(Atlantic World) Douglas Catterall, Jodi Campbell-Women in Port - Gendering Communities, Economies, and Social Networks in Atlantic Port Cities, 1500-1800-Brill (2012)

Women in Port
Atlantic World
Europe, Africa and the Americas, 15001830
Edited by
Benjamin Schmidt
University of Washington
and
Wim Klooster
Clark University
VOLUME 25
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/aw

Women in Port
Gendering Communities, Economies, and
Social Networks in Atlantic Port Cities,
15001800
Edited by
Douglas Catterall and Jodi Campbell
LEIDEN BOSTON
2012
Cover illustrations: Nicolaes Maes (16341693), The Account Keeper (1656), oil on canvas, 26 21 1/8 in.
(66 53.7 cm), Saint Louis Art Museum, Museum Purchase 72:1950. Agostino Brunias (17281796),
Market Day, Roseau, Dominica (ca. 1780), oil on canvas, 14 18 1/4 in. (35.6 46.4 cm), Yale Center
for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1981.25.77.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Women in Port : Gendering Communities, Economies, and Social Networks in Atlantic Port Cities,
15001800 / Edited by Douglas Catterall and Jodi Campbell.
pages cm. (Atlantic world : Europe, Africa and the Americas, 15001830, ISSN 1570-0542 ;
VOLUME 25)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-90-04-23317-1 (hardback : alk. paper) ISBN 978-90-04-23319-5 (e-book)
1. WomenAtlantic Ocean RegionHistory. 2. WomenAtlantic Ocean RegionSocial
conditions. I. Catterall, Douglas. II. Campbell, Jodi, 1968
HQ1818.85.W6596 2012
305.409163dc23
2012026681
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ISSN 1570-0542
ISBN 978 90 04 23317 1 (hardback)
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CONTENTS
List of Maps and Illustrations...................................................................... vii

Acknowledgements......................................................................................... xi
List of Contributors......................................................................................... xiii
Introduction: Mother Courage and Her Sisters: Womens Worlds

in the Premodern Atlantic....................................................................... 1
Douglas Catterall and Jodi Campbell
Section One: Metropolitan Frameworks................................................... 37
The Women of Early Modern Triana: Life, Death, and Survival

Strategies in Sevilles Maritime District.......................................... 41
Alexandra Parma Cook
Aberdeen and the Dutch Atlantic: Women and Woolens in the

Seventeenth Century............................................................................ 69
Gordon DesBrisay
Ports, Petticoats and Power? Women and Work in

Early-National Philadelphia................................................................ 103
Sheryllynne Haggerty
Between Lady and Slave: White Working Women in the

Eighteenth-Century Leeward Islands.............................................. 127
Natalie Zacek
Section Two: Traders and Travelers........................................................... 151
The Price of Assimilation: Spanish and Portuguese Women in

French Cities, 15001650...................................................................... 155
Gayle Brunelle
Capable Entrepreneurs: The Women Merchants and Traders of

New Netherland..................................................................................... 183
Kim Todt and Martha Dickinson Shattuck
vi contents
Can She be a woman? Gender and Contraband in the

Revolutionary Atlantic......................................................................... 215
Ernst Pijning
Lives On the Seas: Womens Trajectories in Port Cities of the

Portuguese Overseas Empire.............................................................. 251
Jnia Ferreira Furtado
Section Three: Interactions and Intermediaries..................................... 287
Wives, Brokers, and Laborers: Women at Cape Coast,

17501807.................................................................................................. 291
Ty M. Reese
Gendering the Black Atlantic: Womens Agency in Coastal

Trade Settlements in the Guinea Bissau Region.......................... 315
Philip J. Havik
Housekeepers, Merchants, Rentires: Free Women of Color in

the Port Cities of Colonial Saint-Domingue, 17501790............. 357
Dominique Rogers and Stewart King
Conclusion: Women in the Port Cities of the Early Modern

Atlantic World: Retrospect and Prospect............................................ 399
Noble David Cook
Bibliography...................................................................................................... 409
Index.................................................................................................................... 427
LIST OF MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS
Map of the Atlantic world (courtesy of Tracy Ellen Smith)............ viiiix

The harbor district of Triana c. 1585, from a print by Ambrogio
Brambilla (fl. 15791599)................................................................................ 43

A Lady Writing, c. 1665, Johannes Vermeer (16321675). Image
courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.................. 192

Three women of Rio de Janeiro from prints by Carlos Julio
(17401811). Permission of the Fundao Biblioteca Nacional........... 256
Philip J. Havik
Map of West Africa (courtesy of Tracy Ellen Smith)............................ 320
Major Atlantic world ports and places discussed in this volume.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The women whose lives grace the pages of this volume, across an extraor-
dinary variety of circumstances and facing a wide range of challenges,
all evinced an uncompromising and enterprising spirit, adapting impres-
sively and sometimes quite successfully to often trying circumstances. In
like manner this volume is the product of an entrepreneurial endeavor.
It did not emerge from a conference; nor did it arise from a chance sug-
gestion from colleagues. Instead this project began as a fairly simple idea:
that it would be good to have an Atlantic history of women that covered
all regions of the Atlantic basin and crossed all of the major imperial and
many of the major cultural zones that it encompassed and touched on
women of varied status. We do not say that we have succeeded in this;
that is for others to judge. But we can say that this volume would not have
been possible without the company of equally venturesome souls willing
to take on this task. So we would like to thank those who volunteered for
this sojourn throughout the Atlantic worlds ports with apologies for not
having been able to offer better on-board accommodations.
To begin with, then, we would like to thank our stalwart contributors.
Each of them took a chance on a project that has taken many years to bear
fruit. They also put tremendous effort into the bargain, patiently fielding
our many queries during an often arduous editorial process. We would
also like to thank those who have assisted us with aspects of the edit-
ing and final production process: Dr. Kristen Burkholder (Oklahoma City
University), Dr. James Cane-Carrasco (University of Oklahoma), Dr. Leigh
Ann Wheeler (SUNY-Binghamton), Dr. Rachel D. Shaw for copyediting
and indexing, and Tracy Ellen Smith for her assistance with the maps. Of
course, a project like this cannot proceed without an adventurous press
and Brill Academic Publishers have been that. We would like to thank
Julian Deahl and Hendrik van Leusen for encouraging this project when it
was little more than an idea and for helping us to move the project to its
current home in Brills Atlantic World series. Since becoming part of this
series in 2010, Women in Port has benefited particularly from the advice
and support of the academic editors of that series, Dr. Willem Klooster of
Clark University and Dr. Benjamin Schmidt of the University of Washing-
ton, who managed the peer review process in a fashion that has ensured
that Women in Port would reach its potential.
xii acknowledgements
In the final stages of the project, we have been fortunate in having

sympathetic editors at Brill, the Senior Acquisitions Editor for History &
Sociology Marti Huetink and the Assistant Editor for History & Sociol-
ogy Rosanna Woensdregt. We would like to thank them for both editorial
and financial support for the volume. Acquiring images for the volume
would have been substantially more trying without the support of the
Saint Louis Museum of Art, which waived most of the costs to use Nicolaes
Maess The Account Keeper, as well as the efforts of the National Gallery of
Art, the Fundao Biblioteca Nacional, and the Yale Center for British Art
to digitize substantial portions of their holdings for scholarly use. Finally,
we have also benefited from substantial grants from the Department of
History & Geography of Texas Christian University and the Academic
Research Support Center of Cameron University that have helped defray
the costs of copyediting, indexing, maps, and images for Women in Port.
We naturally hope that Women in Port finds its audience, and if it does
it will have been due in no small part to all whom we have thanked. But
in closing we would like to thank our spouses Dr. Kristen Burkholder and
Dr. Juan Carlos Sola-Corbacho. In ways great and small they have lived
with this project and we offer them both our thanks for their good humor
and loving support.
Doug Catterall and Jodi Campbell

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
Gayle Brunelle (Ph.D. Emory University) is a professor of history special-

izing in early modern and modern French history, and the history of the
Atlantic world, at California State University, Fullerton. Her first book was
The New World Merchants of Rouen, 15591630 (Sixteenth Century Journal
Publishers/Truman State University Press, 1991). Her most recent books
are Murder in the Mtro: Laetitia Toureaux and the Cagoule in 1930s France,
co-authored with Annette Finley-Croswhite (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 2010) and Samuel de Champlain: The Founder of New
France. A Brief History with Documents (New York: Bedford/Saint Martins
Press, 2012). She is currently working on Tropical Chimeras: France in Gui-
ana, 16041676, which will be a monograph study of Frances efforts to
colonize the South American coast in the seventeenth century.
Jodi Campbell (Ph.D. University of Minnesota) is an associate professor

in the Department of History & Geography at Texas Christian Univer-
sity. With interests in early modern Spain and the Atlantic world, her
work centers on social relationships and cultural expectations as viewed
through such varied lenses as Spains Golden Age theater, the social and
cultural significance of food, and the intersections of politics and popu-
lar culture. Her publications in these areas include Monarchy, Political
Culture and Drama in Seventeenth-Century Madrid: Theater of Negotiation
(Ashgate Press, 2006) and a wide range of articles and book chapters in
Spanish and English. She is currently working on a book project on food
and social identity in early modern Spain.
Douglas Catterall (Ph.D. University of Minnesota) is an associate profes-

sor in the Department of History & Government at Cameron University.
A historian of early modern Europe, his work has focused particularly
on Scotland, the Dutch Republic, and Sweden and their ties to North-
ern and Central Europe and the Atlantic world. Within this contextual
frame he has explored religious coexistence, the cultural impact of migra-
tion, womens work and social position, the informal public sphere, and
community/state relations. He has published on these topics in Com-
munity without Borders: Scots Migrants and the Changing Face of Power
in the Dutch Republic, c. 16001700 (Brill Academic Publishers, 2002) and
xiv list of contributors
in a variety of articles and book chapters. He currently has two ongoing

projects, one on the eighteenth-century Scots diaspora and the other on
women entrepreneurs in North Sea ports.
Alexandra Parma Cook is an independent scholar interested in the social

history of early modern Spain, especially Seville, and its links to colonial
Latin America, particularly the Viceroyalty of Peru. She has worked in
numerous archives in Peru and Spain and has co-authored several books
with Noble David Cook, including Good Faith and Truthful Ignorance: A
Case of Transatlantic History (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991) and
most recently, The Plague Files: Crisis Management in Sixteenth-Century
Seville (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009). She is cur-
rently engaged in a full-scale study of Triana, Sevilles maritime district, at
the end of the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth century, based
primarily on the abundant and rich notarial records that exist for this
period.
Noble David Cook (Ph.D. University of Texas) is a professor of history at

Florida International University. His first book Demographic Collapse:
Indian Peru, 15201620 (Cambridge University Press, 1981) and his Born
to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 14921650 (Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1998) cover issues of demography and the multiple causes of
the Amerindian population catastrophe that came with the Columbian
exchange. People of the Volcano: Andean Counterpoint in the Colca Valley,
Peru (Duke University Press, 2007) with Alexandra Parma Cook is an eth-
nohistorical account of the impact of the outside world on an isolated
valley. He is currently working on the final volume of a trilogy touching
on the Colca Valleya study of the life of a creole Franciscan friar, who
before dying as bishop on the southern frontier of Chile, served in Potos,
Cuzco, Spain, and Italy as well as Florida.
Gordon DesBrisay (Ph.D. University of Saint Andrews) is Associate Dean

of Students and Associate Professor of History in the College of Arts and
Science at the University of Saskatchewan. His research centers on early
modern urban social and womens history, with a particular focus on sev-
enteenth-century Scotland. His publications include (with Karen Sander
Thompson) Crediting Wives: Married Women and Debt Litigation in the
Seventeenth Century, in Finding the Family in Medieval and Early Modern
Scotland, edited by Janay Nugent and Elizabeth Ewan (Aldershot: Ash-
gate, 2008); The Civill Warrs Did Overrun All: Aberdeen, 16301690, in
list of contributors xv
Aberdeen Before 1800: A New History, edited by E. Patricia Dennison, et al.

(East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2002); and City Limits: Female Philanthro-
pists and Wet Nurses in Seventeenth-Century Scottish Towns, Journal of
the Canadian Historical Association 8 (1998).
Jnia Ferreira Furtado (Ph.D. Universidade de So Paulo) is a professor of

modern history in the History Department of the Universidade Federal de
Minas Gerais. She works on the history of gender and slavery in colonial
Brazil on which she has written a number of books, articles, and book
chapters, including the critically acclaimed Chica da Silva: a Brazilian
Slave of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2009), the
Brazilian edition of which received an honorable mention for the Casa
de las Amricas Prize in 2004. Her current project, entitled The Journey
Home as Mission: A Freed Mulatto Priest, Cipriano Pires Sardinha, and
His Religious Mission to Dahomey (17951798), focuses on the trajecto-
ries of a male slaves mulato descendents.
Sheryllynne Haggerty (Ph.D. University of Liverpool) is a historian of

eighteenth-century merchants and the economy of the British Atlantic
world at the University of Nottingham. She is particularly interested in
the networks and lives of the men and women who made this world of
trade possible. She has published widely on these topics in edited collec-
tions and journals and is the author of The British-Atlantic Trading Com-
munity, 17601810: Men, Women, and the Distribution of Goods (Brill, 2006)
and the forthcoming Merely for Money? Business Culture in the British
Atlantic 17501815 (Liverpool University Press, 2012), a project that explores
the role of risk, trust, reputation, and obligation as they operated in
eighteenth-century British Atlantic mercantile networks.
Philip Havik (Ph.D. Universiteit Leiden) is currently Researcher at the Insti-

tute for Tropical Research (IICT) in Lisbon, Portugal. He also teaches at
the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities of the Universidade Nova
in Lisbon. His multidisciplinary research focuses on sub-Saharan Africa,
and West Africa in particular, and centers on the study ofstate forma-
tion, colonial administration,medicine, cultural brokerage, and female
entrepreneurship, with a special emphasis on the Guinea Bissau region.
His publications include The Kriston Traders, Planters and Go-Betweens:
The Kriston in Portuguese Guinea, Portuguese Studies Review, 19, nos. 1
& 2 (2011): 197226; Creole Societies in the Portuguese Colonial Empire, in
collaboration with Malyn Newitt (University of Bristol, Bristol, 2007); and
xvi list of contributors
Silences and Soundbytes: The Gendered Dynamics of Trade and Brokerage

in the Precolonial Guinea Bissau Region (Muenster/New Brunswick: LIT/
Transaction Publishers, 2004).
Stewart Royce King (Ph.D. Johns Hopkins University) is currently a profes-

sor of history at the Mount Angel Seminary and is also a Visiting Associate
in the History Department at Johns Hopkins University. His principal area
of research is the role of free people of color in the French Caribbean,
and especially the role military service played in their lives. His book Blue
Coat or Powdered Wig: Free People of Color in Colonial Saint-Domingue
was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2001. His most recent
book Encyclopedia of Free Blacks and People of Color in the Americas: The
African-American Heritage of Freedom was published by Facts on File
in 2011.
Ernst Pijning (Ph.D. John Hopkins University) is a professor of history at

Minot State University in North Dakota. A specialist in Latin American
history, he teaches widely across this field as well as the fields of Afri-
can and Atlantic history. His research specialties are Brazil, cross-cultural
trade, and the southern Atlantic during the eighteenth century. His recent
publications, which include Idealism and Power: The Dutch West India
Company in the Brazil Trade (16301654), in Shaping the Stewart World,
ed. Alan McInnes and Arthur H. Williamson (Brill, 2006), have focused on
the role of contraband trade in the Atlantic world. He is presently com-
pleting a manuscript entitled Controlling Contraband: Economy, Men-
tality and Society in 18th-Century Rio de Janeiro, which he is currently
completing for publication with Louisiana State University Press.
Ty Reese (Ph.D. University of Toledo) is an associate professor of history

at the University of North Dakota where he teaches courses on Africa
and the Atlantic world. His current project explores the consequences
of interaction and trade upon the African community of Cape Coast and
the British garrison of Cape Coast Castle during the second half of the
eighteenth century. He recently published, with Vincent Carretta, The
Life and Letters of Philip Quaque: The First African Anglican Missionary
(University of Georgia Press, 2010), and has published articles in the
William and Mary Quarterly, Slavery and Abolition, Itinerario, the Journal
of Religion in Africa, and in several edited collections.
Dominique Rogers (Ph.D. Universit de Bordeaux III) is Matre de con-

frences at the Universit des Antilles et de la Guyane and a member of
list of contributors xvii
the history department there where she teaches modern European history
and the history of the Americas. Since March 2008 she has also headed
up the Law, Regulations, Practices and Social Connections strand of the
European Commission-funded Project EURESCL-The Slave Trade, Slavery,
and Their Abolition and Legacies in European Histories and Identities.
Her recent publications in English include On the Road to Citizenship:
The Complex Route to Integration of the Free People of Color in the Two
Capitals of Saint-Domingue, in The World of the Haitian Revolution, eds.
D. Geggus and N. Fiering (Indiana University Press, 2009), 6578. She is
currently working on Actes de colloque sur les affranchis et descendants
daffranchis du monde atlantique; anthologie sur les femmes de la grande
Carabe au XVIIIe sicle.
Martha Shattuck (Ph.D. Boston University) is the former editor and

researcher for the New Netherland Project, now the New Netherland
Research Center. She specializes in New Netherlands history, particularly
relating to women, Indians, and the use of the law in the Dutch colony.
She is the author of several articles on New Netherland including Dutch
Jurisprudence in New Netherland and New York in Four Centuries of
Dutch-American Relations (State University of New York Press, 2009) and
...a well regulated country where justice and government prevails in
Opening Statements: Law, Jurisprudence, and Legacy of Dutch New York
(State University of New York Press, 2012). As well, she edited and wrote
the introduction for Explorers, Fortunes and Love Letters: A Window on
New Netherland (New Netherland Institute and Mount Ida Press, 2009).
Most recently, she edited and annotated the New Netherland Papers in
the Bontemantel Collection at the New York Public Library for on-line
publication. She is currently revising her dissertation for publication.
Kimberly Todt (Ph.D. expected Cornell University) is a Ph.D. candidate in

the Department of History at Cornell University and is completing her dis-
sertation on Dutch trading networks in early America. Her work in Dutch
archives was supported by the Manuscript Society, Het Scheepvaartmu-
seum Amsterdam, the American Association for Netherlandic Studies,
and Cornell University. The Larry Hackman Research Residency and the
Quinn-Library Fellowship supported her work in archives located in New
York. Her publications include Trading between New Netherland and
New England, 16241664 in Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary
Journal 9, no. 2 (2011): 34878. She has also presented her research on
various aspects of early American trade and commercial history at confer-
ences in North America and Europe.
xviii list of contributors
Natalie Zacek (Ph.D. Johns Hopkins University) is a Lecturer in American

History at the University of Manchesters Department of English and
American Studies. Her research and teaching interests include colonial
and antebellum America, the Caribbean, the Atlantic world, gender and
sexuality, race and slavery, urban history, and material culture. She is the
author of Settler Society in the English Leeward Islands, 16701776 (Cam-
bridge University Press, 2010), which won the Gladstone Prize of the Royal
Historical Society, and has published articles in, among other journals,
Slavery and Abolition, History Compass, the Journal of Peasant Studies and
Wadabagei. She is currently at work on two projects: a cultural history
of horse-racing in nineteenth-century America, and a multi-generational
study of the Antiguan planter Samuel Martin and his family across the
Atlantic world and the British Empire.
INTRODUCTION
MOTHER COURAGE AND HER SISTERS:

WOMENS WORLDS IN THE PREMODERN ATLANTIC
Douglas Catterall and Jodi Campbell1
I made a reckoning of my remaining fortune, for I had

managed to sew a substantial sum of gold pieces into
my brassiere, and determined it was enough. Only
honor or, rather, fear of ill repute, lay in my way; the
thought that I would have to make a huckster of a cap-
tains wife. But when I remembered that at that point
I was a captains wife no more, and would very likely
never be one again, I saw that the die was cast, and
I immediately began to tap wine and beer for double
money after my manner, and to gouge and to haggle
the more sharply...2
Gender as a Transformative Category in Atlantic World History

and Historiography
With her landlocked life, Hans Jakob Christoffels von Grimmelshausens

fictional Courage may seem incongruous in a work on gender in Atlan-
tic world ports, c. 15001800. The above lines uttered by Courage as she
contemplates becoming a small-scale merchant in a Thirty Years War
military camp, however, suggest otherwise. Courage offers Atlantic-
world scholars a surprisingly familiar profile. By switching identities and
roles when opportunities arise or circumstances demand, she succeeds
despite her marginal status. The military encampments that she inhabits
shared with Atlantic ports a skewed demographic profile resulting from
1This introduction, which relies on the work, advice, and efforts of scholars active
across the Atlantic basin, is truly the product of an Atlantic endeavor. We would especially
like to thank the anonymous reviewer for Brill as well as Dr. Kristen Burkholder, Dr. James
Cane-Carrasco, and Dr. Leigh Ann Wheeler for particular input, although the mistakes that
remain after their thoughtful critiques remain wholly our own.
2Hans Jacob Christoffels von Grimmelshausen, Simplicianische Schriften, vol. 3, ed.
Heinrich Kurz (Leipzig: Verlagsbuchhandlung von J. J. Weber, 1864), 7475.
2 douglas catterall and jodi campbell
commercially-acquired migrant labor. Ports and camps also counterbal-

anced this entrepreneurial element with corporate structures (e.g. of
military units). Finally, just as Atlantic port worlds depended on the cir-
culation of people and things in the midst of moral ambiguity to survive,
so did the Thirty Years Wars mobile military communities. In laying bare
the role of gender in new and fluid types of early modern community,
Grimmelshausens antihero points to a useful trajectory of inquiry that
this collection of essays pursues: hybridity of identity, of social relations
and, most centrally, of gender. This hybridity, the result of the merging,
interlinking, and interpretation of widely divergent social and cultural
practices as well as perceived physical characteristics, had a fundamental
impact on the entire Atlantic basin.3
Recent debates and surveys of the field underscore that Atlantic history
has come of age. Yet, despite its practitioners growing confidence and the
professional recognition their endeavors have received, doubts remain as
to what Atlantic history might be. Notions of imperial space, often defined
by national narratives, compete with ideas of the Atlantic world as an open,
international commercial zone, and both approaches alternate between
confronting and yielding to the histories of subaltern groups in diaspora
or creative opposition to outsider incursions in an oceanic space whose
impact on human activity is itself hard to define. Even the periodization as
well as the relevance and agenda that might be animating a unity known
as the Atlantic world has come into question.4 Nevertheless, if uncertainty
3Bernard A. Cook, ed., Women and War: A Historical Encyclopedia from Antiquity to Pre-
sent (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, Inc., 2006), 58687; P. W. Singer, The Ultimate Military
Entrepreneur, Military History Quarterly (Spring 2003): 615; von Grimmelshausen, Sim-
plicianische Schriften, passim. See below for relevant literature on the aspects of Atlantic
ports covered here.
4See, for example, the following recent discussions: the contributions from Donna
Gabaccia, Verene A. Shepherd, and William OReilly in Atlantic Studies 1, no. 1 (April 2004):
127; 4984; the recent exchange on Atlantic history in American Historical Review 112, no.
5 (December 2007): 141531 between Eliga H. Gould and Jorge Caizares-Esguerra; David
Armitage, Three Concepts of Atlantic History, in The British Atlantic World, 15001800, eds.
David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave/
Macmillan, 2002), 1127; Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2005) and the responses to it by Trevor Burnard, Peter A.
Coclanis, Alison Games, John J. McCusker, J. G. A. Pocock, and Ian K. Steele; Peter A. Cocla-
nis, Atlantic World or Atlantic/World? The William and Mary Quarterly 63, no. 4 (October
2006): 72542; Nicholas Canny, Atlantic History: What and Why? European Review 9 (2001):
399411; W. Jeffrey Bolster, Putting the Ocean in Atlantic History: Maritime Communities
and Marine Ecology in the Northwest Atlantic, American Historical Review 113, no. 1 (Febru-
ary 2008): 1947; Franois Furstenberg, The Significance of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier
in Atlantic History, American Historical Review 113, no. 3 (June 2008): 64777; Alison Games,
introduction 3
remains as to what the word Atlantic stands for, this volume of essays on
womens lives in Atlantic ports demonstrates that a destabilizing hybrid-
ization constituted one of its guiding principles.5 If in Africa, the Americas,
and even Europe, biologically and culturally driven exogamy6 and the rise
of mixed-lineage groups comprised one of these hybridizing forces, and
the inherently unstable reality of state-building and economies rooted in
enslavement another, then gender acted as a third and perhaps the most
Atlantic-wide of them all.7 The authors in Women in Port demonstrate this
Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities, American Historical Review 111,
no. 3 (June 2006): 74157; Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Atlantic History: A Criti-
cal Appraisal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
5That scholars have had trouble incorporating this reality into their scholarship, however,
is illustrated by James Sweets recent discussion of hybrid identities in the African diaspora
and by Andrew Fisher and Matthew OHaras reflections on the challenges of incorporating
them systematically in research on colonial Latin America: James Sweet, Mistaken Identi-
ties? Olaudah Equiano, Domingos lvares, and the Methodological Challenges of Studying
the African Diaspora, American Historical Review 114, no. 2 (April 2009): 283; Andrew B.
Fisher and Matthew D. OHara, Introduction: Racial Identities and Their Interpreters in
Colonial Latin America, in Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America,
eds. Andrew B. Fisher and David OHara (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 15.
6This is an adaptation of the concept of racial exogamy as discussed in Jennifer M.
Spear, Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2009), 1416. In line with the work of Jennifer Spear (and particularly
the discussion just referenced in this note) and other recent historical work on Atlantic
contexts, in this volume we avoid the use of racialized labels as neutral terms of analysis.
Words such as mestizo and mulato will appear without quotation marks only where it
is clear that they apply to specific individuals or groups labeled in this way in the docu-
mentary record and thus form part of the context under examination. In these instances
we assume that the terminology in question constituted an important dimension of a par-
ticular cultural environment that one cannot fully comprehend without seeing core con-
cepts in their original form. Apart from this explanatory note, ethnonyms set in italics will
appear without quotation marks and when they appear in this form they connote a use
specifically tied to the documentary record. By contrast, where such loaded ethnonyms
appear as part of any analysis they will always appear in quotation marks without italics.
In addition, where possible, the volume will generally use combinations of region-specific
ethnicity descriptors such as Afro-Portuguese or Eurafrican, or the terms mixed lineage or
mixed ancestry when discussing multiple such groups collectively; in keeping with current
scholarly convention, the descriptor free colored is treated as a collective ethnonym.
7The following suggest the range of current work on so-called racial mixing, mixed-
lineage groups, and related processes of cultural mixing: Herman L. Bennett, Africans in
Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 15701640 (Bloom-
ington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003); the introduction and the contributions of Jer-
emy Mumford, Jane E. Mangan, David Tavrez, Cynthia Radding, Mariana L. R. Dantas,
Ann Twinam, Mara Elena Diz to Imperial Subjects, 1165, 197224; the contributions of
Franklin W. Knight, John D. Garrigus, Rebecca Goetz, Trevor Burnard, Sidney Chaloub,
Rebecca J. Scott, and Jean M. Hbrard to Assumed Identities: The Meanings of Race in the
Atlantic World, eds. John D. Garrigus and Christopher Morris (College Station, TX: TAMU
Press, 2010); Serge Gruzinski, The Mestizo Mind: The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization
and Globalization, trans. Deke Dusinberre (London: Routledge, 2002); Spear, Race, Sex,
chiefly by reconstructing womens social, cultural, and economic position

