Jamaica Ladies offers a welcome corrective to the male-dominated accounts of the evolution of early Jamaica. Christine Walker demonstrates adroitly how, between the 1670s and 1760s, free and freed women of European, Euro-African, and African descent contributed to the development of “the wealthiest colony with the largest enslaved population in the Anglo-Atlantic world” (5). These women, she argues, were the “handmaidens of empire” (5), perpetuating, entrenching, and profiting from the system of enslavement on which the island's prosperity depended.

Underpinned by extensive archival research from across Britain, Jamaica, and the United States, Jamaica Ladies interrogates the complex interplay between gender, race, and power that underpinned the operation of Jamaican society in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Interweaving microhistories with broader qualitative and quantitative forms of analysis, Walker provides a vivid and nuanced portrait of the socioeconomic activities of free and freed women, highlighting the ways that early modern ideas about gender were variously, and even simultaneously, buttressed, manipulated, and ignored when metropolitan ideals were put into practice in a colonial context.

The first three chapters explore women's presence within three different colonial spaces: the maritime world of Port Royal, the urban metropolis of Kingston and the agricultural industrial complex of the plantation. These chapters are particularly strong. Using wills, inventories, court cases, and personal letters, Walker draws attention to the diverse range of economic activities undertaken by free and freed women. As traders, retailers, moneylenders, plantation managers, and plantation owners, these women played a central role within early modern Jamaican society, helping “to build the foundations of a colony that would become one of the most productive, and exploitative, agricultural zones in the world” (50). Walker does not shy away from highlighting the systematically coercive and brutal nature of female slaveholding. These women were active participants in the exploitation of other human beings; their gender did not make them any less violent than their male counterparts (this should not be a surprise, but to some it still seems to be). Indeed, enslaved people were, like livestock, furniture, and jewelry, classified as moveable goods, a form of property that was particularly important to (free) women. In a world in which women faced significant disadvantages, they used the possession of human property to cling onto social, material, and legal advantages unattainable to those they enslaved.

The following three chapters are broader in scope, examining inheritance practices, nonmarital relationships, and manumissions as they pertained to free and freed women. They explore how the gendered aspects of female slaveownership, particularly its intimate and small-scale nature, shaped the interconnected lives of both Jamaican slaveholders and those they enslaved. The Jamaican slave codes ensured that enslaved status could only be mapped onto the bodies of Black people, but Walker shows that “race-making was an uneven and . . . contested process” (252); the practices she explores served to both reinforce and undermine the racialized boundaries between slavery and freedom. It was the “quotidian acts” of everyday life—treating people as assets in a bequest to a daughter or manumitting a young enslaved girl but not her mother—rather than the overt displays of extreme brutality or even the slave codes themselves that, Walker argues, “entrenched slavery in the Anglo-Atlantic world while also creating loopholes for a select few to escape bondage” (289).

Jamaica Ladies is not without flaw. Walker's discussion of equitable trusts, for example, is a little simplistic. She suggests that trusts were “accessible to anyone who could get hold of a conveyancing manual” (175) but fails to acknowledge that this was not something available to many free and, perhaps particularly, freed women. Similarly, there is little discussion of what it meant to own property held in trust, the function of which was not solely to give married women access to property. At times Walker also overstates the distinction between the behavior of early modern women in Jamaica and metropolitan Britain. While acknowledging that Jamaican women were “powerful agents of slavery and colonialism” certainly does “call . . . into question the extent to which normative European gender ideologies were imported and adopted across the Atlantic” (9), it is important to recognize both that metropolitan women themselves negotiated and contested dominant gender norms and that they could also be “agents of slavery and colonialism” (9), including as slaveholders. Finally, while the footnotes are very comprehensive, the lack of bibliography is a little frustrating.

However, these are minor quibbles that certainly do not undermine Walker's wider argument or take away from the richness and significance of her work. In exploring the gendering of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Jamaica and the lives of those who perpetuated and profited from chattel slavery Jamaica Ladies demonstrates unequivocally that we cannot understand the development of colonial society and the system of enslavement on which it depended without thinking about the role that free and freed women played in that process. In doing so, Walker encourages the reader to question and complicate the uncritical recovery of women's histories. The women at the heart of Jamaica Ladies are those whose “lives were complicated, their motives diverse, and their morals ambiguous” (290). In placing her focus on women who “bought, sold, stole, and punished enslaved people and vociferously defended their rights to captives as property” (24) Walker highlights the importance of recognizing and interrogating the multiple, and unstable, axes of power that underpinned and shaped the diverse ways that early modern women across Britain and the Atlantic world thought, acted, and behaved.