This panel presents the preliminary findings of three experienced scholars whose recent projects have led them independently to investigate the complex, contested, and changing roles of women within rapidly evolving colonial systems of power, property, and identity during the first half of the eighteenth century. Focusing on transatlantic Anglophone and Francophone communities, the three papers collectively draw on a contrasting array of archival sources, mobilizing either individual cases or aggregate data to support their claims. They are held together less by any uniform set of methodologies than by a single set of overlapping questions: Did colonial circumstances afford free women, whether “white,” “black,” or “of color,” a wider range of personal possibilities than they might have enjoyed in Europe at that time? To what extent were these possibilities conditioned not only by relative economic position, but also by affective, intimate, or obligatory ties of friendship or kinship that lay beyond the purview of formal legal systems or imperial ideologies? Were such possibilities altered, transformed, or curtailed by the rapid expansion of transatlantic enslavement and the concomitant racialization of colonial societies in the decades preceding the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War (1756-1764)? Examining such questions through research into three distinct colonies with contrasting degrees of socio-economic development at a single geopolitical juncture in time, the papers analytically transcend the socio-cultural, political, and legal barriers that separated early modern French and British empire. They consequently promise to provoke stimulating debates not only among their authors, but also between the panel and its audience.

Long obscured by a traditional historiographic focus on broad commercial trends and shifting geopolitical interests, the central role that women and kinship groups played in early modern European systems of colonial settlement and imperial exploitation has recently enjoyed renewed scholarly scrutiny. While this has led to a growing number of publications addressing intimacies within eighteenth-century European empires, much of the recent scholarship remains rooted in a pre-revolutionary era defined by the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War. If explicit connections between social change and political events in that period have been relatively easy to draw, it is in part because heighted post-war intrusion into colonial affairs by the French and British states generated a palpable increase in archival documentation. Far fewer sources survive from the first half of the eighteenth century, when state power was weaker, yet important social changes were also taking place during that period. As the Atlantic System consolidated itself amid the decades of peace that immediately followed the War of Spanish Succession (1701-1714), new tensions emerged between colonial and imperial interests, creating some of the impetus behind new constructions of “race.” Because women served as nodes of stability within the social networks that connected local communities with far-flung transatlantic groups of kin, they often found themselves at the heart of resulting conflicts. The three papers constituting this panel seek to illuminate these relatively obscure but significant historical developments through creative, careful, and rigorous readings of a limited number of surviving sources.