in a variety of Atlantic ports, though mens lives lurk in the background
(and sometimes move to the foreground) as well. As recent research on
gender has shown, the social declensions and inflections through which
men and women conveyed gendered realities compelled them to live
out their lives through a give and take as inescapable as it was shared.8
This did not eliminate differences in peoples positions. Rather, it allowed
for some degree of experiential commonality in community, family, and
other local worlds.
As an embodied phenomenon, the lived experience of gender is of
necessity predominantly local. But in what ways did womens lives con-
nect in an Atlantic context in the early modern period? Unfortunately,
categories of seemingly unassailable reliability such as patriarchy unravel
in the face of the greater flexibility in gendered norms created by Atlantic
and regional dynamics. West Africa, for example, had a long tradition of
matriarchy that cast shadows on the way some of its many societies con-
structed a more patriarchal gender hierarchy after 1400.9 Similarly, early
and Social Order; the contributions of Trudy Eden, Martha L. Finch, Janet Moore Lind-
man, Joanne Pope Melish, Alice Nash, Nancy Shoemaker, and Jennifer M. Spear in A Cen-
tre of Wonders: The Body in Early America, eds. Janet Moore Lindman and Michelle Elise
Tarter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Peter Mark and Jos da Silva Horta,
The Forgotten Diaspora: Jewish Communities in West Africa and the Making of the Atlantic
World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), especially 52102, 159209; David
Northrup, Africas Discovery of Europe, 14501850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002),
6469; George Brooks, Eurafricans in Western Africa: Commerce, Social Status, Gender, and
Religious Observance from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Athens, OH: Ohio Uni-
versity Press, 2003). John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World,
2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) provides a useful introduction to
the instability of plantation societies and the West African states that supplied them. For
one of the still too few systematic explorations of genders impact on the entirety of the
Atlantic basin see Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, eds., Women and
Slavery, vols. I and II (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2007).
8For some recent discussion of this experiential dimension of gender see Ulinka
Rublack, Meanings of Gender in Early Modern Germany, in Gender in Early Modern
German History, ed. Ulinke Rublack (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 118;
Pamela Scully and Diana Paton, Introduction: Gender and Slave Emancipation in Com-
parative Dimension, in Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World, eds. Pamela
Scully and Diana Paton (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 13, 57; Mimi Sheller,
Acting as Free Men: Subaltern Masculinities and Citizenship in Post-Emancipation
Jamaica, in Gender and Slave Emancipation, 7998.
9Brooks, Eurafricans, 2122, 5152; Philip D. Curtin, Economic Change in Precolonial
Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1975), 3046; J. Vansina, based on a contribution by T. Obenga, The Kongo King-
dom and Its Neighbours, in The General History of Africa, vol. V, Africa from the Sixteenth
to the Eighteenth Century, ed. B. A. Ogot (Paris: UNESCO, 1992), 55153, 57072; Boubacar
introduction 5
modern Europe hardly represented a patriarchal monolith, as familiar as

this archetype has become in general academic discourse.10 Gender in the
post-Columbian era of contacts did not turn out to be as fixed or constant
as its patriarchs would have desired.11 Untroubled and uniform patriarchy
existed in early modern mens minds, as Lyndal Roper has shown, and on
the pages of their prescriptive texts, but they could not live out this reality
as they imagined it.12 In some ways the nineteenth-century Atlantic, with
its more powerful states and more fully articulated and broadly projected
market structures, middle class norms, and gender roles, proved more
uniformly patriarchal than its early modern counterpart.13
With purely prescriptive views of gender unreliable, one can seek the
Atlantic interconnections that conjoined womens local worlds by explor-
ing the Atlantic world as an unintentionally collective endeavor. In other
words, one can see the Atlantic as a hybrid of the individuals and com-
munities that enabled it and the local and extra-local worlds that their
actions connected, combined, and even merged. The Atlantic offered its
participants a mixture of imperfect knowledge, ties to adversaries and
allies, and rapidly circulating people, goods, and ideas, which meant fre-
quent changes in local contexts (especially in ports). These experiences
could embed in networks, institutions, and relationships, and create
knowledge and connections that not only circulated, but bound people
Barry, Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998), 2635; Barry, Senegambia from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century: Evolu-
tion of the Wolof, Sereer and Tukuloor, in The General History of Africa, 27981. Even
within strictly patriarchal cultures, gender dualism could allow women agency. Barbara
Frank, Gendered Ritual Dualism in a Patrilineal Society: Opposition and Complementar-
ity in Kulere Fertility Cults, Africa 74, no. 2 (2004): 21740. But see James Lorand Matory,
Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian
Candombl (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 3637, which suggests that a
matriarchy viewed by many as African had quite different origins indeed.
10The work of Allyson Poska on peasant women in Galicia on one hand and of Thomas
Kuehn on guardianship in Renaissance Florence on the other gives a sense of the range
of European patriarchy: Allyson M. Poska, Women and Authority in Early Modern Spain:
The Peasants of Galicia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Thomas Kuehn, Law, Fam-
ily and Women: Toward a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1994), 21237. Moreover, to take just the European worlds addressed by
contributors to Women in Portthe Dutch Republic, France, Spain, and Scotlandit is quite
apparent that patriarchys face varied depending on where one was in Europe.
11See, for example, the contributions by Robert Blair St. George, Jennifer M. Spear,
Susan M. Stabile, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Michelle Lise Tarter, and Janet Moore Lind-
man in A Centre of Wonders, 1328, 95162, 17792.
12Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Mod-
ern Europe (London: Routledge, 2003), 3779, 10725.
13Scully and Paton, Introduction, 1019.
together.14 Below we break down this mobile, yet tangible hybridization

of Atlantic culture into lineal, prescriptive, and subaltern circulation, pro-
cesses that we see as having had particular influence on Atlantic construc-
tions of gender.15
Unavoidably, however, understanding gender as a hybridizing force in
the Atlantic also requires that historians attend to how individuals who
did not necessarily have a concrete plan nevertheless constructed dura-
ble, locally-bound notions of gender. To contextualize local experiences,
contributors to Women in Port employ a microhistorical perspective in
exploring the gender-mediated interplay between ports as social and eco-
nomic spaces and ports as communities of mobile people and mutable
social orders in which women gained and maintained unique roles. The
port community, quintessentially Atlantic in its shameless recombination
of denizens, customs, and relationships, provides their common analytical
framework. The concerns of states, empires, and, to a degree, ambitious
14In this sense our project seeks, to conjure with the words of Philip D. Morgan
and Jack P. Greene, to explore the history of the Atlantic through gender by weav-
ing together a variety of histories within the Atlantic basin, which themselves often
attempt to combine these perspectives. We also see this work as taking advantage of
more recent, tangible insights into the interconnectedness of the Atlantic as articu-
lated by historians such as David Eltis. For these ideas see Jack P. Greene and Philip
D. Morgan, Introduction: The Present State of Atlantic History, in Atlantic History,
8, 10. An example of the approach we propose as well as the kind of lived reality it
attempts to recover is the case of Francisco Noguerol de Ulloa, who had great difficulties
managing his local identities of successful Chilean conquistador and metropolitan Spanish
gentleman: Alexandra Parma Cook and Noble David Cook, Good Faith and Truthful Igno-
rance: A Case of Transatlantic Bigamy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991). Here,
building on the ideas of actor-network theory, we intentionally assume that networks have
lives of their own, and that the historians goal is to follow actors as they create the social
as opposed to presuming its existence and providing an explanation of it: Bruno Latour,
Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2005), 813, 2763.
15In anticipation of this more detailed discussion below it is worth mentioning that
the hybridity under discussion here shares much with the approach to identity traced by
Andrew Fletcher and Matthew OHara in that it emerged from processes in which the indi-
viduals and groups who appear in Women in Port participated, and that these processes
concerned their own ideas about themselves, others perceptions of them, and the active
work of groups and individuals to shape their relationships(s) to gender (for Fletcher and
OHaras discussion, which we gloss here, see Imperial Subjects, 1523). It is a hybridity
generated less from intention than from circumstance. Thus, we would juxtapose it with
more postmodern discussions of hybridity such as the recent discussion of Latin American
modernity in Nstor Garca Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving
Modernity, trans. Christopher L. Chappiari (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press, 2005).
introduction 7
mercantile networks, by contrast, remain in the background.16 Instead of

remaining within one imperial or national historiography, contributions
to this volume range widely across Atlantic historiographys regionally-
defined traditions, often with as little regard for geo-political concerns as
those whose lives they explore had. They include aspects of the British,
Dutch, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Scots experiences in Europe,
Africa, and the Americas as well as West African cultures from the Gulf of
Guinea to just north of Cape Verde.17
To the extent that an institutional focus shapes Women in Port, it is the
organizational impact of Atlantic ports. As much as colonial or metropoli-
tan authorities, ports influenced activities and interactions in the Atlantic
basin fundamentally.18 Taking impetus from the specific casts of charac-
ters assembled in and around their bounds, port communities thrived on
the Atlantics contrasts, creating clean-slate opportunities from which
women could benefit.19 Port denizens did not remain unaware of and cer-
tainly were not immune to imperial designs. They could intuit that Atlan-
tic commerce, identity formation and ethno-genesis, and the circulation
16We replace the methodological terms circum-Atlantic and trans-Atlantic as coined

by David Armitage with these somewhat cumbersome descriptions to address the specifics
of the contexts and historical actors involved more directly. See David Armitage, Three
Concepts of Atlantic History, in The British Atlantic World, 15001800, eds. David Armitage
and Michael Braddick (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2000), 1621.
17It is the goal of Women in Port, then, to tack across the historiographies of the Brit-
ish, Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and even indigenous Atlantics that have been
and remain a viable framework for research as evidenced in the contributions of Kenneth
Andrien, A. J. R. Russell-Wood, Trevor Burnard, Laurent Dubois, Benjamin Schmidt, Amy
Turner Bushnell, Philip D. Morgan, and Carla Rahn Phillips in Atlantic History, much as the
work of scholars such as James Sweet and Jennifer Spear does: James H. Sweet, Recreat-
ing Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 14411770 (Chapel
Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Spear, Race, Sex, and Social Order.
18See, for example, Peter Pope, Fish into Wine: The Newfoundland Plantation in the Sev-
enteenth Century (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Jaap Jacobs,
New Netherlands: A Dutch Colony in Seventeenth-Century America (Leiden: Brill, 2005);
Gayle Brunelle, The New World Merchants of Rouen, 15591630 (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth
Century Press, 1991); Michael Naylor Pearson, Port Cities and Intruders: The Swahili Coast,
India, and Portugal in the Early Modern Era (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press,
1998). Why ports have often not received attention as independent organizing forces
comes across nicely in the recent volume by Patrick OFlanagan on Iberian ports, in which
he notes that much of the historiography on ports has focused on their morphology, their
relationships to larger systems like states and empires, and their structural dimensions.
See Patrick OFlanagan, Port Cities of Atlantic Iberia, c. 15001900 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate
Publishing, 2008), 613, 3958.
19For this sense of clean-slate we borrow from Philip Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plan-
tation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998), 28.
of cultural practices around gender relied on contacts between their local

world and the world beyond.20 But they also saw that port communities
concentrated and realized the effects of such processes.
Women and gender, then, are central to a proper understanding of
Atlantic ports through their part in the translation of norms and practices
from beyond and the construction of working communities within the
Atlantics new and transforming maritime nodes. By the same token, ports
figured prominently in how women in early modern colonial, metropoli-
tan, and encounter contexts in the Atlantic basin interwove authority and
social place through gender.21 When considering the prospect of an early
modern port, we often perforce follow the painters gaze. The majestic
expanse of its roadstead or its main gateway, the three-sided expanse of
anchorages along the IJ bay flanked by the Wael and Nieuwe Wael in the
case of seventeenth-century Europes greatest entrept, Amsterdam, cap-
ture our attention. But more often than not a bridges hinge or a chains
links actually governed access to a ports harbor and interior waterways.
Dense interconnectedness generated at numerous points of articula-
tion defined all ports and particularly stamped ports in an intercultural
space such as the Atlantic basin. In different ways, the contributors to
Women in Port argue persuasively that women in early modern Atlantic
ports lived their lives more completely at and depended more fully on just
such points of articulation: between class, race, and authority; between
commerce, empire, and ethnicity; between household, community, and
corporate group. In these communities gender embodied difference in
a manner that naturalized complex, countervailing social forces that
often worked against women and whose generative impulses they did
20David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the
British Atlantic Community, 17351785 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Cook
and Cook, Good Faith and Truthful Ignorance; Sweet, Recreating Africa.
21Women married to or who provided credit or hospitality or both to sailors in the
Dutch Republic illustrate this quite comprehensively: Manon van der Heijden, Achterbli-
jvers: Rotterdamse vrouwen en de VOC, 16021750, in Manon van der Heijden and Paul van
de Laar, Rotterdammers en de VOC: Handelscompagnie, stad en burgers, 16001800 (Amster-
dam: Bert Bakker, 2002), 181212; Manon van der Heijden and Danielle van den Heuvel,
Sailors Families and the Urban Institutional Framework in Early Modern Holland, The
History of the Family: An International Quarterly 12, no. 4 (2007): 296314; Lotte van de
Pol, Het Amsterdams hoerdom: Prostitutie in de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw (Amster-
dam: Uitgeverij wereldbibliotheek bv, 1996), 13650; Marc van Alphen, The Female Side
of Dutch Shipping: Financial Bonds of Seamen Ashore in the 17th and 18th Century, in
Anglo-Dutch Mercantile Marine Relations, 17001850: Ten Papers, eds. J. R. Bruijn and W. F.
J. Mrzer (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum Nederlands Scheepvaartmuseum, 1991).
introduction 9
not govern.22 Like the hinge of a canal bridge, however, women could
determine the motion of these forces in ways that supported their own
agendas. Although women in maritime communities could not always act
independently, they often manipulated and controlled or predominated
numerically at the internal and external margins of their communities.
Consequently, their activities gave them an important, if not always domi-
nant, role in the more fungible segments of port populations, the articu-
lation points for stability in perennially chaotic communities. Women
who maintained their status as household heads/managers or their ties
to corporately organized employment in ports with prominent household
businesses enjoyed some potential for independence, something they lost
as globalized labor moved work and the derivation of rights and privileges
away from locally controlled contexts. Neither the rise of the modern state
nor tighter webs of market relations preordained this end, although they
did challenge and rearrange womens port worlds.23
Structuring Port Worlds:

Corporate Metropoles, Commercializing Antipodes
At its core, this narrative of womens agency has its origins in a famil-
iar compound question: whether and how women could translate their
acts into social and cultural transformations both in their own lives and
in the broader Atlantic communities in which they lived. Increasingly,
scholars of the early modern era have replied to the first question with an
emphatic yes. Answers to the second question, however, have remained
more elusive. Building on the substantial body of work on early modern
womens lives, the contributors to Women in Port have succeeded in sug-
gesting some useful frames within which one might address this latter
22The inheritance system of Breton as it operated in the Atlantic port of Nantes that
Julie Hardwick has explored provides a concrete example of the kinds of limitations under
which women operated. It is just these sorts of intricacies that contributors to Women
in Port address across a range of Atlantic contexts. See Julie Hardwick, The Practice of
Patriarchy: Gender and the Politics of Household Authority (University Park, PA: Penn State
Press, 1998), 10924, 12942.
23Here we build on the important comparative frameworks that Diana Paton and
Pamela Scully as well as Gwyn Campbell, Joseph Miller, and Suzanne Miers have recently
explored with respect to womens lives. It is our sense, however, that neither the state nor
market relations had effects as uniform and totalizing as their recently released projects on
womens lives suggest: Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, eds., Women
and Slavery, vol. I, Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the Medieval North Atlantic (Athens,
OH: Ohio University Press, 2007), xvixxiii, 2532; Scully and Paton, Introduction, 1019.
issue anew. Collectively, their work suggests that, for Atlantic ports, the
notion of unipolar, European metropoles may be less relevant. It appears
possible that both African and European port communities had metro-
politan influences on gender through their engagement with corporate
institutions and thinking, with the Americas colonial ports further trans-
forming these gender relations. Courage, the fictional anti-heroine whose
story opened this chapter, recognized and profited from legitimated hier-
archies with ease, and would have been at home in both worlds.
On the one hand, middling and elite women in West African and West-
ern European ports alike made use of corporate and kin-based networks
and institutions to establish businesses, secure family social position, and
obtain political power in ways that could and did adapt, shift, and even
project gender norms. Even women of more modest background could
do this. On the other hand, poorer women in disadvantageous positions
still tapped into protections afforded them by the structural limitations
of authority in early modern African and European ports that corporate
thinking imposed on elites. Their counterparts in the British Caribbean
and North America existed in a different world in the sense that very few
of the corporate supports (or barriers) surrounding women in European
and African ports crossed the northern Atlantic. Instead, the world that
confronted women at the bottom of the social ladder in the metropoli-
tan Atlantic enveloped most women in ports like New York, Boston, and
Philadelphia, where commerce had largely overtaken many other forms of
interaction. Ports in the non-British Caribbean and the Iberian mainland
present a more mixed picture. Commerce still played a central role, often
allowing those of mixed lineage, Africans, and Native Americans to par-
ticipate and, eventually, ensuring merchants took a leading role in politi-
cal and economic affairs. Yet, while not all ports and cities had guilds,
many did, and Iberian cultures retained corporate forms in the societies
they established in the Americas, intermixing them with the racialized
hierarchies that they fashioned. This reality, as well as the transfer of elite
notions of female mobility from the Iberian peninsula, afforded women
opportunities, but curtailed them too, a dynamic with a more metropol-
itan impulse than reigned farther north in the Americas.24 Tracing the
24For the literature on which we base the general arguments on European and African
ports that we introduce here as well as what we say on New York, Boston, and Philadelphia,
see below. On Iberian cities see Jay Kinsbruner, Colonial Spanish-American City: Urban Life
in the Age of Atlantic Capitalism (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2005), 67105; Stuart
B. Schwartz, The Kings Procession: Municipality and Royal Authority and the Hierarchies
of Power in Colonial Salvador, in Portuguese Colonial Cities in the Early Modern World,
introduction 11
contours of womens agency that corporatisms presences and absences

produced, now benefiting, now restricting womens possibilities, is one of
the abiding concerns of Women in Port.
The rise of the Italian city-states with their associations of wealthy mer-
chants and landowners provides early clues as to where Europes Atlan-
tic ports would head. At first glance, women do not seem to have had a
prominent billing in this story. In many of Italys city-states mixtures of
Roman, customary, and Lombard law hampered womens access to corpo-
rate bodies like Genoas body of citizens, known as the compagna.25 But
this is not the whole story, as recent work on Venice, Rome, and Florence
has revealed. Monica Chojnacka has demonstrated that Venetian women
across a range of professions had independent access to courts, assets, and,
as participants in family firms, the managerial reins of businesses. They
also constructed or joined informal, quasi-corporate living arrangements,
which included many women who had migrated to this major Mediter-
ranean port, and transformed la Serenissimas neighborhoods.26 Women
served as heads of households, perhaps acting as lodging house propri-
etors, in maritime Venice as well as more landlocked Rome.27 They joined
guilds in the textile trades, participated in retailing despite unfavorable
legal strictures, and acted as or over boatmen, blacksmiths, and sailmak-
ers.28 An ebb and flow, not a series of periodic plateaus, best describes
womens roles in the early modern Italian workplace, suggesting that the
actions of many individuals, not gendered societal structures alone, stood
behind these changes.29 Moreover, women in regions as diverse as France,
ed. Liam Matthew Brockey (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2008), 177205, esp. 189;
Catarina Madeira Santos, Luanda: A Colonial City between Africa and the Atlantic, Seven-
teenth and Eighteenth Centuries, in Portuguese Colonial Cities, 24972. On the Caribbean
see the contributions to this volume of Rogers and King as well as Zacek. Joseph Miller
draws a contrast between private (and to some extent corporate) pre-modern African and
medieval European elite households and Atlantic commercialized and public cultures in
the Americas. Here we propose a slight variation on that theme. For Miller see Joseph
Miller, Preface, in Women and Slavery, vol. I, xvixxiii, 1214, 2532.
25See, for example, the discussion of the mundualdus in Kuehn, Law, Family and
Women, 21237 as well as the situation of women in Genoa in Steven Epstein, Genoa and
the Genoese, 9581528 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), passim;
Ronald G. Witt, Two Latin Cultures and the Foundation of Renaissance Humanism in Medi-
eval Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
26Monica Chojnacka, Working Women of Early Modern Venice (Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2001), 2649, 81102.
27Christopher F. Black, Early Modern Italy: A Social History (London: Routledge, 2001),
88; Chojnacka, Working Women, 95100.
28Black, Early Modern Italy, 8990; Chojnacka, Working Women, 3234.
29Black, Early Modern Italy, 89.
the Dutch Republic, Portugal, Britain, Northern Germany, and Scandina-

