This presentation reveals how abolitionists and slave-owners alike exploited black women’s reproductive labor to finance freedom. Taking a closer look at the oft-neglected history of post-emancipation intercolonial British Caribbean labor migration, this talk provides a careful reading of instances of kidnappings of newly freed children from Barbados to neighboring colonies between 1834 - 1880. Rather than liberatory, this talk demonstrates how the abolition of slavery intensified the commodification of women’s and girls’ labors. It recounts how competing understandings of black women’s reproduction shaped early political economic theory and the expansion of global capitalism in slavery’s aftermath. Throughout, it centers the stories of mothers’ individual and collective pursuits to reunite with their children.
Halle-Mackenzie Ashby is a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the History Department, working with the mentorship of Prof. Sharon Block. Dr. Ashby is a historian of Caribbean slavery and emancipation. Her research explores questions about gender, reproduction, carceral studies, and racial capitalism. Before joining the UCI history department as the President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, she earned her PhD from Johns Hopkins University. She is the former African American History Mellon Scholars Dissertation Fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia. Currently, she is working on a book manuscript that centers on reproduction and struggles over it as a way to examine the role of law and carceral punishment in shaping and dissolving slavery in the Early Modern and Modern Caribbean. In this work, she explores the link between Atlantic slavery’s matrilineal principle and the development of the post-emancipation Barbados carceral state.