les planteurs qui voulaient prévenir des futures révoltes d'esclaves et éliminer des rivaux qui faisaient la concurrence pour obtenir la loyauté des esclaves. Ces efforts ont abouti à de nombreuses lois sur l'esclavage et pratiques policières, qui ont légitimé et élargi la domination et le pouvoir des propriétaires d'esclaves, mais ironiquement ils ont augmenté les pouvoirs de négociation des esclaves. L'article explore comment les définitions légales de l'empoisonnement et Obeah ont changé au fil du temps et l'intention politique et sociale des accusations, il révèle les complexités de la lutte entre les propriétaires d'esclaves et les esclaves pour la survie et le contrôle de la société esclavagiste de la Jamaïque. Tandis que les lois sur l'empoisonnement et l'Obeah ainsi que les accusations et les persécutions suggèrent des perspectives intéressantes sur les conflits, les tensions et les négociations entre les propriétaires et les esclaves et les membres des communautés d'esclaves, elles ont laissé un goût amer d'Obeah vu comme symbole de sorcellerie et de fraude, et à tort projettent le poison comme un élément clé.

The recent body-centered analytical turn in slavery scholarship has yielded fresh insights into the centrality of the female body to slave resistance and slavery’s ideological foundations.1 By focusing on the womb, each of the books under review reveals the significance of the reproductive body to the entrenchment and destruction of slavery. Because women’s reproductive ability threatened the social order, elite men enacted regulations to preserve the status quo. Cowling’s argument, that women’s manipulation of the law and city officials helped to secure their children’s freedom, marks an important intervention in the literature that focuses on how women used sexual favors as pathways to freedom. By exploring the ways in which colonial elites used charity to bolster white supremacy, Franklin makes a key argument, which is overlooked in the literature—that poverty embodied a threat to white supremacy and slavery.3 Preventing their impoverishment and reliance on non-whites for aid reduced the threat white women’s wombs posed to racial purity. The work of historian Kathleen Brown, who proposes the concept “body work” as a framework to explore how bodies acquired meaning through domestic labor and care, would be especially helpful to make the argument that the drudge status mapped onto black female bodies was also made through domestic and intimate practices like wet nursing.4 Examining how black women’s maternal and reproductive labor commanded market value and were included in skill labor accounting further exposes as myth the notion of Southern households as private spaces, shielded from public, economic concerns.

Once the British transatlantic slave trade came under abolitionists' scrutiny in 1788, West Indian slaveholders had to consider alternative methods of obtaining well-needed laborers. This article examines changes in enslaved women's working lives as planters sought to increase birth rates to replenish declining laboring populations. By focusing more on variances in work assignment and degrees of punishment rather than their absence, this article establishes that enslaved women in Jamaica experienced a considerable shift in their work responsibilities and their subjection to discipline as slaveholders sought to capitalize on their abilities to reproduce. Enslaved women's reproductive capabilities were pivotal for slavery and the plantation economy's survival once legal supplies from Africa were discontinued.

For much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Jamaica, enslaved women gave birth in their homes, aided by midwives and female companions from their communities. Childbirth was one rare aspect of enslaved women’s lives over which they had relative autonomy and authority. Masters did not regulate the moment of childbearing for various reasons. Pre-1780s plantation agents bought replacement laborers supplied by the transatlantic slave trade, and thus managers did not depend on the birth of slave children to restock their labor force. Overworked, abused, and malnourished, enslaved women did not birth enough children to replace the many workers who

Children made up a small portion of Jamaica’s slave population between the late 1600s and the late 1700s. Because of children’s numerical minority, precarious existence, and ability to perform only a few tasks, they were marginal to the concerns of plantation owners and agents. Of the few children born to enslaved mothers, as we have seen, many succumbed to diseases in early infancy. Others died later in childhood because they were overworked, underfed, and brutally punished. It is unclear whether the neglect of enslaved children resulted from the availability of replacement workers via the transatlantic slave trade or whether the

Abolitionists used stories like Hetty’s to garner support for colonial reform and eventual emancipation. Hetty’s experience illustrated why West Indian slave populations failed to reproduce. Planters were unusually cruel in their treatment of enslaved women. According to abolitionists like James Ramsay, who previously resided in the colonies, masters commonly stripped women of their clothes, exposing their naked bodies as they whipped them. They endangered women’s lives and denied them modesty and decency. The special circumstances of pregnancy, abolitionists argued, did not mitigate planter cruelty. As Hetty’s case vividly demonstrated, expectant mothers were vulnerable to their masters’ caprice, cutting short their