via made similar moves.30 The gendered and apparently restrictive world
of municipal corporate bodies, then, possessed malleability sufficient for
women to adapt and manipulate it to their advantage. Here, port com-
munities found themselves in the vanguard.
Indeed, the incremental actions of Italian women and their counter-
parts elsewhere often acted as sinews, knitting up the demographic skel-
eton of Europes early modern cities and particularly its ports. Typically,
Europes early modern cities had sizeable overpopulations of women
(Venice had 79 men per 100 women, Zrich 74 per 100), many of them
migrants.31 As Jean-Pierre Poussou has put it, all early modern cities
drained a demographic basin, and many cities operated as ports in
some fashion, even if their arterials were sometimes byways, not water-
ways.32 If Europes major ports could claim any uniqueness in their demo-
graphic profiles, it lay in the magnitude and variety of in-migration they
embraced, which drove the creation of new urban villages, enclaves, living
arrangements, and economic sectors. Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Gteborg,
Rouen, and Seville provide excellent examples of this dynamism, which
could convert a relatively small or underutilized town into a bustling port
or a world entrept in mere decades, drawing womens labor and talents
into the enterprise in the process. As Alexandra Parma Cooks contribu-
tion to Women in Port shows, the commerce of a bustling emergent port
like Seville could quickly involve a range of women in a broad array of
30Gayle Brunelle, Fishwives and Fish Merchants: The Role of Women in the Fish
Trade in the Ports of Northern France, paper presented at the 2008 AHA Annual Meeting
in Washington, DC; Brunelle, Policing the Monopolizing Women of Nantes, Journal of
Womens History 19, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 1035; David Garrioch, The Making of Revolution-
ary Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 3843; Christina Dalhede, Viner
kvinnor kapital: En 1600-tals handel med potential?: Fjrrhandelsfamiljer Jeronimus Mller i
Lbeck och Sibrant Valck i Gteborg (Warne frlag, 2005); Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers:
Women, Words and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998),
1220; Jan de Vries and Adrianus van der Woude, The First Modern Economy: Success, Fail-
ure and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 15001815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995), 596605; Darlene Abreu-Ferreira, Work and Identity in Early Modern Por-
tugal: What Did Gender Have to Do with It? Journal of Social History 35, no. 4 (2002):
85987.
31Leslie Page Moch, Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650, 2nd ed.
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003), 4647.
32Jean-Pierre Poussou, Bordeaux et la Sud-Ouest au XVIIIe sicle: croissance conomique
et attraction urbaine (Paris: Touzot, 1983), 63101 as quoted in Leslie Page Moch, Moving
Europeans, 47.
introduction 13
transactions that stood at the heart of many a premodern familys econ-

omy and well-being.33
We can follow equally buoyant demographic and cultural trends with
implications for womens lives into areas washed by the tidal currents
and waterways whose fingers stretched into West Africa from the Gulf
of Guinea north to the Cape Verde Islands. Originally riverine limits con-
fined West African waterborne trade below the Sahara. But the creation
of trans-Saharan routes allowed a variety of specialized groups and net-
worked states such as the Mali empire to pioneer long-distance trade.34
Recognition of this pre-Atlantic history has fostered a burgeoning con-
sensus that, prior to Atlantic contact, the peoples of Senegambia as well
as the Upper and Lower Guinea Coasts had established powerful central-
ized states, trading networks, a varied agricultural base, and religious and
political cultures undergirded by resilient community and social forms.
All of these played an independent and often decisive role in determin-
ing which societies emerged successful and in fostering economic and
political changes in these regions long after the earliest fifteenth-century
contacts with European outsiders. Here gender provided a central orga-
nizing framework. Matrilineal cultures, for example, were not uncommon
among the peoples of all three regions, and interplay between patriliny
and matriliny stamped many interactions. Gender also helped catalyze
the influence of those groups that interacted with Europeans, whether of
mixed background such as tangomos, fully African employees of Euro-
pean entities, or merchants and traders.35 Within these groups, women
33Douglas Catterall, Community without Borders: Scots Migrants and the Changing Face
of Power in the Dutch Republic (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 2585, 13274; Perry, Gender and Disor-
der, 332; Steve Murdoch and Alexia Grosjean, The Scottish Community in Seventeenth-
Century Gothenburg, in Scottish Communities Abroad in the Early Modern Period, eds.
Alexia Grosjean and Steve Murdoch (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 191223; Philip Bendict, Rouen
during the Wars of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1824; De Vries
and Van der Woude, The First Modern Economy, passim.
34Curtin, The Rise and Fall, 3538, 4245.
35Brooks, Eurafricans, 1101; Northrup, Africas Discovery, 1013, 2933, 50140; Thornton,
Africa and Africans, 43125; Curtin, Economic Change, 3046, 59100, 10521; Walter Rodney,
A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 15451800 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1970); Barry,
Senegambia, 262299; Barry, Senegambia, 2635; Christophe Wondji, The States and
Cultures of the Upper Guinean Coast, in General History of Africa, vol. 5, 36898; A. A.
Boahen, The States and Cultures of the Lower Guinean Coast, in General History of Africa,
vol. 5, 399427; Robin Law and Kristin Mann, West Africa in the Atlantic Community:
The Case of the Slave Coast, The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 56, no. 1 (Spring
1999): 314334; Claire C. Robertson, Sharing the Same Bowl: A Socioeconomic History of
Women and Class in Accra, Ghana (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), 12,
2729; Carol P. McCormack, Slaves, Slave Owners, and Slave Dealers: Sherbro Coast and
were able to control kin-based trade networks, to play a part in female

politico-religious sodalities, to wield independent power as practitioners
of crafts, and, at times, even to achieve political power. As in European
ports and cities, womens demographic dominance favored their agency.
For West African ports, however, one has to bear in mind that the major-
ity of lower-status women were slaves and womens numerical superiority
was not confined to ports or even towns in West Africa.36
Indeed, the poverty and restricted life chances of these port women
and of marginal women in early modern Europes ports point to the
limits of what demography and appropriated opportunity could offer
Courages metropolitan maritime sisters. This becomes apparent in the
average employment profiles of women below the rank of the middling
sort in early modern Europes major ports and large cities. Frequently,
these women, especially if they had migrant status, filled the ranks of
prostitutes, low-skilled textile and manufactory workers, and flophouse
managers, as well as various branches of the retail and hospitality trades.
As women they could not gain access to citizenship (or its benefits) and
marriage as easily as men. Amsterdam, the Dutch Republics greatest port,
for example, had pro-immigrant policies as compared to Dutch towns in
the east of the Republic. Nevertheless, female migrants could not muster
the same clout or wherewithal to obtain citizenship, marriages, or skilled
work as their male counterparts.37 Poorer women in ports, migrant and
Hinterland, in Women and Slavery in Africa, eds. Claire C. Robertson and Herbert Klein
(Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 27192.
36Brooks, Eurafricans, 2833, 4952, 12260, 20621, 27072; Curtin, Economic Change,
9596, 112121; Jan Jansen, Hunters Associations and Malis Search for a Civil Society,
in The Return of the Guilds, eds. Jan Lucassen, Tine de Moor, and Jan Luiten van Zanden
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 25356; Robin Law, Ouidah: The Social His-
tory of a West African Slaving Port, 17271892 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2004),
7677, 8688, 111119, 210212; Robertson, 1314; Claire Robertson and Herbert A. Klein,
The Role of Women in African Slave Systems, in Women and Slavery in Africa; James F.
Searing, West African Slavery and Atlantic Commerce: The Senegal River Valley, 17001860
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 98106; John Thornton, Sexual Demogra-
phy: The Impact of the Slave Trade on Family Structure, in Women and Slavery in Africa,
3946; the contribution of Philip Havik to this volume. European forts, on the other hand,
tended to have a majority of men; see Bayo Holey, Routes of Remembrance: Refashioning
the Slave Trade in Ghana (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 3334. In the colo-
nial era, women became a demographic minority as ports became loci for large numbers of
male migrants; see Emmanuel Akyeampong, Sexuality and Prostitution among the Akan
of the Gold Coast, c. 16501950, Past and Present 156 (August, 1997): 15657.
37Lotte van de Pol, Het Amsterdams hoerdom, 106114; Maarten Prak, The Politics of
Intolerance: Citizenship and Religion in the Dutch Republic (Seventeenth and Eighteenth
Centuries), in Calvinism and Religious Tolerance in the Dutch Golden Age, eds. R. Po-Chia
Hsia and H. F. K. van Nierop (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 17075.
introduction 15
native-born alike, also faced Reformation-era politics and cultural norms

that criminalized and discouraged prostitution (and out-of-wedlock inter-
course) and also heavily policed and even proscribed womens work. The
measures that this environment generated consigned many poor women
to a shadow existence, very poorly paid work, or both. Moreover, as Cour-
ages life eloquently expresses, no amount of cleverness allowed women
a reliable escape from the violence that they could face at the margins of
society.38
Compounding these obstacles were the efforts of men who already
had established positions in a port economy to hold onto them. Masters,
journeymen, merchants, shopkeepers, and other established figures in
the urban corporate hierarchy pressured authorities to prosecute women
who worked in their economic sectors or simply sought to push them
into more marginal niches. Rising Atlantic trades in products such as fish
and victuals or retail trades such as tavern- and market stall-keeping and
the threat of increasingly proletarianized womens labor to craftsmens
livelihoods featured regularly as flashpoints.39 The competitive nature
of such contests could take on great earnestness when the livelihoods of
men became dramatically less secure, as in sixteenth-century Augsburg.40
Municipal authorities themselves, especially in ports with large migrant
populations, also had some interest in keeping women from claiming too
prominent a place in economic life.41
At the same time, ports and cities with port connections often had
pro-immigrant policies or cultures as compared with other sorts of com-
munities, which mitigated some of the effects of the gendering of work
and citizenship, even if these policies did not necessarily treat migrants
38Van de Pol, Het Amsterdams hoerdom, 151180; Monica Chojnacka, Women, Charity
and Community in Early Modern Venice: The Casa delle Zitelle, Renaissance Quarterly 51,
no. 1 (Spring 1998): 6872; Merry Wiesner-Hanks, Having Her Own Smoke: Employment
and Independence for Unmarried Women in Germany, 14001700, in Singlewomen in the
European Past, eds. Judith Bennett and Amy Froide (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylva-
nia Press, 1999), 192216; von Grimmelshausen, Simplicianische Schriften, 6572.
39Gayle Brunelle, Fishwives and Fish Merchants; Brunelle, Monopolizing Women,
1035; Reinhold Reith, Circulation of Skilled Labour in Late Medieval and Early Mod-
ern Central Europe, in Guilds, Innovation and the European Economy, 14001800, eds. S. R.
Epstein and Maarten Prak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 11730; Franc-
esca Trivellato, Guilds, Technology, and Economic Change in Early Modern Venice, in
Guilds, 21417.
40Roper, Oedipus and the Devil, 3753.
41Gayle Brunelle, Fishwives and Fish Merchants; Brunelle, Monopolizing Women,
1035.
evenhandedly.42 And as the female kin of many of the men of Triana,

Sevilles maritime and industrial district, could attest, ports also left
women to manage affairs at home while men went abroad.43 In contrast,
more isolated, often rural communities in regions such as Wrttemberg
presented a different face to women. Here guilds and other corporate
bodies adopted policies promoting high emigration rates of men in their
working years from the region and also greatly restricted womens ability
to earn an independent living, ultimately promoting economic stagna-
tion.44 Regions such as Galicia, the Basque country, the rural hinterlands
of Englands West Country ports, and the northern provinces of the Dutch
Republic occupied a middle ground. Their particular brand of proletarian-
ization drew men into the maritime labor market and away from agrarian
homes for long periods, leaving women to fend for themselves, but also
granting them a freer hand in determining their lives.45
In terms of their size and their location vis--vis surrounding territory,
West African ports fit into this middle category as well: the Gold Coast
port of Cape Coast began life as a Fetu fishing village; Ouidah, along the
Slave Coast, lies about 2.7 miles from the Atlantic on a lagoon; and trad-
ing settlements in Upper Guinea resembled villages too. European-style
proletarianization did not, however, shape these communities. Instead, an
interregional settlement process saw agriculturalist Mande and pastoral-
ist Fulbe peoples from stratified, centralized societies move south from
the Sahel and savannah of West Africa into forest regions of southern
West Africa and west to the coastal zones below the Gambia River in the
42Garrioch, The Making, 3843; Prak, The Politics of Intolerance, 170175; Van de Pol,
Het Amsterdams hoerdom, 8493, 293317; Laura Hunt Yungblut, Strangers Settled Here
Amongst Us: Policies, Perceptions and the Presence of Aliens in Elizabethan England (Lon-
don: Routledge, 1996), 1029, 42; Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 1315.
43See Alexandra Parma Cooks contribution to Women in Port. It should be noted that
this phenomenon is a well-known one in Atlantic scholarship. See, for example, Van der
Heijden, Achterblijvers; Lisa Norling, Captain Ahab Had a Wife: New England Women and
the Whalefishery, 17201870 (Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press, 2000).
44Sheilagh Ogilvie, A Bitter Living: Women, Markets, and Social Capital in Early Mod-
ern Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Nor should one assume that Wrt-
temberg comprised an outlier as a rural region with a prevalence of guilds and corporate
structures. Rural guilds existed in Spain, the Netherlands, and other parts of Germany; see
Ulrich Pfister, Craft Guilds, Theory of Firm, and Early Modern Proto-industry, in Guilds,
Innovation and the European Economy, 14001800, eds. S. R. Epstein and Maarten Prak
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 3640.
45Poska, Women and Authority; Juan Javier Pescador, The New World Inside a Basque
Village: The Oiartzun Valley and Its Atlantic Emigrants, 15501800 (Reno, NV: University of
Nevada Press, 2004), 4780; P. C. van Royen, Zeevarenden op de koopvaardijvloot, omstreeks
1700 (Amsterdam: De Bataafsche Leeuw, 1987); Pope, Fish into Wine, 20755.
introduction 17
several centuries before the arrival of Europeans. There, they interacted

with a range of decentralized coastal societies to produce coastal com-
munities from the Malaguetta Coast to Senegambia. Then, from the Slave
Coast to the Ivory Coast, Ewe, Ga, and especially Akan peoples expanded
throughout West Africas forest regions (linking them to Mande and Hausa
peoples and North Africa) and along the Lower Guinea coast, which ulti-
mately generated trading settlements frequented by Europeans such as
Cape Coast, Accra, and Ouidah.46
Women contended with daunting challenges in the multitude of coastal
and riverside settlements that took root in West Africa as much as they
did in early modern Europe. In strongly hierarchical Mande and Wolof
societies, for example, women could not travel, and outsider women of
mixed lineage could not become full members of the society.47 Spanning
West Africas regions, Kayor and Waalo, where Gore and Saint-Louis
were situated, Kaabu in Upper Guinea, and the Asante kingdom, the
Fante region, and the Ga state in Accra, all knew rigid hierarchies. Female
slaves and women given in pawnship made up substantial percentages of
the population in these societies, while their social orders allowed men
to acquire and retain substantial influence over women. Among the Ga
and Akan peoples, for example, men achieved this by controlling womens
sexuality and lineage property.48 Although male control over economic
activities does not seem to have been as complete along the Malaguetta
and Upper Guinea coasts, traditions of hospitality towards male outsiders
nonetheless gave men in these societies control over womens sexuality.49
Much as patriliny and attendant patriarchy in early modern Europe
could restrict womens possibilities, social stratification and particular
social practices as well as efforts to control marriage and female mobility
did the same in West Africa. As in Europe, these forces affected migrant
women disproportionately. What clearly separated the cultures in these
two regions was the role of those holding the reins of public authority,
46See Barry, Senegambia; Barry, Senegambia, 2635; Wondji, The States and Cultures
of the Upper Guinean Coast; Boahen, The States and Cultures of the Lower Guinean
Coast, 399425; Robertson, Sharing, 12, 2729; Brooks, Eurafricans, 136; the contribu-
tions of Philip Havik and Ty Reese to this volume.
47Brooks, Eurafricans, 5152, 5459, 12526.
48Akyeampong, Sexuality and Prostitution, 14457; Robertson, Sharing, 1314; Brooks,
Eurafricans, 2122, 2829, 55, 87, 12429; Thornton, Sexual Demography; Caroline Bled-
soe, Women and Marriage in Kpelle Society (Standford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1980),
6364.
49Brooks, Eurafricans, 2829, 51, 126; McCormack, Slaves, Slave Owners, Slave Dealers:
The Sherbro.
who had a less direct role in determining womens choices in West Africa
than did family networks.50
Two groups in Women in Port illustrate the struggles of marginal metro-
politan women in Atlantic ports: the slave women who served the chiefly
British-inhabited Cape Coast castle of the Company of Merchants Trading
to Africa (CMTA) during the eighteenth century and the Aberdeenshire
peasant women and women in the ranks of Aberdeens urban poor who
wove cheap woolen cloth for hungry seventeenth-century Atlantic mar-
kets. Despite the distance separating northeast Scotland and the Cape
Coast, both groups of women were effectively laborers whose corporate
status had undergone some degree of proletarianization.51 No longer
having access to sufficient land or sufficiently lucrative economic niches
to sustain themselves or their families, the northeast Scots women in
Gordon DesBrisays chapter produced cheap textiles at piece rates for
foreign markets as distant as Dutch Brazil. Similarly, the slave women in
Ty Reeses piece, who had been forcibly transported from their Gambian
homelands to the Cape Coast, served as unskilled labor for the CMTA. Nor
could any of these women count on advancement. The CMTAs female
slaves did not receive training in a craft as male slaves did, and their wages
of tobacco, alcohol, and textiles hampered their ability to trade (and profit
fully from their labor) as the free population in Cape Coast could. Rural
Aberdeenshire women who spun and processed wool (and their coun-
terparts among the burgh of Aberdeens poor), on the other hand, were
among those left behind by the Scots diaspora to the continent and the
wider Atlantic world (at a minimum 12.515 percent of Scotlands popu-
lation in 1700 went abroad in the course of the 1600s).52 In contrast to
50Curtin, Economic Change, 3746; Brooks, Eurafricans, 2122, 2836; Boahen, The
States and Cultures of the Lower Guinean Coast, 41224.
51In applying the term proletarianization to a group of slaves we are adopting the
position taken by scholars such as James F. Searing who argue that African slavery came
in many forms and cannot be seen as always corresponding to the chattel-based slavery
predominant on plantations in the Americas c. 15001888. These scholars also contend
that social customs, slaverys differing economic functions, and the role of group forma-
tion in African societies tended to create a wider range of relationships between masters
and slaves in African contexts. In some contexts, such as the one we describe here, these
relationships actually restricted the actions of slave owners and granted agency to slaves
that we would liken to the status of unfree, but not enslaved, labor in certain parts of early
modern Europe. For Searing see West African Slavery, 4458, 95128.
52Douglas Catterall, Suddiga grnser, befsta minnen och den skotska diasporan i
1700-talets Gteborg, a paper given before Hgre Seminariet, Ekonomisk-historiska Insti-
tutionen, Gteborgs Universitet on May 23, 2007; Steve Murdoch, Children of the Diaspora:
The Homecoming of the Second-Generation Scots in the Seventeenth Century, in
introduction 19
the successful Scots abroad, who prospered themselves, their adopted

lands, and Scotland through trade and industry, DesBrisays women wool-
workers received little.53 Corporatism also determined the status of both
sets of women. The CMTAs slave women could not easily be sold or
punished and they had status as persons, but were unable to leave the
CMTAs employ, due in part to customs and practices that applied to
slaves in the Cape Coast region. Although not bound to their employers
like the CMTAs slave women (in the way that peasant women in Central
European protoindustrial manufactories arguably were), as cottars in rural
areas or unfree (i.e. lacking citizenship rights) if urban, Aberdeenshire
and Aberdonian spinsters had limited options as persons living without
any robustly protective corporate framework and, thus, lacking any eco-
nomic security. They too, though, could rely on customary protections to
some degree, whether from links to betters in rural society or access to
urban poor relief. 54 Famine also found both groups of women with little
resource. Their employers, the CMTA and Aberdonian merchants (some
female), saw them as expendable at such times.55
Recent work on the evolution of guilds has spoken eloquently to the
fluid, supraregional labor markets that served early modern Europe, but
DesBrisay and Reese encourage us to see chameleon corporatism as Atlan-
tic in scope and far from restricted in its exploitative potential where mar-
ginal women were concerned. Even in her most abject status as a woman
marrying out of necessity a soldier who rescues her from possible rape,
Courage, perhaps better fortuned as the creation of a man, arguably does
not suffer this degree of socio-economic vulnerability.56
Sherryllynne Haggertys exploration of poor (and middling) womens lives
in late eighteenth-century Philadelphia confirms the Atlantic dimension
Emigrant Homecomings: The Return Movement of Emigrants, 16002000, ed. Marjory Harper
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 55.
53For the Scots diasporas positive impacts see Steve Murdoch, Network North: Scot-
tish Kin, Commercial and Covert Associations in Northern Europe, 16031746 (Leiden: Brill,
2006). T. M. Devine, The Tobacco Lords: A Study of the Tobacco Merchants of Glasgow and
their Trading Activities, c. 174090 (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, 1975) is the classic
statement on the tobacco merchants of Glasgow.
54Robert Allan Houston and Ian D. Whyte, Introduction, in Scottish Society, 15001800
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1215; Ian D. Whyte, Scotland Before the
Industrial Revolution: An Economic and Social History, c. 1050c. 1750 (London: Longman,
1995), 16465, 201203; Robert S. Duplessis, Transitions to Capitalism in Early Modern
Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 21623, 292.
55For Reese and DesBrisay see their contributions to this volume.
56See the various essays in Guilds and, for Courage, von Grimmelshausen, Simpliciani
sche Schriften, 6979.
of metropolitan proletarianization and suggests the projection of metro-

politan gender relations to North Americas premier port, although not
within a corporate frame. While Philadelphias post-independence growth
led indentured servitude to decline to less than 2 percent of the popula-
tion, women did not join the increasing numbers of men earning their
freedom in Philadelphia. They remained constrained by metropolitan-
inspired common law in the form of coverture, taking home but half of
what their male counterparts did, and the citys comparatively subordi-
nate status in the Atlantic (a colonial legacy) drew their men away for
long voyages, rendering female-headed as much as one-fifth of households
in some districts.57 Marginalization and proletarianization (most women
worked in lesser occupations with increasing numbers in textiles and
fewer in trading and tavern- or coffeehouse holding) and legal proscrip-
tion against itinerant and open-air retail as well as tavern-keeping crossed
the Atlantic easily as well.58 Yet guilds and other corporate structures with
their statutory proscriptions against women traders did not make it to
North America.59 Womens negligible access to education and capital pre-
vented all but a few from operating as serious merchants, but those few
lived uncowed by corporate hindrance.60
Corporate forms did not easily cross the Atlantic to British or Dutch
settlements in North America and the Caribbean. Demography, economy,
labor arrangements, and emerging social orders radically favored masters
over servants (and merchant capital over skilled labor). Later on these
same factors naturally also placed masters over slaves in those places
where they replaced indentured servants, even in ports where agricultural
57Even poor relief for these womens husbands had a decidedly metropolitan ring as
the merchants of the city put together poor relief initiatives mainly to serve the sailors on
whom they depended, much as merchants in Europes maritime urban villages did. See
Gary B. Nash, Poverty and Poor Relief in Pre-Revolutionary Philadelphia, The William and
Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 33, no. 1 (January, 1976): 8; Douglas Catterall, At Home Abroad:
Ethnicity and Enclave in the World of Scots Traders in Northern Europe, c. 16001800, Journal
of Early Modern History 8, no. 4 (2004): 33336.
58Moreover, New York largely replicated Philadelphia in this despite the greater free-
doms women enjoyed in the former New Amsterdam: Serena Zabin, Womens Trading
Networks and Dangerous Economies in Eighteenth-Century New York City, Early Ameri-
can Studies 4, no. 2 (Fall 2006): 291321.
59W. J. Rorabaugh, The Craft Apprentice: From Franklin to the Machine Age in America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 45; Jacobs, New Netherland, 23738; Benjamin
Moser, Why this World? A Biography of Clarice Lispector (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009), 4849; Rebecca Parker Brienen, Visions of Savage Paradise: Albert Eckhout, Court
Painter in Colonial Dutch Brazil (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 1113,
95170.
60For Haggertys conclusions see her chapter in this volume.
introduction 21
pursuits were less dominant or non-existent.61 Ibero-America, by contrast,

translated corporatism largely intact to the Americas, with women active
as artisans and in the regulated retail trades in large numbers. This is not
to say that the Iberian Americas did not provide a new twist on corporat-
ism. Persons of mixed ethnic background, slaves, and Native Americans
faced numerous barriers to their participation in the marketplace in gen-
eral, and in corporately organized sectors in particular. They participated
nonetheless and their role in commodity exchange was particularly prom-
inent in cities and especially those that incorporated a port. In fact, mar-
ginal groups in Ibero-American port milieux arguably had greater success
in bending corporatism to their will than their European metropolitan
counterparts.62
In Europes early modern ports, in any case, corporate bodies modu-
lated gender quite consistently and distinctly. Ports shifting from regional,
European to Atlantic orientations needed people just as Europes ver-
nacular migration systems matured and Reformation politics began to
generate refugees seeking shelter and military migrants and dependents,
who often became immigrants.63 To succeed in these communities in
the midst of cultural and economic transformation, middling and well-
connected women from less well-off social groups in European ports had
to work through family networks, neighborhood institutions, and formal
corporate structures, which, despite a brave new world of apparently
61Alison Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 72101; Jacobs, New Netherland, 23762; Norman F.
Barka, Citizens of St. Eustatius, 1781: A Historical and Archaeological Study, in The Lesser
Antilles in the Age of European Expansion, eds. Robert L. Paquette and Stanley L. Enger-
man (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1996), 224236; John Gabriel Stedman,
Stedmans Surinam: Life in Eighteenth-Century Slave Society, eds. Richard and Sally Price
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
62Kinsbruner, The Colonial Latin-American City, 7181, 8590; Susan Migden Socolow,
The Women of Colonial Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000),
10911, 11415, 12021; Kris Lane, Quito 1599: City and Colony in Transition (Albuquerque,
NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2003), 5672, 8789, 9599.
63Gteborg, Rotterdam, Ostende, and Cdiz constitute interesting cases. See Murdoch
and Grosjean, The Scottish Community; Douglas Catterall, Interlopers in an Intercul-
tural Zone?: Early Scots Ventures in the 17th-Century Atlantic World, in Bridging the Early
Modern Atlantic World: Peoples, Products, and Practices on the Move, ed. and intro. Caro-
line A. Williams (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2009), 7596; Jan Parmentier, The
Sweets of Commerce: The Hennessys of Ostend and their Network in the Eighteenth Cen-
tury, in Irish and Scottish Mercantile Networks in Europe and Overseas in the Seventeenth
and Eighteenth Centuries, eds. David Dickson, Jan Parmentier, and Jane Ohlmeyer (Gent:
Academia Press, 2006), 6871; Maria del Carmen Lario, The Irish Traders of Eighteenth-
Century Cdiz, in Irish and Scottish Mercantile Networks, 21415. On vernacular migration
see Pope, Fish into Wine, 2133, 6162.
fungible migrants, produced local frictions. Womens struggles occurred

