Reviewed by Jennifer L. Morgan | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.3

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Reviewed by Jennifer L. Morgan | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Women and Slavery in the French Antilles, 1635–1848. By Bernard Moitt. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Pp. xx, 217. $44.95 cloth; $19.95 paper.) Reviewed by Jennifer L. Morgan , Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
From the earliest years of colonial settlement, slaveowners throughout the Atlantic world relied upon the labor of African women. Enslaved women worked in cane fields and boiling-houses in far greater numbers than they served in slaveowners' homes and sacrificed their physical and reproductive health to the demands of backbreaking labor. They resisted slavery alongside enslaved men, participating in work slowdowns, marronnage, and rebellions. They were subjected to the sexual abuses of slaveowners who were, under French colonial policy, initially encouraged to turn to African women for sexual gratification. They were punished brutally and sometimes sadistically for their efforts to resist these multiple forms of oppression.	1
The turn to comparativism in the face of reconceptualized geographies—particularly the black Atlantic and the African Diaspora—has given rise to a range of studies of slavery in which the Caribbean shares center stage. But, as Bernard Moitt points out, as a rubric of comparative analysis "Caribbean" is most often a gloss for the British or English-speaking West Indies (frequently shorthand for Barbados and Jamaica), leaving the remainder of a vastly complicated geopolitical region woefully underexamined (p. xii). Moitt brings the framework of current slavery studies to bear on the French Caribbean in a way that is implicitly comparative, for, although his own work is confined to Martinique, Guadeloupe, French Guiana, and Saint Domingue, his study contributes to the crucial project of cross-cultural investigations of racial slavery and critiques the narrower deployment of "The Caribbean."	2
Moitt begins with a demographic overview in which he examines the transition from indentured servitude to slavery and establishes that, during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, women and men were enslaved in equal or near equal numbers throughout the French Antilles. He charts sex-balanced slaveowning patterns as evidence of slaveowners' use of women's labor, but he is equally concerned with the evident interest of French colonials in importing women as sexual partners and mothers of mixed-race children. It is evident that French interest in using enslaved women as sexual partners for male settlers was linked to their willing appropriation of those women's physical labors as well. Moitt is attentive to unraveling this tangle of forced labor and interracial sex that, he argues, underlies these early demographic patterns (pp. 14–15).	3
Relying on demographic studies published before 1990, Moitt's work is somewhat hampered by the absence of more recent work on the transatlantic slave trade. He struggles to reconcile his evidence of sex-balanced slaveholdings in the French Antilles with evidence that elsewhere in the slave trade men might have outnumbered women two to one. Moitt also falters in his assessment of planter preferences and the corresponding ability of slaveowners to shape the contours of the trade, ascribing perhaps greater agency to slaveowners than other current evidence about the internal dynamics of the supply and demand of enslaved Africans to the Americas would allow. An anecdote about an enslaved man who asked that his wife not be sold is used to "emphasiz[e] ... the recognition by both slave and slaveowner of the need for women slaves," a strange formulation indeed (p. 29). The strength of Moitt's work on the demography of the trade, however, lies in his discussion of creolization, in which he stresses that creolization balances the sexes, whether the slave trade cooperates or not, and which uses data on late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century plantations, making it quite clear that women are present in equal or majority numbers. Moitt rightly concludes that "balanced sex ratios simply meant that more women were available for hard labor" (p. 33).	. . .

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