Mariana P. Candido & Adam Jones 
African Women in the Atlantic World 
Property, Vulnerability & Mobility, 1660-1880

An innovative and valuable resource for understanding women’s roles in changing societies, this book brings together the history of Africa, the Atlantic and gender before the 20th century. It explores trade, slavery and migrationin the context of the Euro-African encounter.






HONORABLE MENTION FOR AFRICAN STUDIES REVIEW BEST AFRICA-FOCUSED ANTHOLOGY OR EDITED COLLECTION, 2019


While there have been studies of women’s roles in African societies and of Atlantic history, the role of women in Westand West Central Africa during the period of the Atlantic slave trade and its abolition remains relatively unexamined. This book brings together scholars from Africa, North and South America and Europe to show, for the first time, the ways in which African women participated in economic, social and political spaces in Atlantic coast societies. Focusing on diversity and change, and going beyond the study of wealthy merchant women, the contributors examine the role of petty traders and enslaved women in communities from Sierra Leone to Benguela. They analyse how women in Africa used the opportunities offered by relationships with European men, Christianity and Atlantic commerce to negotiate their social and economic positions; consider the limitations which early colonialism sought to impose on women and the strategies they employed to overcome them; the factors which fostered or restricted women’s mobility, both spatially and socially; and women’s economic power and its curtailment.


Mariana P. Candido is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame; Adam Jones recently retired as Professor of African History and Culture History at the University of Leipzig.


In association with The Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, College of Arts and Letters, University of Notre Dame

Table des matières

Introduction – Mariana P. Candido and Adam Jones

PROPERTY

Adaptation in the Aftermath of Slavery: Women, Trade and Property in Sierra Leone, c. 1790-1812 – Suzanne Schwarz

Women, Land and Power in the Lower Gambia River Region – Assan Sarr

Women and Food Production: Agriculture, Demography and Access to Land in Late Eighteenth-century Catumbela – Esteban A. Salas

Women’s Material World in Nineteenth-Century Benguela – Mariana P. Candido

VULNERABILITY

Prostitution, Polyandry or Rape? On the Ambiguity of European Sources for the West African Coast, 1660-1860 – Adam Jones

Parrying Palavers: Coastal Akan Women and the Search for Security in the Eighteenth Century – Natalie Everts

To be Female and Free: Mapping Mobility and Emancipation in Lagos, Badagry and Abeokuta 1853-1865 – Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi

Gendered Authority, Gendered Violence: Household and Identity in the Life and Death of a Brazilian Freed Woman in Lagos – Kristin Mann

MOBILITY

From Child Slave to Madam Esperance: One Woman’s Career in the Anglo-African World c. 1675-1707 – Colleen E Kriger

Writing the History of the Trans-African Woman in the Revolutionary French Atlantic – Lorelle Semley

Spouses and Commercial Partners: Immigrant Men and Locally Born Women in Luanda 1831-1859 – Vanessa S. Oliveira

Women, Family and Daily Life in Senegal’s Nineteenth-century Atlantic Towns – Hilary Jones