in and around faults dividing local corporate interests from city fathers or
rulers in search of new talent and taxes, settled inhabitants from newcom-
ers, strivers from the established.64 As a marginalized group, women fig-
ured prominently in such struggles, sometimes as a focal point, sometimes
as affected bystanders. Sexuality and its connections to male and female
honor, proscriptions that restricted womens work or participation in the
legal system, the disproportionate impact on women of legal settlements,
and social advancement all became issues of the day.65 In addition, the
particular community or society in which a woman lived, the position of
her social group, and simple timing all had a part in determining how
women fared in their own and larger struggles.66 Diaspora communities
that settled in ports encapsulate all of these dynamics.
Individuals and families from Calvinist and Jewish diasporas, for exam-
ple, migrated to the Dutch Republic, with the Scots and Sephardims mar-
itime inclinations, mercantile savvy, and canniness regarding residency
rights exemplifying their dynamism. Despite the promise of their new
home, women in both of these migrant streams confronted economically
and culturally defined dependency; they played the same status games as
Courage did in her many roles as a military camp inhabitant, but as flesh-
and-blood people, could not escape strictures as she could. As Calvin-
ists, Scots women could integrate easily into normatively Calvinist Dutch
ports and above all in Rotterdam where Scots controlled an urban vil-
lage. Through marriage or membership in Rotterdams Scots enclave, they
also gained the benefits of denizen or citizen status. Sephardic women in
Amsterdam accessed residency status through their husbands. A sexually-
tinged, male-defined sense of female honor, however, burdened women
64Seventeenth-century Amsterdam and Gteborg, La Rochelle c. 15501650, and Genoa

through about 1530 presented all of these conflicts: David Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmo-
politans: The Portuguese Jews of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam (Portland, OR: The Littman
Library of Jewish Civilization, 2000), 1025; Helge Almquist, Gteborgs historia: Grundlg-
gningen och de frsta hundra ren: Senare delen: Envldets och det stora nordiska krigets
skede, (16801718) (Gteborg: Gteborgs Litografiska Aktiebolag, 1935), 314321; Kevin C.
Robbins, City on the Ocean Sea: La Rochelle, 15301650: Urban Society, Religion, and Politics
on the French Atlantic Frontier (Leiden: Brill, 1997); Epstein, Genoa and the Genoese.
65Lyndal Roper, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); James Richard Farr, Artisans in Europe, 13001914
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 10713; Brunelle, Policing, 17, 2527; Dan-
ielle van den Heuvel, Women and Entrepreneurship: Female Traders in the Northern Nether-
lands, c. 15801815 (Amsterdam: Askant, 2007), 87176.
66Brunelle, Policing, 1316; Van den Heuvel, Women and Entrepreneurship, passim.
introduction 23
of both groups. The male leadership of the largest Scots enclave saw it as
crucial that women be married and chaste and came down hard on those
who did not fit the profile. The relative openness of Hollands legal system
permitted Scots women to act in the economic sphere with little trouble,
but did not free them from these moral canons.67 Sephardic women in
Amsterdam faced an even tougher standard. Both the leaders of the Sep-
hardim and the city fathers of Amsterdam effectively agreed to a ban on
marriages or any sort of sexual relations between Christians and members
of the Sephardic community, a policy that isolated Sephardic women. Ibe-
rian canons for female conduct also dictated that, in theory, respectable
women center their lives on the domestic sphere.68
Religiously-driven attitudes and social isolation, then, could exclude
women from full community membership and economic niches in Atlan-
tic ports even if they had the advantages conferred by membership in a
privileged enclave. In their contributions to this volume, however, Gayle
Brunelle, Jnia Furtado, Philip Havik, and Ty Reese argue that women
could counteract both. Brunelle examines several networks of Portuguese
and Spanish women migrants to Nantes and Rouen from the sixteenth into
the seventeenth century who had in common converso origins. She demon-
strates that, despite Europes confessional fracturing, migrant women with
outsider religious backgrounds could transfer advantageous and transfor-
mative cultural knowledge from their culture of origin to an adopted port
community. Their cultures emphasis of social capital over their religious
or cultural background enabled them to do this. Spanish women of con-
verso origin, for example, arrived in France as part of a skilled merchant
migration. This made them desirable marriage partners for powerful
French men, who also allowed their Spanish wives to make use of their
mercantile skills to manage their estates, a freedom not allowed French
women and one whose exercise, in a small way, reshaped gender norms.
Portuguese converso women, however, remained at French societys mar-
gins due to their incomplete command of French and their communitys
outsider profile as religious refugees. Following another path altogether,
67Catterall, Community without Borders, 25174; von Grimmelshausen, Simplicianische

Schriften, passim.
68Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans, 1315, 187191, 206, 21718, 239; Miriam Bodian,
Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997), 65; Jonathan Israel, Diasporas Within
a Diaspora: Jews, Crypto-Jews, and the World Maritime Empires (15401740) (Leiden: Brill,
2002), 7784; David Graizbord, Souls in Dispute: Converso Identities in Iberia and the Jewish
Diaspora, 15801700 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 122125.
Philip Haviks freeborn women traders or tungums in Cacheu and envi-

rons actually became cultural brokers. Mixing freedoms that women
enjoyed in the decentralized, matrilineal societies of the Upper Guinea
Coast with the religious and social roles that women throughout Sen-
egambia and Upper Guinea exercised through nyamakalaw (kin-based
craft groups), power groups (kin-counteractive, politico-religious sodali-
ties), and family firms, they built patron-client bonds with indigenous
groups such as the Pepel.69 These ties made them indispensable partners
for their often converso husbands, who acted as private traders, and for
Portugals ultramarine empire. Not even the Portuguese Inquisition could
compel their conformity. In like manner, the donas da Zambezia of Jnia
Furtados piece and the elite women and commoner women (and likely
even the Eurafrican women) of Ty Reeses Cape Coast study made use of
African ideas of chieftaincy and patron-client ties that Europeans desired
to appropriate for their purposes to attract and retain European power
and wealth. In contrast to middling women in early modern European
ports, their Eurafrican and African peers achieved some notable successes
on both fronts, establishing a world much more in accordance with Cour-
ages aspirations.70
Destabilizing Port Worlds: Hybridizing Circulations
The actions of women along the Upper Guinea Coast, in Zambezia and its
associated Swahili ports, and Luanda and its Central West African environs
illustrate an important paradox. To conduct commerce and project power
in sub-Saharan African circuits, Portuguese imperial authorities depended
on women of African and Afro-European origin whom they deeply dis-
trusted. But the collective example of these womens interculturally-
constructed agency also points to womens roles in circulating the offshoots
of biological and cultural recombination for which Atlantic ports became
known.71 The sheer magnitude of this human activity has stymied Atlan-
tic world scholars seeking to define acts, processes, or tactics as Atlantic.
What, after all, stamps this profusion as Atlantic compared with the cul-
tural variety typifying Indian Ocean societies from the Swahili coast to the
69On the nyamakalaw and the power groups see Brooks, Eurafricans, 2833; Jansen,
Hunters Associations, 25356. For the family firms see Haviks piece in this volume.
70For the particulars of Brunelle, Furtado, Havik, and Reese, see their contributions
to this volume.
71On Luanda see Miller, Introduction, 22; Santos, Luanda.
introduction 25
South China Sea?72 Clearly registers of practice and experience displayed

similarities across intercultural zones. Nevertheless, Women in Ports con-
tributors demonstrate that individuals and groups selected from amongst
them in context-specific ways. In the last few years, a number of scholars
have suggested that diasporas and migrations institutionalized through
commercial techniques, religious practices, social group formation strat-
egies, and legal forms circulated widely in the Atlantic, connecting and
changing disparate places.73 Ties between regions of the Atlantic also pro-
duced cycles of mutual influence as between Brazil and the Slave Coast,
or Britain and its Americas settlements.74 The newness of the Atlantic
world as an interconnected space and the reality that many of its ports in
the Americas and along Africas west coast were wholly new and different
types of communities further intensified their flux and reflux.75
Women proved integral to these exchanges. Read through the expe-
riential prism of gender, movements of people around the Atlantic look
just a little different from the rough-and-ready division of activities just
offered. The commercial impulses propelling womenenslaved, inden-
tured, and pawnedremain. But religious and legal practices collapse
into what we would view as prescriptive circulation. While women could
have a central role in religion, they, like some men, also found themselves
ordered to do certain things in the name of prescribed gender norms. In
like manner we see gender as calling for a different focus when it comes to
understanding how the formation of social groups entered womens lives.
Nations, diasporas, and protean ethnicities all swept women up in their
geneses. But we would point to lineal circulationthe circulation of the
strategies and practices to foster a family or kin groups fortunesas the
force operating most directly in womens and even mens lives when they
confronted gender. Lineal circulation touches on the bedrock reality that,
within a given social group, men and women found their gender identity
72Games, Atlantic History, 74750.

73For examples of each see Israel, Diasporas; Craig Bailey, Metropole and Colony: Irish
Networks in the Eighteenth-Century Empire, Immigrants and Minorities 26, nos. 23
(JulyNovember 2005): 161181; Sweet, Recreating; Philips S. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint:
Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, NC: Uni-
versity of North Carolina Press, 1998); Jacobs, New Netherland.
74Law and Mann, West Africa, 31620; Games, Migration, 193206.
75In this sense we would contend that many if not most Atlantic ports, be they part of
an imperial architecture or not, served a cultural brokering function such as Robin Law
has ascribed to Ouidah and that has sometimes been underestimated. See Law, Ouidah,
47; Peggy K. Liss and W. Franklin Knight, Introduction, in Atlantic Port Cities: Economy,
Culture, and Society in the Atlantic World, eds. Peggy K. Liss and W. Franklin Knight (Knox-
ville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 6; OFlanagan, Port Cities, 613.
most implicated at the locus of rights and privileges predicated on biology

that embedded in family/lineage formation.76 Lastly, as contributors to
Women in Port show, interactions between groups could generate a new
group (often, but not necessarily, considered and explicitly labeled as of
mixed lineage) with separate rights and privileges, and the ability to proj-
ect a cultural identity. The cultural impact of these groups comprises a
phenomenon in its own rightand an undercurrent of many diasporas
and planned migrationsthat we term subaltern circulation to highlight
the juxtaposition of systematic influence and exclusion it occasioned.
Physically and biologically women circulated themselves by having
children with men whose origins made it likely that these offspring would
connect a port to another place. These children also formed a separate
group due to the cultural constructions often placed on their origins and
the interstitial roles that mixed-lineage groups could play in port com-
munities. In the Atlantic this happened first along the western coast of
Africa where European men in a weak position needed women who had
local contacts and resources, but could also derive benefits from develop-
ing ties to European men.77 Philip Haviks portraits of Crispina Peres and
Bibiana Vaz reveal the fluidity in these interactions, because they show
that mixed-lineage women and their offspring could eventually become
dominant in these settlements and able to challenge any local and Euro-
pean notions of female marginality. In addition, once constituted, a mixed-
lineage elite could invert metropole/colony relations by virtue of its local
control of the imperial agenda. It might even become able to project this
control by exporting its revisions of gender roles through migration. While
the number of such migrants is far from certain, these liaisons could pro-
duce far-flung, even transatlantic, female-headed lineages of considerable
influence, as the contributions of Jnia Furtado and Dominique Rogers
and Stewart King to this volume suggest.78
76For an excellent general discussion of these connections see, for example, the many
contributions to Mary Jo Maynes, Ann Waltner, Birgitte Sland, and Ulrike Strasser, eds.,
Gender, Kinship, and Power: A Comparative and Interdisciplinary History (London: Rout-
ledge, 1995). More specifically we would point to the following as valuable discussions in
Atlantic contexts: Sweet, Mistaken Identities?, 299300; Brooks, Eurafricans, esp. 1933;
Spear, Race, Sex, and Social Order, esp. 129177.
77For a basic introduction to this history see inter alia, Mark and da Silva Horta, For-
gotten Diaspora, 17.
78For the above see the contributions of Havik, King and Rogers, and Furtado to this
volume.
introduction 27
Moreover, through the early nineteenth century these women and

their offspring established substantial free communities of color across
the Atlantic in ports such as Buenos Aires, Caracas/La Guaira, Havana,
Lima/Callao, Lisbon, Mobile, New Orleans, Pensacola, Seville, the ports of
Saint-Domingue and the Danish West Indies, and Valencia to name but
a few examples. Populations born of unions between men of European
background and women of African or Native American origin as well as
between men and women of African background, men of African origin
and Native American women, and, in lesser numbers, women of European
origin and Native American men flourished in these ports. Some managed
to gain a substantial degree of influence as well as independence.79
This is not to say that, in and of itself, subaltern circulation resulted in
such communities or even the potential to establish them. In the British
Caribbean, free women of Afro-European or African origins found it very
79Mara Emma Mannarelli, Private Passions and Public Sins: Men and Women in Sev-
enteenth-Century Lima, trans. Sidney Evans and Meredith D. Dodge (Albuquerque, NM:
University of New Mexico Press, 2007), 12; Daniel Walker, No More, No More: Slavery and
Cultural Resistance in Havana and New Orleans (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press, 2004), 13348; Virginia Meacham Gould, Afro-Creole Women, Freedom, and Prop-
erty-Holding in Early New Orleans, in Coastal Encounters: The Transformation of the Gulf
South in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Richmond Brown (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska
Press, 2007), 15166; Brown, A Chaos of Iniquity and Discord: Slave and Free Women of
Color in the Spanish Ports of New Orleans, Mobile, and Pensacola, in The Devils Lane:
Sex and Race in the Early South, eds. Catherine Clinton and Michele Gillespie (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1997), 23246; Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, African Women in French
and Spanish Louisiana: Origins, Roles, Family, Work, Treatment, in The Devils Lane,
24761; Shannon Lee Dawdy, Building the Devils Empire: French Colonial New Orleans
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 16269; Susan M. Socolow, Economic Roles of
the Free Women of Color of Cap Franais, in More than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery
in the Americas, eds. David Barry Gasper and Darlene Hines Clark (Bloomington, IN: Indi-
ana University Press, 1996), 27997; Eduardo R. Saguier, The Social Impact of a Middleman
Minority in a Divided Host Society: The Case of the Portuguese in Early Seventeenth-
Century Buenos Aires, The Hispanic American Historical Review 65, no. 5 (Aug., 1985): 467
91; Arlene J. Daz, Female Citizens, Patriarchs, and the Law in Venezuela, 17861904 (Lincoln,
NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 2836, 6574; Stephanie Blank, Patrons, Clients,
and Kin in Seventeenth-Century Caracas: A Methodological Essay in Spanish American
Social History, The Hispanic American Historical Review 54, no. 2 (May, 1974), 26583;
N. A. T. Hall, Slave Society in the Danish West Indies: St. Thomas, St. John, and St. Croix
(Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 1994), 87123; Spear, Race, Sex, and
Social Order, 17177; Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque
to the Modern, 14921800 (London, Verso, 1998), 150; William Dillon Piersen, Black Yan-
kees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England
(Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 1920; the contributions of Debra
Blumenthal, Aurelia Martn Casares, and Didier Lahon to Black Africans in Renaissance
Europe, eds. Thomas Foster Earle and K. J. P. Lowe (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005); Alexandra Parma Cooks contribution to this volume.
challenging to establish themselves in ports like Bridgetown, Barbados

and Kingston, Jamaica despite their substantial African-origin populations.
In 1788, for example, 75 percent of Kingstons population had an African
origin and 12 percent were free colored or free black, while census data
from 1816 indicates that the population of Bridgetown was 15 percent free
colored and 75 percent of African origin. Furthermore, womens numbers
exceeded those of men in both ports. Yet, due in part to their precarious
legal position, these substantial groups of free African-origin women did
not emerge as a substantial voice in these ports. By contrast, the numbers
of women of African origin in the major British colonial ports of Charles-
ton, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston remained fairly small. In addi-
tion, although African-origin communities had real cohesion, especially
in mid-Atlantic and New England ports, their inhabitants were relatively
divided by their residence (and employment) in white households as well
as the concentration of persons of African origin in more transient pro-
fessions such as sailor and street-hawker. This is even more obviously the
case if one concentrates on the free African-origin populations of these
ports, although the post-Revolutionary era brought improvements for
these residents of northern harbor towns and all of these ports received
increases in their free colored population resulting from the influx of gens
de couleur from Saint-Domingue in the 1790s. Charlestons slightly larger
free black community (3.66 percent of the citys population by 1790) and
its substantial slave population, combined with the prominence of slave
and free women of color in certain economic sectors at least gave mixed-
lineage groups a more concentrated presence there. Even so, free status
did not have the legal underpinnings that it did in Spanish, Portuguese, or
even French colonial ports.80
80Hilary MacDonald Beckles, Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women
in Barbados (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 723, 7289, 115151;
Lucille Mathurin Mair, A Historical Study of Women in Jamaica, 16551844, eds. Hilary Mac-
Donald Beckles and Verene A. Shepherd (Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies
Press, 2006), 8597, 26894; Barry W. Higman, Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica,
18071834 (Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 1995), 13955; Gad Heuman,
Free Coloreds in Jamaican Slave Society, in The Slavery Reader, eds. Gad Heuman and
James Walvin (London: Routledge, 2003), 65456; Colin G. Clarke, Decolonizing the Colonial
City: Urbanization and Stratification in Kingston, Jamaica (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2006), 112; David C. Marley, ed., Historic Cities of the Americas: An Illustrated Encyclopedia,
vol. 2 (New York: ABC-Clio, 2005), 1727; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 206207, 23644,
25053, 305ff., 407ff., 487ff., 49097; Peter A. Coclanis, Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life
and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 16701920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1991), 115; Kenneth Morgan, Slave Sales in Colonial Charleston, The English Historical
Review 113, no. 453 (September 1998): 906, 919; Susan E. Klepp, Seasoning and Society-
introduction 29
Subaltern circulation had still another face. Across the Atlantic groups
arose from social congress as well as sexualfrom participation in societ-
ies (e.g. the power groups of West Africa mentioned above), networks of
shared experience and history (the so-called nations in which Africans,
Europeans, and Native Americans participated), and collective encoun-
ters with authority (e.g. the poor women who obtained charitably-granted
economic niches as a result of official acquiescence in illegal work whom
we discuss below). These communities of practice could bridge or replace
kinship or lineage, a capacity that distinguished them from corporate
groups such as guilds, which underwrote lineal thinking. Groups like
the Seminoles, the recaptives of Sierra Leone, and the various European
nations have received the greatest attention, followed closely by societies
of a more religious bent in the work of scholars such as James Sweet.81 The
kinds of everyday resistance possible due to sheer numbers and concen-
tration of people, however, often presented as ephemeral performances.
Therefore, their lasting contributions to subaltern community formation
have not received as much acknowledgement by comparison with acts of
open rebellion. As classic weapons of the weak, their traces were by design
not often apparent.82 They have received even less attention in consider-
ations of gender, because it is far from clear how they made lasting marks
on the way women lived their lives. That said, Grimmelshausens Cour-
age, who makes frequent use of the particular demography of the military
Racial Differences in Mortality in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia, The William and Mary

Quarterly, 3rd series, 51, no. 3, Mid-Atlantic Perspectives (July 1994): 473506; Elaine For-
man Crane, The Socioeconomics of a Female Majority in Eighteenth-Century Bermuda,
Signs 15, no. 2 (Winter 1990): 24648; Foote, Black and White, 7079; Shane White, We
Dwell in Safety and Pursue Our Honest Callings: Free Blacks in New York City, 17831810,
The Journal of American History 75, no. 2 (September 1988): 44767; Piersen, Black Yankees,
1422, 65142.
81This is not to say that groups like the Seminole did not attempt to claim kinship or
establish it over time, but rather that other approaches were necessary to create unity
in a largely refugee society. Kevin Mulroy, Freedom on the Border: The Seminole Maroons
in Florida, the Indian Territory, Coahuila and Texas (Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University
Press, 1993), 1034; Richard A. Sattler, Remnants, Renegades, and Runaways: Seminole
Ethnogenesis Reconsidered, in History, Power, and Identity: Ethnogenesis in the Americas,
14921992, ed. Jonathan David Hill (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1996), 3669;
Bodian, Hebrews; Northrup, Africas Discovery, 12535; Sweet, Recreating; Sweet, Mistaken
Identities?, 299300.
82See, for example, Bernard Moitt, Women and Slavery in the French Antilles, 16351848
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001), 14649; Simon David Smith, Slavery,
Family, and Gentry Capitalism in the British Atlantic: The World of the Lascelles, 16481834
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 31721, but cf. Walker, No More, No More,
118, 13348. For the discussion of weapons of the weak see James C. Scott, Weapons of the
Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985).
camps to achieve her ends, suggests that, difficult as it may be, recovering
the impact of such experiences is worth the effort.83
In two fairly consistent ways comparatively plebeian port women could
form a group identity to their advantage on the strength of their num-
bers, their networks, and their cultural creativity. On the one hand they
could fashion a public role and class identity in port communities through
carnivalesque performances and leisure time activities. Poor women and
enslaved women in New Orleans, Havana, and Kingstown, St. Vincent, for
example, shaped, expressed, and helped establish a class identity of sorts
through dance performances and tavern socializing in defiance of elites
and despite resistance from local authorities. These activities made use of
womens roles at the heart of network neighborhoods and took advantage
of the concentrations of people of different ethnic, religious, and cultural
backgrounds in Atlantic ports occurring through commercial circulation.
This form of subaltern circulation seems to have had greater prominence in
the Americas, which is possibly explained by the reality that the formation
of mixed-lineage groups proved far more fraught due to elite resistance
toand interaction withthe groups of women involved and as a con-
sequence of the politics of emancipation.84
On the other hand, non-elite women of many sorts successfully
extracted the right to work in the face of moral and economic strictures
in towns with Atlantic ties. In Europe, where corporate forms had their
fullest articulation, women faced restrictions on their economic activities,
as we have seen. Poorer women, however, were able to convert moral
obligations to support the poor to which local authorities subscribed (and
their realization that the poor needed to support themselves somehow)
into a de facto right to work. In French ports, for example, women suc-
cessfully pressed directly and indirectly for the freedom to run taverns or
sell wares in the markets and on the street. Women achieved the same
in smaller English provincial towns as well.85 This set of practices was
also durable enough to cross the Atlantic where those leading the new,
anti-corporate social orders in British and Dutch colonies and their ports
83von Grimmelshausen, Simplicianische Schriften, passim.

