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Enterprising Women

Enterprising Women

Gender, Race, and Power in the Revolutionary Atlantic

by Cassandra Pybus and Kit Candlin
Hardback
Publication Date: 30/12/2014

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$71.50

In the Caribbean colony of Grenada in 1797, Dorothy Thomas signed the manumission documents for her elderly slave Betty. Thomas owned dozens of slaves and was well on her way to amassing the fortune that would make her the richest black resident in the nearby colony of Demerara. What made the transaction notable was that Betty was Dorothy Thomas's mother and that fifteen years earlier Dorothy had purchased her own freedom and that of her children. Although she was just one remove from bondage, Dorothy Thomas managed to become so rich and powerful that she was known as the Queen of Demerara.

Dorothy Thomas's story is but one of the remarkable acounts of pluck and courage recovered in Enterprising Women. As the microbiographies in this book reveal, free women of color in Britain's Caribbean colonies were not merely the dependent concubines of the white male elite, as is commonly assumed. In the capricious world of the slave colonies during the age of revolutions, some of them were able to rise to dizzying heights of success. These highly entrepreneurial women exercised remarkable mobility and developed extensive commercial and kinship connections in the metropolitan heart of empire while raising well-educated children who were able to penetrate deep into British life.

ISBN:
9780820344553
9780820344553
Category:
Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900
Format:
Hardback
Publication Date:
30-12-2014
Language:
English
Publisher:
University of Georgia Press
Country of origin:
United States
Dimensions (mm):
235.71x162.56x22.86mm
Weight:
0.52kg
Cassandra Pybus

Cassandra Pybus is an award-winning author and a distinguished historian. She is author of twelve books and has held research professorships at the University of Sydney, Georgetown University in Washington DC, the University of Texas and King's College London. She is descended from the colonist who received the largest free land grant on Truganini's traditional country of Bruny Island.

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