Women's Lives and Labour On Radnor, a Jamaican Coffee Plantation, 1822-1826.*
Caribbean Quarterly › Vol. 54 Nbr. 4, December 2008
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Women's Lives and Labour On Radnor, a Jamaican Coffee Plantation, 1822-1826.*
Introduction
Over the course of the past two decades there has been an explosion in the historical and anthropological literature on slavery and slave life, both in the Caribbean and on the North American mainland. While much of the historiography of the British West Indies in general, and Jamaica in particular, has traditionally focused on the economic and social dynamics of sugar production, many scholars have recently turned their attention to the history of Jamaica's alternative agricultural industries, particularly livestock and coffee production.1 In recent years, scholars have begun to thoroughly investigate the history of plantations organized for the production of coffee in the Spanish, French and British Caribbean A simultaneous trend has been the development of a significant body historical literature on the lives of women working on plantations. It is my hope to add to these subsets of the important and growing body of literature on Caribbean slave life by examining the lives of women on one of the few well-documented coffee plantations of Jamaica, Radnor Estate, which was (and still is) situated in the Blue Mountains of eastern Jamaica, specifically addressing what life was like for women living and working as slaves on Radnor. The primary source of evidence for the material presented here is a well-preserved estate journal, which documents the day-to-day workings of the plantation from January of 1822 to March of 1826. Through the examination of this important document, I hope to suggest how enslaved women on this plantation were negotiating gender identities given the constraints of the oppressive mode of production under which they were compelled to operate.The nature of the historical record of Radnor Plantation allows for several vectors of analysis, each of which can be considered a forum through which gender identities were defined, neg...See the full content of this document
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