84Sheena Boa, Young Ladies and Dissolute Women: Conflicting Views of Culture and
Gender in Public Entertainment, Kingstown, St. Vincent, 18381888, in Gender and Slave
Emancipation, 25259; Dawdy, Building the Devils Empire, 99101, 13134, 18182; Walker,
No More, No More, 118, 13348; Mair, A Historical Study, 26894.
85Brunelle, Monopolizing Women; David Pennington, Women, Commerce, and
Social Relations in Early Modern England, (PhD diss., Washington University at St. Louis,
2007).
introduction 31
happily moralized against the poor as an other.86 Equally as portable were

attitudes regarding the appropriate recipients of charity.87 Poorer women
and widows in Boston, the Chesapeake, New York, and, albeit less often,
Philadelphia, successfully petitioned for the right to work, although here
their goal was often a license to run a public house.88 In like manner poor,
mixed-lineage, and slave women in ports from Charleston to New Orleans
to Rio de Janeiro insisted on and obtained the right to keep taverns and
inns and to sell in marketplaces.89
Natalie Zaceks contribution to this volume explores working womens
part in subaltern circulation in two new ways. In the first instance she
rereads the various types of women who played roles in British West Indies
societies, arguing that class played an important role in the European-
origin community. In contrast to what scholars have typically suggested,
her white women of modest means defined themselves not solely vis--vis
other racialized groups, but also in terms of their respectability as widows
of men who could no longer provide for them.90 In the same way that
poorer women in North American ports did, they implicitly invoked the
responsibility of men to provide for women and children in their petitions
for tavern-keeping licensurea metropolitan idea regarding community
responsibility for the deserving poorbut also inverted this moral nos-
trum by their agency in soliciting this help and by directing charity towards
86Charles R. Lee Public Poor Relief and the Massachusetts Community, 16201715,
The New England Quarterly 55, no. 4 (Dec., 1982): 57273, 58182; Nash, Poverty and Poor
Relief, 330; Janny Venema, Beverwijck: A Dutch Village on the American Frontier, 16521664
(Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2003), 33854.
87Nash, Poverty and Poor Relief, 45, 28; Lee, Public Poor Relief, 57273, 58182;
Venema, Beverwijck, 338.
88David Conroy, In Public Houses: Drink and the Revolution of Authority in Colonial
Massachusetts (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 11213; Zabin,
Womens Trading Networks, 308; Sarah Hand Meacham, Keeping the Trade: The Per-
sistence of Tavernkeeping among Middling Women in Colonial Virginia, Early American
Studies 3, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 143; Sharon V. Salinger, Taverns and Drinking in Early America
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 16472.
89Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 25053; Socolow, The Women, 12021; Dawdy, Building
the Devils Empire, 100101, 104107, 13037, 17588, 207; Hanger, Bounded Lives, 5866.
90As Zacek observes in her contribution to this volume, Barbara Bush was instru-
mental in establishing the terrain here in White Ladies, Coloured Favourites and Black
Wenches: Some Considerations on Sex, Race, and Class Factors in Social Relations in
the British Caribbean, Slavery and Abolition 2 (1981): 245 and this approach has proved
durable; see Trevor Burnard, Gay and Agreeable Ladies: White Women in Mid-Eigh-
teenth-Century Kingston, Jamaica, Wadabagei 9, no. 3 (2006): 28. That said, more recent
considerations of identity in the Caribbean are transforming this perspective along the
lines that Zaceks analysis suggests. See Shepherd, Unity and Disunity, Creolization and
Marronage in the Atlantic World, Atlantic Studies 1, no. 1 (April 2004): 5455, 61.
morally ambiguous establishments. Perhaps more than their mainland

counterparts, however, British West Indies women who operated tav-
erns shaped the nascent public sphere in the ports where they operated,
because colonial assemblies in the Caribbean often met in the same tav-
erns that everyday inhabitants patronized. In successfully shaping tav-
erns in the British West Indies into spaces that allowed women access
to the public sphere, these women supplemented their family role with a
respectable public role in the community.91
Prescriptive circulation complemented subaltern circulation, which
becomes apparent in the Atlantic mobility of legal codes and moral can-
ons. As Matthew Restalls reinterpretation of the Iberian conquest of the
Mexica has shown, legal forms, not facts on the ground, could count for
more in first establishing ones claims to imperialized territory or profits.92
Administrative codes like the Code Noir or the Siete Partidas, which framed
the terms on which one human being could make claims on the person
and labor of another in the French and Spanish Americas, also encoded the
realities of ongoing Atlantic circulation. Spanish authorities and especially
criollo elites adapted the Siete Partidas, a medieval law code, to new cir-
cumstances, developing, for example, coartacin, the practice of forcing
an owner to agree to free a slave at price agreed upon with that slave, in
Havana in the late seventeenth century.93 The French Code Noir proved
similarly protean. Its 1685 version saw manumission and mixed marriages
and relationships in a more positive light than its 1724 New Orleans itera-
tion, which also informed the later efforts of New Orleans elites to con-
test the introduction of Spanish legal norms starting in 1769 through the
Code Noir ou Loi Municipale.94 Possibly for this reason Saint-Domingues
free colored population was more prominent than its French New Orleans
counterpart.95
Prescriptive circulation could work to the advantage of marginal groups
as well, which Martha Shattuck and Kim Todts work on women traders
91See Natalie Zaceks contribution to this volume.

92Matthew Restall, Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2004), 126.
93Spear, Race, Sex, and Social Order, 116; Alan Watson, Slave Law in the Americas (Ath-
ens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 4263.
94Spear, Colonial Intimacies: Legislating Sex in French Louisiana, The William and
Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 60, no. 1 (Jan. 2003): 9798; Spear, Race, Sex, and Social Order,
5278, 102109.
95Nathalie Dessens, From Saint-Domingue to New Orleans: Migrations and Influences
(Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2007), 89; Dawdy, Building the Devils Empire,
18185.
introduction 33
in New Netherland shows unequivocally. There women made use of the

fact that the Amsterdam Chamber of the Dutch West India Company
transferred whole cloth the province of Hollands less patriarchal law to
its North American colony. This law allowed women to undertake legal
obligations more easily and thus to run businesses and otherwise par-
ticipate in economic affairs. The opposite could perhaps be said of the
case that Ernst Pijnings article takes up in this volume, that of a highly
mobile and elite French trader and migr active on the Isle of France
and in both Buenos Aires and Brazilian ports in the 1790s. Pijning sug-
gests that, while members of the Brazilian elite were often quite willing to
treat canons for elite womens behavior, which dictated a minimal public
role and presence, as flexible, when they did enforce them it was with
great rigidity indeed. Paradoxically, however, this sort of enforcement
likely eroded rather than supported efforts to restrict womens movement,
and the norms in play did not actually represent a universally agreed on
set of expectations within Portuguese ultramarine or metropolitan soci-
ety even for elite women according to Jnia Furtado. Alexandra Parma
Cooks account of womens lives in the maritime urban village of Triana
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries suggests yet another variation
on this theme. She demonstrates that while Spains legal structures may
not always have intended it, women nonetheless possessed consider-
able degrees of freedom in caring for themselves and those they loved.
This included participating fundamentally in the business of empire and
in weaving its profits into their communitys social fabric, a fabric that
enmeshed the lives of Trianas women with those of slaves (with women
acting as owners of and investors in slaves), ship captains, sailors and
others in maritime employ, and merchants both distant and nearby. If
Spains Atlantic dictated the details of these interconnections, the find-
ings of Todt and Shattuck (and others) that women in the Dutch Republic
shared in many of the same tasks suggest a phenomenon of important
European-wide import and global reach.96
If Hollands legal codes provide a contrast to their metropolitan coun-
terparts in terms of womens agency, encoded within them is another
surprise: a comparative indifference to patriliny when it came to chil-
dren and thus descent, and perhaps more surprising is the presence of a
96For Shattuck and Todt as well as Pijnings and Cooks findings see their contributions
to this volume. Further on the experiences of women in the Dutch Republic see Van der
Heijden, Achterblijvers and Van der Heijden and Van den Heuvel, Sailors Families.
similar indifference in legal systems in Spain and other parts of Europe.97

Jnia Furtado has taken up this matter in a fundamental way in her con-
sideration of the circulation of corporately defined nobility throughout
the Portuguese ultramarine realm. Ranging widely, she shows that from
Afro-Portuguese elites in the riverine towns and communities of Mozam-
bique to heiresses in regional ports in Brazil and adventurers in a range
of theaters, the Portuguese empire standardized and circulated nobility
with its notions of pure blood and patrilineality as an aspirational goal for
all. Yet, even as it did so, it often undermined that same goal by creating
circumstances in which women were the vehicles for nobilitys transmis-
sion and in which persons of non-white background became ennobled.
Neither sense of lineality (direction or source) as dictated by Portuguese
nobility was served. Through the story of Joanna Baptista, who sold herself
into slavery to maintain an honorable material existence for herself and
her offspring, Furtado demonstrates that this same slippage in categories
could just as easily arise at the bottom of the social order within the Luso-
phone world.98
Conclusion: Mapping Gender in Atlantic Space
As the case of Joanna Baptista brings home only too poignantly, pinning
down Atlantic hybridity would be a thankless task; it is as mutable as
the many faces of Grimmelshausens everywoman, Courage. At most we
have wanted to suggest a possible mapping of gender onto our under-
standing of the Atlantic through the framework provided by its intercon-
nected port communities. Circulation and translation perhaps best sum
up the pathways that the contributions of Women in Port have traced,
which suggest metropolitan translations moving from Europe and Africa
to the Americas as well as between Africa and Europe where gender is
concerned, and the need for scholars to accommodate an Atlantic that
turned on intersections within and between communities.99 African-
97On the presence of this phenomenon in a variety of European legal contexts, includ-
ing Spain, the authors would like to thank the audience, organizer, chair, and presenters
of the session on Female Power and Influence in Early Modern Spain at the Sixteenth
Century Studies Conference in Fort Worth, Texas (October 2011), and in particular Grace
Coolidge of Grand Valley State University for her helpful comments.
98For Furtados findings see her contribution to this volume.
99As Bruno Latour would put it, the contributors to Women in Port seek to render the
social connections [enveloping historical actors] traceable, so they (and we with them)
intentionally avoid making definitive statements as to all of the possible actions, pathways,
introduction 35
ists such as Jim Sweet, Robin Law, and Kristin Mann have brought an
important part of this story full circle by showing that those forced into
diaspora or migration with little resource still participated in producing
the social and cultural sedimentation whose impacts on both sides of the
Atlantic have become increasingly apparent. More recently Pamela Scully,
Diana Paton, Joseph Miller, Gwyn Campbell, and Suzanne Miers have
proposed that the rise of the modern civic stateto use Joseph Millers
terminologyand the press of market forces pushed women out of slav-
ery, but also shunted them to one side.100
We concur that the modern state as well as increasing commoditiza-
tion and the globalization of migration altered centuries of structural con-
stants around the Atlantic, especially in ports. Women no longer always
predominated numerically in ports or within key social groups.101 Addi-
tionally, from male national citizenship to friendly societies supporting
the male householder to market appropriation of family labor, women
faced a number of sea-changes in social forms certainly rendering their
lives something strange to them if not as rich in possibilities.102 Yet these
forces produced varied effects. In Europe, French and British agriculture
bore no resemblance to one another, just as French manufacturing did
not follow the path blazed by Britain and widened by Germany, which
means that pressures on family economies and the social forms associated
with production were quite different in France.103 In West Africa, women
retained their influence as household heads along the Upper Guinea
Coast and adapted to increasing commercialization and the ending of the
slave trade.104 Despite efforts to masculinize public life in ports from New
Orleans to the Caribbean to Brazil, women retained some control over
or destinations of the historical actors appearing in Women in Port. Latour, Reassembling,

3031.
100Sweet, Recreating; Law and Mann, West Africa in the Atlantic Community; Miller,
Preface, xvixxiii, 2532; Paton and Scully, Introduction, 1019.
101Akyeampong, Sexuality and Prostitution, 15759; Dessens, From Saint-Domingue,
2341, 92100; Hanger, Bound Lives, 27.
102The Tempest, 1.2.402404; Scully and Paton, Introduction, 1012, 1619; Melanie
Newton, Philanthropy, Gender, and the Production of Public Life in Barbados, 1790ca.
1850, in Gender and Emancipation, 22546.
103For the comparison of French agriculture with its British counterpart see French
Beans and Food Scares: Culture and Commerce in an Anxious Age (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press), 4755. On British, French, and German industrialization see Roger Collins,
A Concise History of France, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005),
16680.
104Philip Havik, From Pariahs to Patriots: Women Slavers in Nineteenth-Century Por-
tuguese Guinea, in Women and Slavery, vol. I, 30933.
public forms of expression that allowed them to push against class, gen-
der, and racial norms.105 Finally, even as market relations impinged on
household organization, women actually thrived by appropriating mar-
ket access to reweave their relationships and privileges into existences
separate from male control.106 For these normative departures to have
occurred, we argue that lives such as those that the contributors to Women
in Port have explored needed to establish patterns of behavior that made
later deviations conceivable and possible.
The coming pages approach the task of tracing the paths women fol-
lowed within three broad frameworks, each of which we consider in more
detail in the volumes three sections. In Metropolitan Frameworks, Alex-
andra Parma Cook, Gordon DesBrisay, Sheryllynne Haggerty, and Natalie
Zacek consider how women in Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire, the Brit-
ish Caribbean ports, Philadelphia, and Seville fared in experiments with
Atlantic commerce, proto-industry, and community-building that by turns
depended on, exploited, and enabled women. Section two, Traders and
Travelers, explores the world of women who created or benefited from
the commercial mobility undergirding Atlantic life. Gayle Brunelle, Mar-
tha Shattuck and Kim Todt, Ernst Pijning, and Jnia Furtado consider how
women across Portuguese ultramarine space to the more local worlds of
French and New Netherland ports balanced culture and opportunity as
they tapped into that mobility. In Interactions, the third and final sec-
tion of Women in Port, Ty Reese, Philip Havik, and Dominique Rogers and
Stewart King examine women traders, brokers, laborers, and household
heads in the ports of Upper Guinea, the Gold Coast, and Saint-Domingue
who sought to create largely or wholly independent spheres of action.
If we have learned nothing else from this project, it is that even the
rich variety of these womens lives cannot come close to representing all
womens lives in the Atlantic. If they nevertheless suggest that variety
while still holding onto what women in Atlantic ports shared, this project
will have been a success. It is in that spirit that we offer the pages that
follow.
105Walker, No More, No More, 3, 10, 4458; Joseph R. Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-
Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 5963; Anastasia Lou-
kaitou-Sideris and Renia Ehrenfeucht, Sidewalks: Conflict and Negotiation over Public Space
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 6874; Boa, Young Ladies, 25259; Martha Abreu,
Mulatas, Crioulos, and Morenas: Racial Hierarchy, Gender Relations, and National Iden-
tity in Postabolition Popular Song (Southeastern Brazil, 18901920), in Gender and Slave
Emancipation, 26788.
106Akyeampong, Sexuality and Prostitution, 15973.
SECTION one
METROPOLITAN FRAMEWORKS
The iconic Atlantic-world figure is a traveler, explorer, or merchant, cer-

tainly a man, and someone who leaves the familiar patterns of his home
society to venture out in pursuit of profit and glory. While most of our
attention to the Atlantic world has been drawn to the new patterns of
encounter and exchange created by these early adventurers, the first sec-
tion of our collection features essays that examine the lives of women
who were neither adventurers nor explorers. They were the women who
remained in their home communities or were ensconced in established
colonial societies; while most of them did not actively pursue a connec-
tion to the Atlantic world, they were nonetheless very much affected by
its existence. Although these were white women of European origin, and
among those who in theory profited the most from the products and labor
of the Atlantic world, the essays in this section largely focus on their lowest
ranks, the non-elite women whose lives have too often remained largely
in the shadows of Atlantic-world historiography. They lived in European
communities or in colonies that strove to replicate or at least react to
the social and cultural mores of their respective European metropoles.
Whether they experienced great prosperity or a constant struggle for sur-
vival, these essays demonstrate that one of the most significant factors
shaping womens relationships with the Atlantic world was the structur-
ing force of metropolitan frameworks.
Atlantic adventuring could produce enduring changes in womens lives
as happened in Seville, which, in the sixteenth century, was transformed
by the establishment of Spains American colonies into one of the larg-
est and most dynamic commercial ports in the Atlantic world. Alexandra
Parma Cooks research into the wills left by the residents of the Sevillian
neighborhood of Triana reveal the ways in which women took advantage
of the fluid social circumstances that arose in this suddenly booming port
community. Iberian prescriptive views of gender favored the image of
women as passive, obedient, and relegated to the domestic sphere, and
legal structures were generally oriented towards preserving the wealth
and authority of men. Nevertheless, women found a wide range of oppor-
tunities to support themselves and profit from their circumstances, often
38 section one
by taking advantage of precisely the same assumptions about proper gen-

der roles. Womens perceived vulnerability may have led to their favorable
treatment by parents in the distribution of inheritance and dowry money;
they also found that Atlantic commerce created rich possibilities in the
traditionally feminine areas of providing lodging and domestic service.
In a port city where men were often absent, women also acted in their
husbands stead or engaged in trade and investments of their own, mak-
ing the most of their extended family and neighborhood networks. While
Sevilles growth as a new Atlantic port city did not transform the social
or legal structures that framed Triana womens experiences, it did create
openings that they did not hesitate to take full advantage of.
Even where cultural shift was absent and women could not take advan-
tage of its momentum, Atlantic adventuring had an impact nonetheless.
The Scottish peasant women described by Gordon DesBrisay who carded,
combed, and spun wool for the coarse cloth known as plaiding probably
did not imagine themselves as players in a trans-national, trans-oceanic
commercial network. Like women across the rest of Europe, with the devel-
opment of cottage industry, they took on these tasks when time allowed
as a way of bringing in extra income to the household. But the cloth they
produced caught the eye of Dutch merchants, who gave it an unexpected
destination as uniforms, blankets, and tents for the slaves and indigenous
workers on Dutch sugar plantations in Brazil. For a brief period of time in
the mid-seventeenth century, this trade became a vital part of the Aberdo-
nian economy. It generated income that fed back into the community to
support improvements in the local infrastructure, hospitals, and welfare
systemsall of which were sharply curtailed as the income from plaiding
exports declined as suddenly as it had risen.
Thus the poorest people in a poor region at the farthest periphery
of Europes Atlantic archipelago found themselves directly drawn into
the political and economic vagaries of the Atlantic-world system. This
involved no structural transformation of the local economy, since rural
women already produced cheap woolens; merchants simply took advan-
tage of their flexible and cheap labor to increase production for their newly
acquired market. Nor did womens roles fundamentally change; they only
found themselves tied to the upheavals of the Atlantic trade world which
they did not understand and over which they certainly had no control.
For the port city of Philadelphia in the newly created United States, a
century later, Sheryllynne Haggerty emphasizes both the importance of
the legal and cultural legacy of the colonizing power and of changing eco-
nomic fortunes. In the political and economic context of independence,
metropolitan frameworks 39
Philadelphias men gained far more opportunities than its women, who
remained subservient to men under the heritage of the English legal struc-
ture. Examining the case of white working women, Haggerty argues that
they faced economic, social, political and cultural constraints that limited
their access to education, commercial activity, and wealth. As Philadel-
phia grew in size and economic significance, women participated in trade,
the production of textiles, and the provision of accommodations, and
the number of working women rose in proportion to the overall popula-
tion. The growth of the textile industry did not generate any significant
improvement in these womens economic conditions, however, and they
found themselves squeezed out of their role in running inns and taverns
as these gradually became more masculine spaces. Unlike the prosperous
businesswomen of New Netherland that we will see in Todt and Shat-
tucks essay in the following section, the working women of Philadelphia
found their professional opportunities largely framed by English assump-
tions about appropriate (but not greatly remunerative) female roles such
as teaching, nursing, and midwifery, and they remained on the economic
margins of society. Although they did the best that they could, only a com-
parative handful could benefit from the more open business environment
to achieve the success of their New Netherland (and later New York) sisters.
Natalie Zacek examines a similar group of non-elite white women, in
this case in the Leeward Islands of the British West Indies, and here too,
the interaction between metropolitan socio-legal forms and new forms of
commercial intercourse was evident. She demonstrates that, in the mid-
dle of the eighteenth century, and in keeping with the broader Atlantic
pattern of port towns, there was a substantial number of female-headed
households. Unlike the women of Seville, though, these women found
many of their traditional occupations as seamstresses, housekeepers, or
midwives taken up by slave and free women of color. Those women who
were not connected to elite plantation society therefore found themselves
channeled into the management of tavern and punch-houses, which in
the West Indies replicated their role in English villages as centers of white
working-class sociability. In fact, the context of the port city in this case
probably provided less fundamental change and new opportunity than
women might have found in rural plantation society. Nevertheless, Zacek
establishes that these women did gain from the elevated status that tav-
erns, punch houses, and establishments devoted to hospitality enjoyed
in the public sphere of ports that had a perennial shortage of meeting
spaces for political decision-making. Moreover, the experiences of these
women, heretofore nearly invisible in West Indies historiography, help
40 section one
break the stereotype held by contemporaries and historians of the West

Indies European woman migrant as an elite white plantation lady, though
they were still restricted to the roles and expectations created for them by
early modern English society. As in the case of Philadelphia, these work-
ing women were important to the local economy, but unlike the women
of Triana, they themselves profited only marginally from their ties to the
Atlantic world.
Each of these essays features women of European origin connected to
the social, economic, and legal frameworks of European cities and the
colonies that most closely replicated them. In the lives of most of these
women, the structures that governed society proved to be more powerful
than the transformational forces of the Atlantic economy, at least for the
women of European origin most obviously dependent on those societies.
They found new opportunities and challenges due to the links between
their port cities and the Atlantic world, and their labor was clearly essen-
tial to the success of Atlantic port cities. However, these ties brought
little structural change, and the women in question either prospered or
suffered according to the fortune of the positions they had traditionally
held. Yet, when we look to the margins of these cases, we note that some
women did benefit and could even change their lot by bending domi-
nant structures ever so slightly to their will. In some cases, such as that
of Triana, women were able to work within traditional constraints to gain
economic benefit if not substantial social mobility. In the case of Philadel-
phias few female merchants and the female proprietors of public houses
in the British West Indies, metropolitan forms actually bent before suc-
cessful efforts to take advantage of the greater pressure that commerce
exerted on notions of poor relief and mercantile regulation. In contrast,
the merchants of Aberdeen appear to have had little impact on their cir-
cumstances or on those of the peasant women they employed. Here soci-
etal constraints translated into limited (and very temporary) advantages
for elite and non-elite women alike, although this may have had less con-
nection to gender than to Scotlands niche in the Atlantic economy. These
examples collectively suggest that while white women in European societ-
ies and colonies were individually affected by the vagaries of the Atlantic
economy, they experienced the least structural change as compared to
the societies that experienced greater mixing with indigenous American
or African influences, as will be seen in other essays in this collection. At
the same time, they underscore the importance of not overlooking the
margins of womens experiences, even when the numbers involved may
be slight.
THE WOMEN OF EARLY MODERN TRIANA:
LIFE, DEATH, AND SURVIVAL STRATEGIES
IN SEVILLES MARITIME DISTRICT1
The worldly clauses in the wills of early modern residents of Triana, a par-
ish of Seville, constitute a rich source for economic and social history and
offer a glimpse into the lives of ordinary men and women of the period.
Spanish testaments were highly formulaic legal documents. In spite of
these limitations many of the testators, both men and women, provided
personal information which sheds light on their existence.2 With a few
exceptions, Trianas women were illiterate and left no letters or diaries,
yet their lives can be gleaned from notarial records, especially wills. The
women of Triana who speak through these documents are not the mar-
ginalized and passive participants traditionally portrayed, rather their
voices and actions highlight a more complex position in their families and
community. Their debts, business transactions, relationships with family
members, friends and business partners as well as servants and slaves per-
mit partial reconstruction of their lives. While their men were overseas,
Trianas women relied on close relatives, but also friends and neighbors,
in times of need or sickness. In contrast to some nations north of the Pyr-
enees, laws governing inheritance and dowry gave Spanish women some
degree of financial security. Children regardless of sex inherited equally
and women were entitled to a full return of their dowries in case the
1I would like to thank James Boyden, N. D. Cook, Juan Gil, Asuncin Lavrin, Victor
Uribe and Consuelo Varela for commenting onan earlier version of thiswork. I am grateful
to the editors of this volume DougCatterall and especiallyJodi Campbell for their insight-
ful suggestions and guidance.
2The wills and the other notarial documents used for this chapter are just a small sample
of the rich sources available. Morell Peguero, Mercaderes y artesanos en la Sevilla del descu-
brimiento (Seville: Diputacin Provincial, 1986), used wills extensively in her work along with
other notarial records, as did Allyson M. Poska, Women and Authority in Early Modern Spain:
The Peasants of Galicia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Asuncin Lavrin and Edith
Couturier, Dowries and Wills: A View of Womens Socioeconomic Role in Colonial Guada-
lajara and Puebla, 16041709, Hispanic American Historical Review 59 (1979): 280304, have
pointed out the importance of wills in studying women of colonial Mexico. See also Eugene
H. Korth, S. J. and Della M. Flusche, Dowry and Inheritance in Colonial Spanish America:
Peninsular Law and Chilean Practice, The Americas 43 (April 1987): 395410.
42 alexandra parma cook
marriage ended. Though as wives or daughters they were ostensibly under

the control of men, a closer look reveals that many of Trianas women
were actively involved in their lives, and if necessary, unafraid to demand
their legal rights. Women in port cities such as Seville, and specifically
in Triana, enjoyed a unique position compared to other early modern
Spanish women. The men often traveled overseas leaving their wives and
sometimes mothers or sisters to act for them in their absence. It was com-
mon for men to provide their wives or other female relatives with a power
of attorney to carry out various types of transactions, such as collect their
salaries, rents, or debts as well as enter into business contracts or act in
disputes.
Sevilles role as Spains premier port of the transatlantic trade trans-
formed a relatively modest commercial center into one of the largest and
most cosmopolitan cities in Europe. Sevilles permanent heads of house-
hold (vecinos) rose from approximately 9,000 to 26,000 between the 1530s
and the 1580s.3 Estimates for the total population of the city in the 1580s
range from 100,000 to 150,000. No parish grew more rapidly than Santa
Ana of Triana, which at the end of the sixteenth century was the citys
second largest. Triana, the maritime and manufacturing quarter of Seville,
lay across the river from the walled city. It changed from a sleepy neigh-
borhood of 817 vecinos in 1534 to a vibrant district of 3,115 vecinos in 1588,
not counting a constant stream of estantes, who remained in Triana only
until they could embark on the latest fleet, or while they were conduct-
ing business that brought them to the city. Seville, an inland port, is con-
nected to the Atlantic Ocean by the Guadalquivir River, which empties
into the sea at Sanlcar de Barrameda.4
3The status of vecino carried with it certain economic privileges and those not born in
the city could apply for vecindad. Men could become vecinos through marriage to a local
woman. See Blanca Morell Peguero, Mercaderes y artesanos, 16061.
4For population estimates, see Ruth Pike, Aristocrats and Traders: Sevillian Society
in the Sixteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972), 1213, and Antonio
Domnguez Ortiz, La sociedad espaola en el siglo XVII (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Inves-
tigaciones Cientficas, 1964), 14041. There is an extensive literature by Spanish historians
on sixteenth and seventeenth century Seville. The most comprehensive to date are the
volumes by Francisco Morales Padrn, Historia de Sevilla: La ciudad del quinientos (Seville:
Universidad de Sevilla, 1983), and Antonio Domnguez Ortiz, Historia de Sevilla: La Sevilla
del siglo XVII (Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 1986). See also Mary Elizabeth Perry, Crime
and Society in Early Modern Seville (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1980),
and the same authors Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville (Princeton, NJ: Prince-
ton University Press, 1990); see also Ruth Pike, Enterprise and Adventure: The Genoese in
Seville and the Opening of the New World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966).

