Early Modern Women Writers and Slavery

Through receipt collections, cookbooks, conduct books, and household instruction, women were the principal drivers of the demand for foreign provisions in early modern England—and therefore the economic engine behind England’s colonial activity. But they were also the point of contact for domestic workers—many of whom, recent research into population diversity in early modern London suggests, were not of European descent. This further holds the possibility that attitudes towards African laborers were exported to, not imported from, the offshore colonial spaces of the West Indies and North America. It is a different orientation, one that calls to account the complicity of early modern Englishwomen of European descent in the production of race in the period. The colonial project required preparation: the politics, economics, and racial hierarchies that ultimately produced settler colonialism, chattel slavery, the forced migration of peoples, and the development of the British empire had to be in place prior to the enactment of colonial violence. The language and literatures of the pre- and early modern periods are crucial to this development, and ultimately this endeavor. We need to recognize women, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, among the chief authors of the rhetoric and cultural codes that rewrote Black people as chattel and consumable goods.