Reproductive Labour, Atlantic Slavery, and the Development of Capitalism

As a result of past generations of scholarship, we know a good deal about the reproductive labour of enslaved people in Atlantic slave societies. This labour, providing for the physical and emotional needs of both adults and children, fell heavily on women, and was crucial in enabling the survival and expansion of slavery as a system. Despite this, new macro-level histories that seek to explain the large-scale contribution of slavery to the global economy and to the development of capitalism (eg Beckert 2014, Baptist 2014) have not incorporated the significance of reproductive labour into their analysis. This paper draws on literature from the fields of Marxist feminist economics, feminist labour history, and the historiography of slavery, in dialogue with primary sources from Caribbean slave societies, particularly from the late slavery period, when conflicts over childbearing and childrearing between enslaved women and managers, as well as between enslaved women and enslaved men became particularly intense. It argues that it is in these kinds of encounters that historians can seek to tell a big-picture story of the history of slavery’s relationship to capitalism that takes full account of the gendered organization of labour, reproduction, and social life in the Atlantic world.