women of early modern triana
A view of Seville with the port district of Triana in the foreground. Ambrogio Brambilla, 1585. The original work is
43
part of the holdings of the Biblioteca Nacional de Espaa, which has declared the original and this image to be in
the public domain.
Trianas inhabitants in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not

include Sevilles wealthiest men and women, but the barrio was populated
by a diverse mix of merchants and shopkeepers, artisans, day laborers,
and farmers. Many ship captains, pilots, and masters, sailors, caulkers and
shipwrights and their wives or widows lived in Triana. There were doc-
tors, barbers, and priests, as well as numerous personnel connected to the
Inquisition, which was housed in the Triana castle. The barrio was also
home to Moriscos (converts from Islam), gypsies, free blacks, and slaves
owned by some of the more prosperous residents. And, like the rest of
Seville, Triana had its share of the underclass that went largely unrecorded
and whose activities are difficult to reconstruct.
Many Triana women had family members in New Spain, Peru, Cuba, His-
paniola or other parts of the Americas and the Philippines. Trianas men,
especially those associated with the transatlantic trade, whether as sailors or
caulkers, ships notaries or barbers, or merchants, were often absent, leaving
their wives to fend for themselves and their families. Oftentimes, women were
given a power by their husbands or male siblings, drawn up by a notary, to
conduct business or to enter into contracts. Sometimes the wives of the arti-
sans or sailors who worked on ships or resided in the Americas supported
themselves by entering into service or engaging in small business or selling
goods such as embroidery. The length of the mens stay overseas varied, but at
a minimum lasted from the day a fleet left Seville, or Sanlcar de Barrameda,
until it returned several months later. Some men remained abroad, either com-
pletely abandoning their wives and families, or sending meager and irregular
remittances. Many men died overseas, drowning or succumbing to diseases.
It was a rare family in Triana that did not have a relative in the Indies.
In the absence of their male relatives, the women of Triana employed
various strategies to help support their households. A fishermans widow,
Francisca Gonzlez, whose only brother lived in Cuba, had been caring for
her parents, was raising a son and was forced to make some repairs to her
house. She had used up money left over from her dowry and although her
parents left her a small inheritance, she had yet to collect it. In order to help
pay her expenses, Francisca was earning extra money sewing and embroider-
ing. Some of the items she sold in Seville, but others she consigned for sale
overseas. For example, she had entrusted Captain Baltasar Riberol with six
embroidered pillows and four small cushions, so that he sells them for me in the
Indies. She was waiting for the proceeds from them when she prepared her
will.5 Another woman, doa Gernima de Almansa, widow of Captain
5Archivo Histrico Provincial de Sevilla (hereafter AHPS), protocolos notariales, 16135

(30. 6. 1599).
women of early modern triana 45
Gernimo de Porras, was expecting money from the Indies in June of 1599.
She had given money and goods to several people to invest or sell for
her. She transferred over 8,000 reales (727 ducats) to Pedro Rodrguez to
invest in silk, and gave charcoal merchant Martn Gonzlez 140 ducats to
engage in trade for her. She reported she had received from him a cer-
tain amount of maravedies in profit. Doa Gernima had delivered to
Captain Gaspar de Maya, who is in the Indies, 116 varas6 of taffeta, some
mens shirts, and other things that I do not remember, in order that he
take them to the Indies to be sold. She directed that when the captain
returned, all that he says in his conscience that he brings me in profit and
proceeds of the said merchandise, should be collected from him.7
Other women in Triana engaged in trade. For example, Juan Antonio,
an oars maker/trader, received forty ducats from widow Juana Beltrn
and fifty ducats from her daughter, Mara de San Bernardo, to trade
with them in oars for loss or profit.8 In June of 1599 the widow Isabel
Rodrguez entered into a contract with Diego Lorenzo, master of the ship
San Jorge, preparing to sail to New Spain. Isabel was planning to send on
the ship two large casks of red wine, ninety-six jars of olives, fourteen jars
of large capers, and nine barrels of small capers. She was also sending a
large box of various tools, such as two dozen saws and a hammer and a
hatchet. Diego Lorenzo pledged to load the merchandise on the ship and
to take it to be sold in New Spain for the best prices I can, for cash, and
not on credit, and to send the proceeds to you registered to this city of
Seville. The ship master also promised to give Isabel a receipt signed
with my name. The money was to come registered to Isabel and in case
of her absence any of her four daughters could receive the proceeds of
the sale.9 Such activities were not uncommon. Living in a city that played
such a significant role in transatlantic trade provided numerous opportu-
nities for not just men, but many women, to send goods to be sold in the
Americas.
In a port city such as Seville with a large transient population, and
particularly in a district such as Triana, a favorite layover for sailors and
others associated with the Indies trade, a woman could support herself
by providing lodging. Women, widowed, married, or single, rented out
rooms in their houses and supplied food for their boarders. For example,
Francisco Martn, a sailor from Ceuta, stated that he had been for four
6A vara was a measure equivalent to about 835 millimeters.

7AHPS, protocolos notariales, 16135 (24. 6. 1599).
8AHPS, protocolos notariales, 2390 (28. 10. 1588), 382v83v.
days in the lodgings of Gernima Daz, I mean five days, and these lodg-
ings are in Triana. He ordered that she be paid whatever she says upon
her conscience that she deserves.10 A widow, Mara Prez, gave power
of attorney to a cleric to collect for her from sailor Lorenzo Alvarez de la
Vega, 400 pesos (291 ducats) that the aforesaid owes me from the time
that I gave him lodging and food in my house. This large sum included
other things and the costs of litigation that he had been ordered to pay
by the courts.11
Women whose husbands extended their stay in the Indies often com-
plained of being poor and unable to provide for their children. Some
became dependent on their relatives while waiting for their husbands
to return or send money, and may have entered into service in the rela-
tives household. Others may have used their skills, such as embroidery
and sewing, or participated in other occupations, to sustain their families.
Women in higher strata of society did not work, but on the lower rungs of
the social ladder, girls were often placed into service by their parents or
guardians. Morell Peguero found Sevillian women engaged in a variety of
occupations, from olive pickers to bakers, fishmongers, or washerwomen.
Women acted as midwives, and many ran small shops, and this was true
not only of widows but also of single and married women.12
Many men sent money from overseas to their wives in Triana through
other family members, friends, or an agent. It is common to find receipts
such as the one given by Isabel Daz to Marcos de Camino for fifty
ducats that her husband, Diego Martn Callejas, sent her from Cuba. Diego
gave the money to Marcos about a year earlier in Havana and asked him
to deliver it to his wife in Triana.13 Trianas women depended on such
sources of income and used it as collateral in obtaining loans from family,
friends, and neighbors. The money was registered at the point of depar-
ture and then collected at the Casa de la Contratacin (House of Trade)
in Seville. The recipient had to file petitions in order to collect the funds,
even small amounts, which could take weeks at best, but usually dragged

11AHPS, protocolos notariales, 16139 (25. 9. 1600). A peso was worth eight reales.
12Morell Peguero, Mercaderes y artesanos, 7276. The author cites an example of a
sailor whose wife owned a shop, p. 75. See also Ida Altman, Emigrants and Society: Extrema-
dura and Spanish America in the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1989), 112, regarding a wifes participation in family business. In her discussion of artisans
in Cceres and Trujillo, Altman also notes: Bakers and cheese vendors were almost always
women, p. 109.
13AHPS, protocolos notariales, 2387, ff. 453rv.
on for months. Sometimes the transaction was complicated. Cristbal

Vicente, a cleric at the church of Santa Ana, stated in his will that Captain
Francisco Prez is sending me eighty ducats from the Indies. The money
did not belong to him, but rather to Francisca Muoz, whose husband,
Andrs Martn, was sending it to her. The cleric declared, [the ducats] are
hers even though they come directed to me, and I have no part in them,
and he gave Francisca power if it is necessary for the collection of it.
Francisca lived in the priests house and was likely his housekeeper. She
was possibly a relative, for he bequeathed to her twenty ducats and the
house that he lived in for the last life.14
Dowry and inheritance laws provided Spanish women with a degree of
financial security and control over their lives. According to Spanish law,
the amount of dowry and the husbands marriage gift, the arras, were to
be returned to the woman should the marriage end by death or any other
reason. A widow was entitled to collect the full amount of her dowry and
the arras before any other division of the deceased husbands property was
made. Women were also entitled to half of any jointly acquired property
(bienes multiplicados). Marriages without dowries were not that uncom-
mon, but a good dowry often influenced the quality of the match, and
the long-term prospects for social and economic betterment.15 Because
of their significance in determining a womans position in her family and
community, dowry inventories were very detailed and included the value
of every item listed. Part of the dowry was often in cash and the rest could
range from a house through a bed and all its furnishings to a couple of
napkins or handkerchiefs. The amount and type of items varied with the
socioeconomic position of the bride. During marriage the husband was to
administer the couples property, including the dowry, though he needed
the wifes consent for any transaction involving her assets. Furthermore,
women often actively participated in investment decisions, as we shall
see. Trianas women, as women elsewhere in Spain, guarded their dower
rights and if necessary filed complaints against or sued their husbands to
protect their dowries. When Cecilia Corzas merchant husband wanted to
finance his trip to the Indies by selling a bond that was my dowry, arras
and half of multiplicados, she not only protested but took her husband

15Lavrin and Couturier, Dowries and Wills, discuss the role of dowries, pp. 28285.
The authors report 14 percent of the women they studied had no dowries at the time of
marriage, pp. 29394.
to court claiming that the money from this bond was used for her living
expenses while her husband was overseas.16
Doa Ins de Alfaro, second wife of the wealthy Triana merchant Gaspar
Luis, faced a potentially complex inheritance. Doa Ins had provided her
husband with a substantial dowry, and as he acknowledged in his will, her
money allowed the couple to prosper. Doa Ins took care to safeguard
her possessions during the marriage and after her husbands death contin-
ued to administer not only her dower properties but also the inheritance
of her minor children. Doa Inss husband, Gaspar Luis, had five children
from his first marriage and three of them, sons, lived in Peru. About fif-
teen years before his death the merchant had traveled to Peru, planning
to stay there for six years, with doa Inss permission. He intended to
sell some merchandise and also to track down two of his wayward sons,
who had absconded with some goods Gaspar had sent with them to sell.
When applying for a license to travel to the Indies, he accused his two
sons of taking his property and leaving him poor.17 It is unclear how
Gaspar resolved his differences with these young men, but as he lay dying
in September of 1599, he left them and the other son who lived in the
Indies their legitimate share: 500 ducats each (the oldest son had already
collected 250 ducats of his legacy). He implored his sons not to ask for
anything or molest the said doa Ins de Alfaro, my wife. Another son
had become a monk in the monastery of the order of the Minim friars,
La Victoria, in Triana and it cost his father 700 ducats to secure his entry.
His only daughter from the first marriage was a nun in the Mercedarian
convent of La Asuncin in Seville. Gaspar gave the hefty sum of 1,700 ducats
as dowry for his daughter to enter the convent. As was customary, both
religious siblings had renounced their legacies. Gaspar Luis had married
his second wife doa Ins de Alfaro in 1579, and the couple had three
children: doa Mara de Alfaro, doa Catalina de Alfaro, and Clemente de
Alfaro, who became his universal heirs. It was a profitable union for the
Triana merchant. Doa Ins had both wealth and prestige, as suggested
by the fact that none of their children carried their fathers last name
16AHPS, protocolos notariales, 16133 (23. 8. 1598). Poska, Women and Authority, 14446,
notes for Galician women a similar pattern of partnership with their husbands in terms of
managing their joint properties and the dowry. See also Alexandra Parma Cook and Noble
David Cook, Good Faith and Truthful Ignorance: A Case of Transatlantic Bigamy (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 7172.
17Archivo General de Indias (AGI), Indiferente General, n. 165.
(two of his sons from the first marriage did).18 Indeed, Gaspar Luis con-
fessed in his will that most of the property that I presently have belongs
to the said doa Ins de Alfaro, adding that his current possessions were
acquired using his wifes money. At about the time Gaspars first wife died,
he had entered into a partnership with a silk merchant, Juan Lpez de
Herrera, and went bankrupt. He lost 12,000 ducats in this venture and I
then remained poor and lost. He reiterated: and what there is at present
was earned again with the property of doa Ins and my care and cau-
tion. The merchant charged doa Ins with safekeeping the money he
left for his three sons in Peru until my said sons come or send to collect
it.19
Given the complexity of the family situation, Gaspar Luis included
an inventory of doa Inss dowry. The couple lived in houses on Car-
reteros Street20 that originally belonged to doa Ins, though Gaspar
added, which I have repaired during the time I have lived in them.
The dowry included a corral de vecinos, a rooming house with a central
shared patio. Numerous corrales existed throughout Seville, providing
relatively low-income housing for the renters and a source of income for
their owners.21 Doa Ins brought in as part of her dowry a mulata slave,
Benita. There were also household goods and jewelry. All this was worth
500 or 600 ducats. Moreover, Gaspar Luis stated I gave her and now
again order to give her 200,000 maravedies (535 ducats) in arras.22 Gaspar
also bequeathed doa Ins as gracia y donacin a fifth of his property,
the maximum allowed under the law, because of the great friendship I
feel and much gratification I have received from her. Although this was
a formulaic statement, not every husband felt compelled to add it. Using
income from the corral, Gaspar made his two children who had entered
the Church a life-long annual gift of twelve ducats for his daughter and six
ducats for his son. Only in his sons case did he specify what the money
should be spent on: to buy books and for his pleasure or anything he
18AHPS, protocolos notariales, 16134 (9. 9. 1599). For naming patterns see Ida Altman,
Transatlantic Ties in the Spanish Empire: Brihuega, Spain and Puebla, Mexico, 15601620
(Stanford: Stanford California Press, 2000), 14750.
20Todays Fabi Street.
21See Francisco Morales Padrn, Los Corrales (Seville: Grupo Andaluz de Ediciones,
1981), for a brief study of surviving corrales in Seville and Triana; and Morell Peguero,
Mercaderes y artesanos, 12324.
22According to law fifty of the Laws of Toro, the arras, or marriage gift, was not to
exceed 10 percent of the total value of the grooms property.
wanted.23 But because the corral was his wifes dower property, the mer-
chant added, this is ordered with the consent and goodwill of the said
doa Ins de Alfaro, my wife, who is present.24 In his will, as most men
in Triana, Gaspar Luis named his wife as guardian and administrator of
the persons and property of their three minor children, without having
to post bond.25 Doa Inss case is illustrative of a woman who partici-
pated in her familys financial decisions, especially when her own proper-
ties were involved. While Gaspar Luis was away in the Indies doa Ins
conducted the necessary transactions including selling a slave. And as his
widow she continued the partnership that her husband had established,
selling cloth for profit.26
While older widows were less likely to marry again, younger widows
would at times remarry men in the same profession as their deceased hus-
bands. It was usually a mutually beneficial arrangement, at least from the
business standpoint. The dowry agreements of such matches were among
the most detailed in order to spell out clearly every item and its value that
the widow brought into the marriage. In this way the estate could be pro-
tected. Francisca de Len, the second wife of barber Juan de Hinojosa, was
pregnant when her husband died. The couple was married for nine years
and already had four children. Juan also had three daughters from his first
marriage.27 In order to ensure that his heirs received any money owed
to him, the barber left a detailed list of debtors in his will. Hinojosa had
worked in two monasteries, Los Remedios and San Isidoro del Campo, and
other parties had standing orders with the barber to go to their houses
for whatever may be necessary in my profession.28 These regular services
rendered by the barber involved bloodletting and cupping as well as the
hairdressing aspects of his profession, including the trimming or shaving
of beards.29 Francisca de Len married another barber within a year and a
23AHPS, protocolos notariales, 16134 (9. 9. 1599). Gaspar Luis died within a month after
this. On November 17 Fray Melchor returned the six ducats of income to his stepmother.
26AHPS, protocolos notariales, 2380, ff. 648v49r; 2409, ff. 239r40r.
27Poska, Women and Authority, 16466, notes that Galician widowers were much more
likely to remarry than widows. Men whose wives may have died in childbirth needed
someone to care for the baby and other young children left motherless.
29Regarding barbers, see Anastasio Rojo Vega, Enfermos y sanadores en la Castilla del
siglo XVI (Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid, 1993), 3435. See also Alexandra Parma
Cook and Noble David Cook, The Plague Files: Crisis Management in Sixteenth-Century
Seville (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2009), 38, 17172.
half following Hinojosas death. Before Francisca remarried she had relied
on an apprentice, Bartolom Garca de las Casas, to fulfill the tasks of a
barber and use the equipment left by her husband. The apprentice stayed
on after she remarried and in April of 1605 he presented witnesses to tes-
tify that he was an experienced and capable barber ready to be examined.
A witness testified that he had seen him work in the house of the widow
of Juan de Hinojosa who now is married to Hernn Lpez, also a barber.30
When Francisca remarried she brought into the new marriage as part of
her dowry (valued at 431 ducats) a barbers grinder with all that belongs
to it and a black mule that operates the said mill. Appraised at forty duc-
ats, it was an expensive piece of equipment, yet for a barber with several
standing orders at four ducats or more a season, it was a good invest-
ment. Hinojosas widow also gave her new husband two barbers basins.31
Young widows often returned home and brought back with them their
original dowry and arras, as well as half of any joint earnings. Mara de
Aldana married the miller Cristbal Rodrguez in 1598 and her mother,
Teresa Garca, an active widow of a wine merchant, had given her 350
ducats in dowry. Within a short period of time Maras husband died and
she came to live with her widowed mother. In her will Teresa stated that
when Mara returned home, she turned over to me all of the dowry that
she had received and another 250 ducats; some in cash and some in goods
that she gained during the brief marriage. Teresa, who had eight chil-
dren, was careful to establish in her testament that the approximately 600
ducats belonged to Mara and should remain apart from the total inheri-
tance that was to be divided between seven of her children (one son had
become a monk and renounced his legtima).32 Within ten days after
Teresa dictated her will she died. A few days later Mara de Aldana issued
a receipt to the executor of her mothers will for 5,142 reales (467 ducats),
the partial payment of the 600 ducats that I took to the house of...my
mother when I became a widow. The receipt included a full inventory
of all the goods that comprised the sum; only fifty ducats (in reales) was
paid in cash, the rest were household goods, clothing, some jewelry and
fifty fanegas of chickpeas.33 Mara remarried several months after her
mothers death and she gave her new husband, an official at the public
30AHPS, protocolos notariales, 16158, 764r66v.

31AHPS, protocolos notariales, 16139 (19. 11. 1600). One of Hinojosas daughters was also
married to a barber.
granary, as my dowry goods items that were appraised at 6,090 reales

(554 ducats); there were only sixteen fanegas of chickpeas left.34
Isabel Ruiz de Cabrera, a millers widow, had seven children: three sons
and four daughters. Two sons, one a sailor and caulker and the other one
a miller, had died and the third son, Jusepe Mrquez, was a farmer. All the
daughters had married, one was now a widow, and one, Leonor, lived in
the Indies with her husband. Two of Isabels daughters were already dead,
and one left a daughter, Isabels granddaughter, Ana de Santa Ana, who
was now married, also to a miller. In her will Isabel declared that three
of her daughters had each received more or less sixty ducats in dowry.
Leonor actually received 120 ducats in dowry from her mother according to
a receipt signed by Leonors husband before the couple left for the Indies.35
Isabel did not mention any dowry for her other deceased daughter. She
also stated that her son Jusepe had not received anything. She named her
children and her granddaughter as heirs.36 Two days later Isabel dictated
a codicil: I declare that when I married my daughter Catalina de Santa
Ana, my son Jusepe Mrquez loaned me twenty ducats to complete the
dowry. Her son also loaned her ten ducats toward the dowry of another
daughter, which Isabel Ruiz ordered repaid from the estate. Jusepe, unlike
his sisters, had not received any gifts from his mother and was going to
share the inheritance equally with his sisters and his niece. Therefore
Isabel (or her son) wanted to ensure that the thirty ducats he had loaned
her would not become part of the total.37
In a maritime neighborhood such as Triana, husbands were often en
route to or from the Indies, while their wives were pregnant or gave birth,
and sometimes they never came back. Pregnancy and childbirth consti-
tuted a well-known risk to a womans life and it was not unusual for preg-
nant women to draw up their testaments. In doing so, the woman would
ensure that her childrens legitimate inheritance, including that of her
unborn, would be protected. It was in the will that the testator noted any
debts owed to her and directed the executor to collect the debt. The chil-
dren would inherit in equal parts their mothers estate, which included the
value of her dowry and arras, and her half of any jointly earned property.
In the testament, the woman could also specify extra gifts she wished to
give to any of her children. On June 25, 1599, Mara Gernima, a caulkers

35AHPS, protocolos notariales, 2388 (8. 4. 1588), 1031v32v.
36AHPS, protocolos notariales, 16156 (31. 12. 1604, entrando el ao...1605).
wife, composed her will in the midst of a deadly plague epidemic. She was
ill and pregnant with her third child, and her husband had just set sail for
the Indies. Several of Maras bequests were contingent on when my said
husband returns from New Spain. She bequeathed twenty-nine ducats to
her mother for being my mother and the friendship I feel toward her.
She had modest debts, including five reales to a woman who sold her some
linen, and three reales and six maravedies to a blind woman who prays in
my house. Mara diligently noted the few people who owed her money,
including her brother, who owed seven ducats and five reales, that I had
spent in curing his wife of the illness that she had and in the funeral I gave
her. Her brother had already repaid twelve reales. Mara also loaned five
ducats to her cousin Catalina. She had given Gernimo Librero 100 reales
to buy wheat for her, and she had only received a partial shipment of it.
Hence, she instructed her heirs to collect the rest of it. She also had paid
Juana Ochoa to sew some shirts for her and for her child. Yet, Mara was
unable to pay for masses for her soul and instructed her executors to wait
until her husband returned to say them and pay the customary alms.38
Maras situation was not uncommon in a port city such as Seville. As a
caulker, her husband was often absent while she cared for their children
and other family members. Women like Mara helped each other out in
sickness or during pregnancy and made decisions regarding their daily
survival based on income that would eventually be either sent to them or
brought back when their husbands returned.
Some Triana residents, including women, were involved in the slave
trade, either directly, as part owners of a ship, or because they sent mer-
chandise to be sold in Africa. Sevillian ships frequently made stops in
African ports, especially in the years between 1580 and 1640 when the
Portuguese and Spanish Crowns were united. There the proceeds of the
sale of goods were used to purchase slaves, who were then taken to be
sold in the slave markets of Cartagena de Indias or New Spain, with profits
returning to Seville. For example, Magdalena Merina and her husband,
wine merchant Pedro Gmez, sent to Guinea, the province of Angola,
certain jugs of wine, and olives and some hams and coral and other
things.39 Magdalena forgot the agents name, but noted that he gave
me a written agreement which is in my power. She added I am expect-
ing the return of this at any moment. The nature of the trade is more

fully illustrated in the case of Mara de las Casas, wife of barber-surgeon

Juan Lpez. The barber-surgeon had fallen ill and was too weak to sign
his short testament. He left all the funeral arrangements and masses up
to his wife, Mara de las Casas, who was his heir and one of the execu-
tors of the will. He stated that he had bought one third of the Nuestra
Seora del Rosario with another partner, Diego Bez Mndez, who was
also his bondsman (and the other executor of his will), for more than
7,000 reales (636 ducats). Each was to pay half, but neither he nor I have
given any money.40 Only the wealthiest Sevillians owned ships outright.
Many lesser investors, including women, held a share, typically one-third
of a ship. Eight days after the testament was written, Mara de las Casas,
now a widow, gave power to Diego Bez Mndez to make any necessary
payments for her.41 Mara also gave power of attorney to three different
men on the Nuestra Seora del Rosario, in case one or two of them died
or proved unable to act for her, to collect the merchandise that I have on
the said ship and that belongs to me as my husbands heir. She charged
them to sell it in the Rivers of Guinea...and employ it in slaves...and
take them loaded in the said ship or another one to any ports or parts
of the Indies...and sell them at the best prices.42 Nuestra Seora del
Rosario with her cargo of slaves was headed for Cartagena de Indias, and
Mara wanted to ensure that she collected all the fees and profits due to
her as the mistress of the third part of the ship.43 Mara de las Casass
signature on all the documents, clear and confident, reveals an educated
woman. Her determination to collect her due in the unsavory trade in
human beings suggests a capable widow intent on continuing her hus-
bands business and ensuring adequate income for herself. It was common
for widows to maintain their husbands investments or take over their
occupations, hiring skilled craftsmen if necessary. Because seafaring men
and merchants often relied on their wives to oversee their affairs and act
on their behalf during their frequent absences, widows in a port city such

42AHPS, protocolos notariales, 16139 (1. 9. 1600). For a survey of the transatlantic slave
trade, see Herbert S. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999), and for detailed information on available records, see David Eltis, Stephen D.
Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert S. Klein, eds., The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A
Database on CD-ROM (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
as Seville would be more likely to step in following their husbands death

and keep up the activities.44
Legitimate children, regardless of gender, inherited in equal parts their
parents property. Only when the testator lacked legitimate offspring could
others become heirs, normally family members or the Church.45 Parents
generally declared in their testaments any money or gifts that their children
already had received, and unless otherwise stated, this counted toward
the inheritance of each child. For example, children were given money
(or goods whose value was recorded) when they married or needed funds
to help them travel to the Indies. Although legitimate children were to
receive equal shares of the estate, parents often meliorated some of their
offspring, either with money, jewelry, or income from investments or real
estate. Some parents confirmed in their wills a previous gift or dowry and
set it apart from the total inheritance. At times, even in these gifts (mejo-
ras), parents attempted to be equitable in giving each child more or less
a similar value. But more often, some children were clearly preferred over
others and it appears that a perceived need played a role in the distribu-
tion. It was not unusual in Triana for daughters to be given mejoras such as
a house in the second life, money for their dowry, or proceeds from a cer-
tain business transaction.46 Daughters were considered more vulnerable
and in need of more protection. Whereas boys could become apprentices
in a variety of crafts, remunerative work for women was more limited. A
house meant a better prospect for marriage; it would be counted toward a
dowry, and should the daughter remain unmarried, it afforded her a place
to live and potentially provided a source of income.
44Morell Peguero, Mercaderes y artesanos, 7677, provides several examples of widows

continuing their husbands businesses. See also the chapter on widows in Poska, Women
and Authority, esp. 17375.
45According to the laws of Toro promulgated in 1505, law six specified the order of suc-
cession regarding ascending heirs when there were no legal descendants. See Compendio
de los comentarios extendidos por el maestro Antonio Gmez, a las ochenta y tres leyes de
Toro (1785) facsimile edition (Valladolid: Lex Nova, 1981).
46None of the testators in this study established an entailed estate, or mayorazgo.
Poska, Women and Authority, 4450, discusses inheritance practices in Galicia. She found
that along coastal areas daughters were preferred for a mejora, whereas in the more inland
regions the preference decreased. Poska attributes the difference to greater male migration
in coastal communities, something that might also apply in Triana. Muriel Nazzari, Disap-
pearance of the Dowry: Women, Families, and Social Change in So Paulo, Brazil (16001900)
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 1823, also noted that daughters were favored
over sons. See also the same authors Parents and Daughters: Change in the Practice of
Dowry in So Paulo (16001770), Hispanic American Historical Review 70 (1990): 63965;
and Korth and Flusche, Dowry and Inheritance, 40710.
It was not uncommon for Trianeros to inherit from relatives who had
died in the Americas. When Mara Alvarezs aunt died in Cartagena de
Indias she left her estate to her niece in Triana. Mara was certain that
when my said aunt died...Pedro de Zavallos (the aunts husband, a gold-
smith) had and at present has much property worth more than a thou-
sand ducats, which my aunt bequeathed to me, and more.47 Widows and
children of men who had died in the Indies or during the transatlantic
voyage often collected their inheritance in Seville, at the Casa de la Con-
tratacin, a process that could take years. Antonia Gonzlezs second hus-
band, Gernimo Ruiz, an embroiderer, had died in Lima about three years
earlier and she was expecting to inherit 5,000 ducats and up. Antonia
ordered the executors of her will to collect everything that appears to be
mine and that my said husband had bequeathed me. In her testament
she made several bequests and ordered numerous masses, but all were
contingent on when my said property that I have in the Indies arrives.
She added poignantly, because at present I do not have any property.
She gave her niece, Mara, 100 ducats pending the arrival of the 5,000 duc-
ats she expected, and if less should come then the amount should be
discounted.48
The transatlantic journey was long and fraught with danger. Two major
fleets were dispatched each year, one to New Spain and one to the main-
land of northern South America, Tierra Firme. A large number of ships
accompanied by warships and soldiers traveled together for protection.
The Spanish fleets were constant targets of corsairs. Inclement weather
caused frequent shipwrecks. People drowned after being swept overboard.
Illness during the sea voyage or in the notoriously unhealthy seaports
was not uncommon.49 Given the uncertainties and perils facing travelers,
many who ventured overseas dictated their testaments before setting sail.
Gernima de la Cruz had been married for only six months when her hus-
band Matheo Prez, a caulker, was preparing to sail to the Philippines in
May of 1604. Matheos father, a sailor, had left his family behind in Seville
about sixteen years earlier and had died in Manila. Matheos mother per-
ished during the last plague epidemic of 15991600. Now Matheo, who had

49For a discussion of transatlantic voyages and their perils, see Carla Rahn Phillips, Six
Galleons for the King of Spain: Imperial Defense in the Early Seventeenth Century (Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 917, 17780; Pablo E. Prez-Mallana, Spains
Men of the Sea: Daily Life in the Indies Fleets in the Sixteenth Century, trans. Carla Rahn
Phillips (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).
gathered sworn information that he was his fathers only legitimate child
and heir, was getting ready to travel to Manila to collect his inheritance.
To finance his trip he would work as a ships caulker. Before leaving, the
young man went to a notary and composed his testament. The couple had
no children and Matheo was free to bequeath his possessions in any way
he wished. He made a three-way division of his property. Gernima had
brought a dowry of 150 ducats and Matheo ordered that in addition to get-
ting back her dowry, he wanted her to have one third of his goods, which
would include the inheritance he was planning to collect in Manila. As a
pious man, about to embark on a perilous voyage, he assigned another
third of his property to be used to do good for my soul by establish-
ing a chaplaincy of masses in the church of Santa Ana. The last third of
Matheos possessions, which again would include whatever inheritance
awaited him in Manila, went to a woman who clearly had a close con-
nection to his family: Mara de Pasillas who nurses abandoned infants.
The foundling house in Seville was known as La Casa Cuna and its infants
were cared for throughout the city by paid wet-nurses, such as Mara de
Pasillas. The treatment these infants received varied and their mortality
was high, prompting complaints by concerned citizens.50 Mara, a widow,
was getting her share of Matheos property for many and good deeds that
I have received from her and great obligations that I have toward her. If
Mara died, then her daughter Mara de Soto was to inherit her mothers
portion. He also acknowledged that he owed Mara de Soto a total of
sixty ducats that she had loaned him over time.51 Mara de Pasillas rela-
tionship to Matheo is unclear, though she gave Matheo power of attorney
a day later to collect in Manila her share bequeathed to her by Matheos
father. It is likely she was a relative who might have helped his mother
care for him after his father left for the Indies. It was quite common for
50See Alonso de Morgado, Historia de Sevilla [1587] (Seville: J. M. Ariza, 1887), 31820;
Archivo Municipal de Sevilla (AMS), Escribanas de Cabildo, section 4, tomo 24, no. 15;
Carlos Alvarez Santal, La Casa Cuna de Sevilla, in Fernando Chueca Goitia, et al, Los
hospitales de Sevilla (Seville: Real Academia Sevillana de Buenas Letras, 1989), 7387; Perry,
Gender and Disorder, 162. Juan Ignacio Carmona Garca, El extenso mundo de la pobreza:
La otra cara de la Sevilla imperial (Seville: Ayuntamiento de Sevilla, 1993), 95143, exa-
mines in some detail the question of abandoned or orphaned children in early modern
Seville. There is extensive literature on child abandonment. For an overview of the history
of abandonment in Europe and analysis of the general patterns, see John Boswell, The
Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity
to the Renaissance (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988). Boswell also points out horrifying
mortality rates in foundling homes, pp. 42125, 43233.
Triana women whose husbands participated in the transatlantic trade to

depend on relatives, often female relatives, to help with household chores
and in raising their children. Matheo, like many men in Triana, named
his wife as executor of his will and he also designated Mara de Pasil-
las and her daughter as additional executors. Furthermore, before setting
sail, Matheo gave his wife, Gernima, full power to act in his absence.
Matheos trust in and reliance on women is evident and not uncommon
for men whose work or business forced them to be absent for extended
periods of time.52
Early modern Seville had a sizeable slave population and slave owners
came from all levels of society. Slaves in Seville and Triana were mostly
of African origin, but there were also Moriscos (converts from Islam), and
some slaves from the Canary Islands and the Americas. By the end of
the sixteenth century many slaves in Seville had been born and raised
in Seville or some other place on the Iberian Peninsula.53 Most slaves
worked as servants (particularly women), as artisans or on ships, and
some gained their freedom: they were able to buy it or their masters, often
in their wills, freed them. Socioeconomic mobility was limited for freed
slaves, but it could and did happen. Ana Ponce, a free woman of color
(de color morena) and a widow of sailor Luis de Caraballo, unlike many
residents of Triana, owned outright the house she lived in.54 The prop-
erty was not mortgaged, leaving Ana Ponce debt-free. While preparing
her will Ana listed several people who owed her money. One of her major
debtors was the baker Alonso Hurtado, who lives in my house, which
happened to be next to his bakery. Hurtado owed Ana a large quantity of
maravedies...for money loaned to him and other things. Hurtados sis-
ter, Mara, owed her two ducats as well. Anas debtors ranged from Baena
Morisco to the wealthy spinster doa Ana de Andino. Ana Ponce stated
that Sebastin Gonzlez, a miller, owes me five ducats from accounts we
have had, and she had loaned Catalina de Vied five ducats and for that
52AHPS, protocolos notariales, 16154 (24. 5. 1604; 29. 5. 1604). For similar findings in
Portuguese fishing communities see, Darlene Abreu-Ferreira, Fishmongers and Shipown-
ers: Women in Maritime Communities of Early Modern Portugal, The Sixteenth Century
Journal 31 (Spring 2000): 2122.
53Alfonso Franco Silva, Esclavitud en Andaluca, 14501550 (Granada: University of Gra-
nada, 1992), 3952. Pike, Aristocrats and Traders, 15492, devotes part of a chapter to the
position of Moriscos and slaves in sixteenth-century Seville. For Amerindian slaves see
Esteban Mira Caballos, Indios y mestizos americanos en la Espaa del siglo XVI (Madrid:
Iberoamericana, 2000).
54Most lower and middle-class Sevillanos rented their living quarters, whether they
were houses or just a room. The notarial records abound with rental contracts. See also
Pike, Aristocrats and Traders, 13637.
she held in pawn some green pillows and a table cloth.55 Ana Ponces
debtors and the wide range in their socioeconomic status provide insight
on her position in society. In spite of being a free woman of color, Ana
commanded enough wealth to loan money in her community and must
have been known as someone to turn to for such purposes. Ana Ponce
also owned a slave. On February 28, 1599, Ana Ponce, widow of Luis Car-
vallo freed Ana Ponce, my captive black slave...aged twenty. On the
same day, Cristval de Contreras, a free man of color (moreno), issued a
dowry receipt to Ana Ponce, widow of Luis Caravallo, sailor, because
he was to marry Ana Ponce, your servant. The dowry was worth 1,736
reales (158 ducats) and consisted of forty ducats in cash and the rest in
goods, including a full bed and silk shirts. The groom gave his newly freed
bride 550 reales (fifty ducats) in arras.56 There is no doubt that in spite of
the variation in the spelling of her husbands name, it was the same Ana
Ponce who freed her slave and namesake, and then gave her a substantial
dowry. Additionally, Ana Ponce made provisions in her will for two free
mulato orphans, a brother and a sister, who lived with her. Ten-year-old
Mara was to receive fifty ducats and a full bed with four silk pillows and
a coverlet. Three-year-old Juan was given twenty ducats. Ana stipulated
that the money for both children was to be administered by a trustwor-
thy and bonded person until Mara either married or entered a convent,
and in the case of Juan, he either married or reached the age of majority
(twenty-five). In the meantime the income from this bequest was to pay
for their sustenance.57
Social status did not necessarily relate to economic standing. Free
morena Ana Ponce was secure, by standards of time and place, in compar-
ison to Catalina de Zamora, the wife of royal accountant Luis de Villatoro.
In 1588 Villatoro was working in Cartagena de Indias in the accounting of
the king our lord, while his wife and children lived in the house of Cat-
alinas sister, Gernima de Zamora and her husband Juan Gallego, a pilot
in the carrera de Indias. In order to prolong his stay another two years,
Luis de Villatoro needed permission from Catalina, which she granted.
While he was in the Indies, the accountant sent his wife eighty pesos of
gold, 300 reales, one ounce of pearls, and a gold ring. On another occasion,
he sent her fifty ducats.58 When Catalina became ill in 1604 her husband

58AHPS, protocolos notariales, 2389, 176v; 2390, 146v; 384v85r.
was back in Spain, but was living in Valladolid. Her debts were large at
this point and either the accountant did not provide her with adequate
income, or she was a spendthrift. She owed money to family members,
friends, strangers, and even servants and slaves. I declare that I owe my
brother [in-law], Juan Gallego, 1,426 reales (130 ducats) that he loaned me
at various times for my needs and to cure me from my illnesses. Catalina
also owed her sister Gernima de Zamora 315 reales (twenty-nine duc-
ats). In addition she owed 188 reales (seventeen ducats) to Gregoria de
Quiroz, her relative who lived and served in the household. She borrowed
money from a blacksmith and on a different occasion forty reales from
his wife. Catalina de Zamora owed 144 reales (thirteen ducats) to another
sister which include I do not know how many reales that Catalina, her
slave, loaned me. And the list goes on: Lzaro Snchezs wife loaned her
twelve reales; the wifes sister, sixteen reales, and many different men and
women made her small loans of anywhere from four to twenty reales.
Catalina de Zamora also owed wages: five reales to Juan Luis, who was a
servant in my house, and to Ursula Morisca, my servant, twelve ducats
as remainder of all the time she served me. In total she owed 254 ducats
to thirty-one different people, a substantial sum when one considers that
many young girls were lucky to receive a dowry of 100 ducats.59
Catalina de Zamoras extensive debts and the paltry sums she was bor-
rowing from people who were clearly her social inferiors suggest an inse-
cure existence for this woman, seemingly abandoned by her husband to
fend for herself and their two children. When her brother-in-law, Juan
Gallego, composed his will three years later, he stated that at her death,
Catalina owed him 600 reales (fifty-five ducats) and in addition her hus-
band, Luis de Villatoro, owed him 800 reales (seventy-two ducats). Juan
Gallego claimed that he had spent a lot of money on Luis de Villatoro
and his family in the past twenty-two years and he ordered the execu-
tors of his will to collect the debt.60 Catalina de Zamoras situation was
relatively unique in terms of the accumulated debt. But her situation was
not unusual in her reliance and dependence on close relatives. Trianas
women, regardless of social standing, often turned to relatives or friends
in times of necessity.
Debts also provide excellent information on the property and business
connections of testators. Doa Leonor de Porras had been married twenty-
five years to secretary of the Inquisition Antonio Ortuo de Espinosa

60AHPS, protocolos notariales, 16169 (16. 9. 1607), 339r41r.
Briceo and they had eight children, seven girls and a boy. Several people
owed Espinosa Briceo for various pieces of land they had rented from
him and a tailor paid him thirty-three ducats a year rent for a house in the
San Marcos parish across the river. The secretary also owned three wine
cellars (bodegas) outside of Seville which contained 4,500 arrobas of wine,
1599 vintage, stored in fifty-four large clay jars (tinajas).61 He employed
mayordomos and other people who are in charge of the said property.
Earlier that year the secretary had sold about 200 arrobas of wine in two
tinajas to some men from Medelln for about 129 ducats. The men gave
Espinosa Briceo a certain amount, and the secretary had charged his
mayordomo with handing over the wine to the men and collecting the rest
of the money from them. Now the dying secretary instructed his executors,
which included his wife, to collect the appropriate sum from the mayor-
domo. The house doa Leonor de Porras and secretary Espinosa Briceo
lived in belonged to the Inquisition, though he owned it for three lives
and paid annual rent of forty ducats to the Holy Office. Holding houses
for one, two, or more lives was a common long-term rental, and the con-
tract often included the option to designate the person who would live
in the house in the next life. It was usually in the will that such choice
was recorded. Espinosa Briceo named his daughter, doa Mara Briceo,
to the second life, with the same conditions that he had, thus giving her
the right to designate the person to the last life. He made this provi-
sion with a stipulation that was quite common. He asked his daughter
to allow her mother doa Leonor and her children to live in the house.
He added that the rent should be paid from the body of the property
that he was leaving. If his daughter refused to accept these terms, then he
named another daughter, doa Petronila Briceo, to inherit the house.62
It was typical to choose a daughter over a son in the second life of a house,
as was the condition that the widow would have usufruct of it until her
death. Antonio Ortuo de Espinosa Briceo also gave his daughter doa
Mara Briceo 1,000 arrobas of his wine as a mejora, an addition to her
share of the inheritance.
All the legitimate children became his heirs, and because they were
minors, their mother doa Leonor de Porras was named guardian. But
there was another child, doa Paula Briceo, my natural daughter, who
is in my house and she is twenty-six years old. In his will he left doa
61An arroba was equal to approximately 11.5 kilograms.

Paula 400 ducats for her dowry. Although his daughter was of age, the
money was to be administered by his wife, doa Leonor, until doa Paula
either married or entered a conventthere was not much choice for her.63
Espinosa Briceo begged his wife to then give her the money and sup-
port her as her own daughter, indeed she always treated her as such. He
also asked doa Leonor, in the meantime, to keep her in her house in
the same manner as she had done until now.64 It was not unusual for
women to raise children that were not their own, including illegitimate
offspring of their husbands. Family members often took into their house-
holds orphaned relatives and many of these children became servants of
their aunts and uncles, or cousins.65 Following her husbands death doa
Leonor continued to collect income from various sources, including rents
and bonds. She also sent certain swords to Mexico to be sold and on
February 3, 1604, she signed a receipt for thirty pesos that her agent sent
her as profit from the sale.66
Women sometimes made provisions for their own illegitimate children.
For example, widow Luisa de los Angeles had three legitimate daughters,
one of whom was married. Luisa had given Leonor de Santa Ana, her
married daughter, 200 ducats in dowry, which was to be counted as part
of Leonors legtima, that is, her share of her mothers estate. In addition
Luisa gave Leonor as a mejora a gold ring with a green emerald. Luisa
bequeathed to her second daughter, Isabel de los Reyes, again as part of
her legacy, all the ajuar (trousseau) that I have made for her which is
in a chest in my house, so she can marry with it. For her third daugh-
ter, Agustina de Flores, Luisa designated fifty ducats for dowry as part
of her legtima. Luisas husbands occupation is unknown, but Luisa had
no debts and was able to divide between her two unmarried daughters
all the other clothing and money and merchandise that I have in the
shop, as well as some jewelry. The nature of the merchandise was not
stated, though the business was probably established by Luisas husband,
and she, like many widows, took over following his death. And then Luisa
63According to the Laws of Toro (law ten), illegitimate children could not inherit
more than one-fifth of the progenitors property; lacking legitimate children, there was
no restriction.
64AHPS, protocolos notariales, 16139 (22. 8. 1600). Regarding Espinosa Briceo see also
Cook and Cook, The Plague Files, 5859.
65Wills in Triana abound with bequests for live-in relatives, usually female, for the
service that she did and the friendship I feel for her. Poska, Women and Authority, 6061,
also notes that it was common in early modern Spain for families to take in young female
relatives, raising them and employing them as servants.
made provisions for Diego, aged three, who is in my house and who is
my son and I had him with a free man. She gave her little boy a paltry six
ducats and some gold pomanders as well as certain bedding. She stipu-
lated I want all this to be given to the father of this child, to help him
raise and feed him. Luisa added, my daughters know who his father is.
Illegitimate offspring, particularly for women, carried a social stigma, and
Luisa had tried to keep her indiscretion a secret from the outside world.
Because Seville was a busy port with a large transient population, authori-
ties were anxious to curb illicit relations, fearing the social implications of
a large number of illegitimate and abandoned children.67
Slaves formed part of many households in Seville and the notarial
records are filled with sales contracts of slaves of both sexes and all ages.68
Trianas women, particularly widows and single women, are well repre-
sented in the records as both buyers and sellers. Women also inherited
slaves or brought them into marriage as part of their dowries. Slaves,
whose status often was marked on their cheeks and other places, were
regarded as valuable property and listed in inventories along with other
possessions. Many slave holders, both men and women, attempting to
ease their passage to heaven, freed their slaves in their testaments or
bequeathed them to relatives in exchange for prayers with a stipulation
that they be freed after a few years of service.69
The widow Catalina Muoz freed her thirteen-year-old slave Mara, but
only after she was to serve Isabel de Burgos, perhaps Catalinas niece, for
six years, from the day of my death. She charged Isabel de Burgos to treat
the girl well and to pay her three ducats for the service each year. Nor-
mally, the meager salaries of girls in domestic service were added up over
67AHPS, protocolos notariales, 16135 (10. 6. 1600). On illegitimacy in Seville, see Perry,
Gender and Disorder, 5859. Ann Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets. Gender, Honor, Sex-
uality, and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1999), 6673, discusses what she terms private pregnancy in eighteenth-century colonial
Latin America. The stigma of an out-of-wedlock pregnancy prompted many couples to
devise elaborate strategies to hide the misdeed and protect the womans honor. Poska,
Women and Authority, notes the high rate of illegitimacy in early modern Galicia. The
author attributes this to the frequency of amancebamiento or concubinage which became
an effective alternative to marriage because, according to the available evidence, Galician
families did not attach any stigma to illegitimate birth, particularly if the couple might
eventually marry, pp. 8788.
68See Antonio Domnguez Ortiz, Orto y Ocaso de Sevilla, 3rd ed. (Seville: Universidad
de Sevilla, 1981), 101105; and also Alfonso Franco Silva, La esclavitud en Sevilla y su tierra a
fines de la Edad Media (Seville, 1979), and the same authors Esclavitud en Andaluca.
69For a general discussion on manumission practices in sixteenth-century Seville, see
Franco Silva, Esclavitud en Andaluca, 12235.
the years and often became a young womans dowry.70 But Maras sal-
ary was to be used for masses for Catalina Muozs soul. The widow had
another slave, Mara de Vega, Morisca from the kingdom of Granada.
Moriscos, Muslim converts to Christianity, had been exiled from Gran-
ada in 1570 and dispersed throughout Castile, Extremadura, and western
Andalusia following an unsuccessful uprising. Many of them settled in
Seville, including Triana. Most Moriscos as Christians were free, though
some who revolted had been enslaved.71 When Catalina Muoz drafted
her will she stipulated that her Morisca slave could buy her freedom
for fifty-two ducats. Catalinas son and sister were in the Indies and she
stated that if they or anyone sent her any property then it is my will that
it should be for the said Mara de Vega and Mara, her daughter, both
my slaves.72 Testators often left an item or two of clothing or bedding
from their personal possessions to their servants or slaves, but Catalinas
bequest is unusual and suggests a more complex relationship between her
and the two slaves.
Juana Bernal, a wealthy unmarried woman, made numerous wills and
codicils between 1581 and 1607. She had inherited her estate, including
several slaves, from her brother Luis de Morales, a prominent priest in
Triana. Juana, one of the few women who was literate, prepared her wills
in good health, though she was clearly preoccupied with her mortality.73
According to her 1581 testament her ten-year-old black slave, Ins, had
been sent to serve in the convent of Nuestra Seora de la Consolacin in
Triana and Juana Bernal stipulated that following her death Ins was to be
freed. She bequeathed her a bed, two small mattresses filled with wool as
well as pillows, sheets and a coverlet, and some clothing. Inss sister, Cat-
alina, and her aunt, Juana, worked at the same convent and Juana Bernal
70For example, Ana de Alvarado and her new husband, mason Juan Mndez, issued a
receipt for 451 reales (forty-one ducats), given in various household items, which were the
pay for all the time that I, Ana de Alvarado have served you Mara de Alvarado in your
house and your family, in addition to what you have given me in food and clothing. AHPS,
protocolos notariales, 16160, 132r34v.
71See Antonio Domnguez Ortiz and Bernard Vincent, Historia de los moriscos: Vida y
tragedia de una minora (Madrid: Alianza Universidad, 1997), 3556, regarding the upri-
sing and resettlement. When Moriscos were expelled from Seville in 1610, the authorities
counted 7,503 Moriscos in the city, and 2,176 of them lived in Triana. See Domnguez Ortiz,
Sevilla del siglo XVII, 18485; see also Pike, Aristocrats and Traders, 15470.
73Sara Nalle, Literacy and Culture in Early Modern Castile, Past and Present 125 (Novem-
ber 1989), 6970, notes that literacy rates for women are harder to establish than for men, but
that they were significantly lower. For example, in the first half of the seventeenth century only
7 percent of women in Toledo could sign their name as opposed to 62 percent of men.
left each slave woman ten ducats as well as some clothing. In addition, she
gave the convent of La Consolacin fifty ducats as part of the dowry for
her niece, Damiana de la Magdalena. She further ordered that following
her death, Inss eight-year-old brother Luis should be freed and placed
to serve in the same convent. In her will Juana spelled out a standard
service contract whereby the convent was obligated to clothe, feed, and
teach Luis the Christian doctrine as well as good manners.74 In the pro-
cess Luis was expected to learn a trade. To ensure this Juana placed Luis
de Morales, then aged ten, in service as an apprentice for seven years with
her nephew, Diego Martn de Arroya, a cord maker.75 In a codicil of April
30, 1582, Juana remembered her former slave, Magdalena de los Angeles,
a mulata, who lived with her husband in Triana. Juana left Magdalena ten
ducats and some bedding.76
In May of 1599, at the height of the plague epidemic, Juana Bernal,
though untouched by the sickness, summoned notary Gabriel Salmern
to her house to draw up a new testament. This time she bequeathed to
Ins, my black servant whom I had freed, the bed in which I sleep, as
well as some bedding, similar to what she had willed Ins eighteen years
earlier. These items came all from the bed in which I sleep. Inss sis-
ter Catalina and her aunt Juana were again mentioned: both were freed
and each woman received twelve ducats. Catalina, similarly to Ins, now
worked as a servant in Juana Bernals household, while their aunt had
remained at the convent.77 Four days later Juana Bernal amended her will.
She was earning interest on a 200-ducat tribute on a house in Triana, and
wished that following her death, her niece doa Magdalena del Angel,
nun at La Consolacin, should collect it for her necessities for the rest
of her life. After doa Magdalenas death this income was to be equally
divided among Juanas three former female slaves: Juana de los Angeles,
Catalina de Morales, and Ins Bernal. She added that if any one of the
three died then the remaining women should share it equally. Juana stipu-
lated that none of the beneficiaries, including her niece, were to sell or
touch the principal amount, because they are to only enjoy it during
their lifetime. After the last of the women died the money would transfer
to the parish church of Santa Ana, for an annual sung mass on the day

of the Immaculate Conception (December 8).78 A little over a year later,

Juana Bernal modified her will yet again. In this testament there was no
mention of any income from the 200-ducat tribute. Instead she stipulated
that doa Magdalena, Juana, Catalina, and Ins should divide between
them all of Juanas clothing and furniture. But she earmarked some of
the best things for her niece. All that Juana asked in return was that they
pray for my soul.79 Although there were some small differences in the
testaments, Juana Bernal throughout faithfully followed the directives set
out by her brother before he died, by freeing the slaves and providing for
nephews and nieces. But Juana was unusual in freeing her slaves during
her lifetime. Most manumissions, especially of young and healthy slaves,
only took effect after the masters death.
Doa Gernima de Almansa, widow of Captain Gernimo de Porras,
did not free her slave, Juana who is berberesca (Berber), who cost me
including the alcabala (sales tax) 133 ducats. But she did free her two-
year-old black slave, Agustina, as of the day I die, and gave the little girl
fifty ducats as help for her marriage or anything else she might want.
This was unusual, because normally these bequests, regardless of social
status, were specified for marriage or convent, without any freedom to
choose how to spend the gift. In the meantime, however, the money and
the income from it were to be enjoyed by doa Ana de Andino, my aunt,
who was obligated to raise and provide for the said Agustina until she is
of age when the said fifty ducats can be turned over to her.80 About five
months later doa Gernima was still alive, though too weak to sign her
codicil. Doa Ana de Andino had died and someone else needed to be
entrusted with Agustinas money and upbringing. Doa Gernima gave
the child an additional ten ducats, and asked her sister, doa Catalina
de Almansa, to have her with her and to teach her good manners. She
instructed her sister to invest the money so it grows so that [she] can
marry with it.81
Doa Gernimas maiden aunt, doa Ana de Andino, had dictated her
will just a few days after her niece drew up her original testament in June.
Doa Ana had left her niece 200 ducats and ordered that she be paid
whatever amount of money she stated under oath that she had spent on
me and the people of my household in curing me and them. Doa Ana

employed several servants and many became ill during the plague epi-
demic. She bequeathed 100 reales (nine ducats) to Juana de Contreras for
all the work she had during my illness in taking care of the many things
that were needed...with me as well as the other ill women that I have in
my house. Doa Ana left thirty ducats to Juana Andino, my slave who
is ill; if she recovers I leave her free after the days of my life. Juanas son,
Luis Mulatto, was also freed. Doa Anas will provides a good testimony
to the extent of the contagion, as she, her servants and a slave and possibly
her niece fell infected. Doa Ana de Andino was another literate woman,
but could not sign because of the gravity of her illness.82 Doa Ana died,
though how many others in her house also succumbed is unclear.
Although no portraits or memoirs of Trianas women from this period
remain, their legacy is found in the archive. Thousands of notarial and
parish documents shed light on their lives: contracts, powers of attorney,
receipts, dowry agreements, records of disputes with family or friends. In
many cases, however, only the last will remains as a testimony to a life
experience: marriage, children, family members and friends, occupational
network, debts, and a final resting place. For the historian attempting to
reconstruct and gain a fuller understanding of early modern society, the
will is a voice from the past. The testament often provides the only oppor-
tunity to hear a womans voice.83 The testament may be the only record
of a parents concern and wishes for her children. Most of the women
studied in this essay were illiterate and unlike some men could not even
painstakingly scratch their names. These wives and widows of sailors, bak-
ers, or barbers, or their single daughters or sisters left no letters or jour-
nals. Most were not important enough or their lives exceptional enough
to prompt their contemporaries to write about them. Lacking other docu-
ments, the wills are the only records of the lives of many lower and middle
class women of the period.
In bulk, these testaments and other notarial documents allow the his-
torian to fit together some pieces of the life journeys and attitudes of
early modern residents of the Triana district of Seville, whose often large
households and extended families provided a safety network, particularly
important in a port city with many members absent overseas. There are

83For the voice of colonial Latin American women in their wills, see Asuncin Lavrin,
Lo femenino: Women in Colonial Historical Sources, in Coded Encounters: Writing, Gen-
der, and Ethnicity in Colonial Latin America eds. Francisco Javier Cevallos-Candau, et al.
(Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 16972.
frequent references to people, children or adults, who live in my house.

Some were servants, but not all, nor were they always relatives.84 In spite
of disputes and denunciations, one glimpses a closely-knit society where
neighbors and friends helped each other in ways that ranged from provid-
ing loans, bonds, or courier services to giving shelter, or nursing a neigh-
bors baby. Women, whose role in early modern Spain is often described
as marginal, their existence seen as dominated by men, speak through
their testaments and other documents, revealing more complex relation-
ships with their families and peers than simple subservience. Many of
the women who emerge from these long-forgotten papers were far from
helpless. They engaged in various activities, demanded their rights and,
when necessary, took charge of their lives. Moreover, as in any major port
city, many men relied on women, their spouses, daughters, or other rela-
tives, to collect and invest money for them during their frequent overseas
absences.85 Many Trianeros, both men and women, shared in the opportu-
nities provided by the Indies trade, though the level of their participation
varied. Some actively traded in merchandise coveted overseas or needed
during a voyage. Others, particularly women, relied on income sent to
them from the Americas by husbands and relatives. Success and survival
in Triana were significantly influenced by ties to the overseas colonies and
participation in seafaring. In focusing on some of the past inhabitants of
Triana as individuals, a fuller picture of a vibrant maritime community
emerges where men and women, parents and children, masters and ser-
vants, business partners or Church members interact in life. And as they
prepare to die, they not only arrange for the safe passage of their souls,
but also devise strategies to aid and to protect their heirs.
84Morell Peguero, Mercaderes y artesanos, 11821, found similar patterns.

85Abreu-Ferreira, Fishmongers and Shipowners, 723, noted similar reliance on
women by seamen who were often absent from their communities on long fishing expe-
ditions. Poska, Women and Authority, 3440, highlights the impact of male migration on
the women left behind, who quickly adapted to their roles as heads of household.
ABERDEEN AND THE DUTCH ATLANTIC:
WOMEN AND WOOLENS IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY1
Gordon DesBrisay
Throughout the seventeenth century, in farmsteads and cottages across

much of northeast Scotland, thousands of women and girls in poor house-
holds used their spare time between chores to clean, card, and spin wool
into yarn that hundreds of men wove into plaiding, a coarse woolen cloth
that urban merchants shipped overseas from the port of Aberdeen.2 The
bulk of the plaiding exported from Aberdeen went to the Netherlands,
where it was bought by local merchants who arranged for it to be finished
and re-exported to Baltic cloth markets that the Dutch largely controlled.3
The neglected writings of a participant in that trade named Alexander
Skene, however, reveal a development obscured by the port books and
customs accounts that historians usually rely on: that, for a few heady
years in the first half of the seventeenth century, the Dutch also shipped
Aberdeen plaiding to new markets across the Atlantic.4 In the 1630s
Aberdeen merchants earned windfall profits, and Aberdeenshire spinners
and weavers gained a modest measure of economic security, by supplying
cheap woolen cloth for the Dutch to carry to their newly (and, as it turned
out, temporarily) acquired sugar plantations in northeast Brazil. There, it
was most likely used in barter with indigenous peoples and as clothing
or bedding for enslaved Africans.5 The period of Aberdeens participation
1The author wishes to thank Andrew Blaikie, Susan Blake, Michael Hayden, Margaret
Hunt, Doug Catterall, and Jodi Campbell for their expert advice and assistance.
2Robert E. Tyson, The Rise and Fall of Manufacturing in Rural Aberdeenshire, in Fermfolk
and Fisherfolk: Rural Life in Northern Scotland in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, eds.
J. S. Smith and David Stevenson (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1989), 6382.
3Duncan MacNiven, Merchants and Traders in Early Seventeenth Century Aberdeen,
in From Lairds to Louns: Country and Burgh Life in Aberdeen, 16001800, ed. David Stevenson
(Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1986), 6064.
4Alexander Skene, Memorialls for the Government of the Royall-Burghs in Scotland: With
Some Overtures Laid before the Nobility and Gentry of the Several Shyres in this Kingdom:
As Also...A Succinct Survey of the Famous City of Aberdeen (Aberdeen: John Forbes, 1685).
Published under the pseudonym Philopoliteius, or a lover of the Publick welfare.
5Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550
1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 68, 136. See also Marcus P. Meuwese,
For the Peace and Well-Being of the Country: Intercultural Mediators and Dutch-Indian
70 gordon desbrisay
in the seventeenth-century Atlantic trade was brief, but it provides tell-

ing insights into the economic lives of women in a poor and apparently
isolated region of northern Europe who were nevertheless caught up in
an international textiles trade that by the start of the seventeenth century
was already becoming global in scope.
When plaiding was in the ascendant, the effects on the port of Aber-
deen were everywhere to be seen: the population grew, major building
projects were undertaken, charitable donations poured in, and, between
increased pensions and ample opportunities to earn money spinning, the
widows and children who comprised the bulk of the poor of the town
were provided for as never before. Women in more prosperous house-
holds also benefitted from the links to international capital that partici-
pation in the woolen export trade afforded, especially those wives and
widows of overseas merchants and shipmasters who played an active and
sometimes lead role in managing the family businesslike Issobel Udny,
whose over-zealous efforts to buy up dwindling plaiding stocks to ship to
her husband cooling his heels in Flanders landed her in hot water in 1647.6
Out in the Aberdeenshire hinterland, however, the effects of the plaid-
ing boom were almost certainly more muted. As in rural cloth industries
across northwest Europe, profits generated by the plaiding trade pooled
in the town but trickled out to the countryside. The most that can be said
for the largely female workforce in the countryside is that its members
could live somewhat better during Aberdeenshires plaiding boom, which
resulted in such an intense commoditization of wool that rural womens
traditional by-employment in the household economy as spinners allowed
them and their families to derive some benefit.
Then as now, the drive for lower costs shaped international trade. Labor
costs were key; it was a simple equation and everyone knew it. The value
of all Cloath, in the terse words of one of Alexander Skenes Scottish con-
temporaries, consists chiefly in the Workmanship, and these that can live
cheapest, can make the cheapest Cloath; and so export and under-sell
others.7 The author went on to single out Aberdeens large hinterland in
Relations in New Netherland and Dutch Brazil, 16001664, (PhD diss., University of Notre
Dame, 2003), 160, 22122.
6See below, 867.
7A Representation of the Advantages, That Would Arise...By the Erecting and Improving
of Manufactories: But More Especially, by That of Woollen-Cloath...(Edinburgh, 1683), 10.
The same sentiment was repeated in David Black, Essay upon Industry and Trade, Shewing
the Necessity of the One, the Conveniency and Usefulness of the Other, and the Advantages
of Both (Edinburgh, 1706), 4.
aberdeen and the dutch atlantic 71
northeast Scotland as a region where the Commons are very ingenious,

and live very cheap, as he saw it.8 Scottish merchants, Alexander Skene
himself boasted, sell cheaper abroad than any Forraign Manufacture in
the World can afford it, particularly upon Plaidings, Fingrams, or any kind
of raw Cloaths, in respect saving of Charges is the life of all Manufactures.9
All the Wool of Scotland, he continued, may be wrought by the Com-
mons of this Nation at an easie rate, because of their sober way of living,
and working but at such times as their other Countrey-work permits.10
Bluntly put, the endemic poverty of Aberdeenshires rural army of spin-
ners and weavers was not just a sad and widely acknowledged fact of life,
but the barren rock on which enterprising merchants in the port of Aber-
deen built the plaiding industry.
There may be an element of emotional distancing in the way Alex-
ander Skene and other seventeenth-century commentators wrote of the
rural workforce, but a certain degree of abstraction was characteristic of
how proto-industry functioned, how it was documented, and how histor-
ians have written about it. Under proto-industrialization, Gay Gullick-
son notes, putting-out merchants seldom knew the people who cleaned,
carded, spun, and wove the wool that independent agents delivered to
them. The manufacturing system, she reminds us, became less and less
personal, and the income and economic well-being of large numbers of
people became more and more tied to the vagaries and fluctuations of
national and international markets, long before most workers lived in
cities and worked in factories.11 Gullickson draws on the experiences
of female textile workers in the cottage industries of eighteenth-century
Normandy over which the merchants of Rouen presided, but many of the
same dynamics applied to the seventeenth-century women of Aberdeen-
shire in relation to the merchants of Aberdeen. The same themes of ano-
nymity and vulnerability are evident. Tens of thousands of mainly rural
people worked to produce the cloth exported from the port of Aberdeen,
but the nature of those earlier and sparser sources is such that few indi-
vidual names and stories emerge from them.12
8A Representation of the Advantages, 8, 23.

9Skene, Memorialls, 1023.
11G. L. Gullickson, Spinners and Weavers of Auffray (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1986), 2.
12As elsewhere in the early modern world, Scottish women who were poor and rural left
relatively few individual traces in documentary records, and no record sets were created
72 gordon desbrisay
It is worth remembering, though, that just beneath the rather macro

scale of the tale told here there existed a wide and deep seam of individ-
ual stories that either left little in the way of documentary traces or whose
traces remain to be uncovered. Whether or not we ever find a way to
mine those microhistories fully and bring the individual women in ques-
tion back up into the light of history, this chapter is still about them. And
we can at least begin the process of disaggregation by catching glimpses of
their lives and making explicit a point that most commentators from that
day to this have tended to gloss over or ignore, which is, as Jan De Vries
put it, that the bulk of the iceberg of prefactory industrial production was
submerged in a mainly rural sea of by-employments, seasonal work, and
child and female labour.13 Neither Alexander Skene nor any of his con-
temporaries drew an explicit connection between Aberdeenshire women
and Atlantic trade, but the connection is clear enough in his writings so
long as we remember that women comprised a great majority of those
referred to generically as the people or the commons.14 And if there is a
broader conclusion to be drawn from their collective story, which proved
in the end to be bound to that of the merchants who employed them, it
is that although the Atlantic worlds poorer corners did not afford women
much room for maneuver, they seized the chances that came their way.
Women certainly played a key role at the European end of the trans-
atlantic economy as consumers and retailers of New World imports.15 In
seventeenth-century Aberdeen, we occasionally find women married to
overseas merchants or to ships captains buying or selling sugar, tobacco,
exotic dyestuffs, and other iconic goods, usually in small quantities and
generally in the course of supplying the household or managing the shore-
specifically to record their activities in the way that tax rolls and customs accounts, for
example, captured aspects of mens lives. See Deborah Simonton, A History of European
Womens Work 1700 to the Present (London: Routledge, 1998), 3940.
13Jan de Vries, The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution, Journal of
Economic History 54, no. 2 (June 1994): 252. Scholars of the modern Aberdonian textile
industry have also been unable to find the stories of the women at the heart of this story.
See, for example, William W. Knox, Working Life in the City, in Aberdeen, 18002000: A
New History (East Lothian: Tuckwell Press ltd., 2002), 155, 166; Anna Clark, The Struggle for
the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1997), 207208.
14The same generic language applied, and sometimes still applies, to discussions of char-
ity and poor relief, in which the fact that most recipients were female can be lost sight of.
15See for example Pamela Sharpe, Gender in the Economy: Female Merchants and
Family Businesses in the British Isles, 16001850, Histoire Sociale 34, no. 68 (2001): 283306;
and Elizabeth C. Sanderson, Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century Edinburgh (London:
Macmillan, 1996), ch. 1.
bound side of the family import/export business.16 Scotlands small popu-

lation and generally weak economy, however, meant that the domestic
market for such items was limited.17 A far greater number of women in
and about Aberdeen first felt the effects of transatlantic trade not as con-
sumers of imported New World commodities, but as producers of exported
Scottish manufactures or, albeit in smaller numbers, as the entrepreneurs
who employed them. Their collective Atlantic story is inextricably linked
to the rise and fall of Scotlands first wave of proto-industrial cloth produc-
tion, which developed and flourished in the first half of the seventeenth
century as, in effect, a minor branch of the greater Dutch textile trade.
***
The almost built-in obscurity of the role of women in early modern proto-
industrial production is exacerbated in this instance because Aberdeens,
and possibly Scotlands, first significant engagement in the emerging Atlan-
tic economy elicited few recorded comments at the time. It soon faded
from popular memory, and has been almost entirely forgotten sinceall
of which is attributable to the indirect nature of the trade.18 The Atlantic
dimension of Aberdeens cloth trade left no trace, for example, in the cus-
toms accounts and port books on which most studies of Scottish overseas
trade and migration are based, because the goods in question traveled
to the New World indirectly via transshipments from the Netherlands.19
Customs agents at the port of Aberdeen, like their counterparts elsewhere
in Europe, were concerned only with the initial outbound voyage to a
16Gordon DesBrisay and Karen Sander Thomson, Crediting Wives: Married Women
and Debt Litigation in the Seventeenth Century, in Finding the Family in Medieval and
Early Modern Scotland, eds. Janay Nugent and Elizabeth Ewan. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008),
88. For the range of goods imported into Aberdeen, see Louise B. Taylor, ed., Aberdeen
Shore Work Accounts, 15961670 (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1972).
17T. C. Smout, Scottish Trade on the Eve of the Union (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd,
1963), 23.
18Direct trade to the Americas posed a challenge for merchants in any small or mid-
sized port, because the potential for great profit had to be balanced against the certainty
of heavy capital outlays, high risks, and slow returns. Nuala Zahedieh, Overseas Expansion
and Trade in the Seventeenth Century, in The Oxford History of the British Empire. Volume
I, The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century,
ed. Nicholas P. Canny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 398400. Two early accounts
that do address this trade and many of this chapters elite protagonists are: William Watt,
A History of Aberdeen and Banff (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons,
1900), 31419; William Alexander, Notes and Sketches Illustrative of Northern Rural Life in
the Eighteenth Century (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1877), 13436. They do not, however,
address the dynamic role of gender in its operation.
19The same limitation is noted in Mark Duffill, The Africa Trade from the Ports of
Scotland, 170666, Slavery and Abolition 25, no. 3 (2004): 108109.
74 gordon desbrisay
foreign entrept. The fact that a seemingly large, if unquantifiable, portion

of Aberdeen plaiding was for a time destined to be re-exported by the
Dutch to the Americas was of no professional interest to them.20 Aber-
deens early trade with the Dutch West India Company seems to have
elicited little comment elsewhere in the Scottish sources, either.21
Fortunately for us, however, Aberdeens indirect involvement in the
emerging Atlantic economy was of interest to Alexander Skene of Newtyle
(16211694), an Aberdeen merchant, local historian, and close observer of
Scottish overseas trade.22 As a teenager learning the cloth trade in the
1630s, he saw firsthand how the local economy benefitted from its connec-
tion to the wider Atlantic economy. As an old man writing fifty years later,
when that first transatlantic trade was all but forgotten and the plaiding
industry in terminal decline, he came to appreciate the costs of not hav-
ing such a connection. In his Memorialls for the Government of the Royall-
burghs in Scotland, a handbook for civic magistrates published in 1685, we
find the crucial evidence that the surge of cloth exports to the Netherlands
in the 1630s was driven by the Dutch West India Company, whose agents
in Zeeland were buying up large quantities of plaiding for shipment to
the Companys plantations in Brazil. Having laid part of the blame for
the fall of plaiding on shoddy workmanship and poor quality control,23
20On the nature of these trade records, see Martin Rorke, English and Scottish Over-
seas Trade, 13001600, Economic History Review 59, no. 2 (2006): 26668.
21The Dutch West India Companys venture in Brazil was known in Scotland from the
outset; in 1624 a Scottish promoter of overseas expansion noted that it may enable them
for greater matters. William Alexander, An Encouragement to Colonies (London: William
Stansby, 1624), 45. Willem Schotte, a.k.a. William Scott, served on the Council of Five that
directed the Companys affairs in Brazil. Although two generations removed, his Scottish
origins were sufficiently important to him that in 1641, while living in Brazil, he and two
brothers (living in Amsterdam and Rouen, respectively) petitioned the Scottish parlia-
ment for a letter patent confirming their Scottish lineage. C. R. Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil
16241654 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 53; K. M. Brown et al., eds., The Records of the
Parliaments of Scotland to 1707 (St Andrews, 2007), [1641/8/461]. Recent research suggests
that hundreds of migr Scots were employed by the Company in support of its military
and commercial endeavours in Brazil from 1629 to 1654. Esther Mijers, A Natural Part-
nership? Scotland and Zeeland in the Early Seventeenth Century, in Allan I. Macinnes
and Arthur H. Williamson, eds., Shaping the Stewart World, 16031714: The Atlantic Connec-
tion (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 25051. A major cache of Dutch correspondence from Brazil has
recently become more accessible to scholars, and may reveal more about Scottish con-
nections. Victor Enthoven and Martine Julia van Ittersum, The Mouse That Roars: Dutch
Atlantic History, Journal of Early Modern History 10, no. 3 (2006): 225.
22Gordon DesBrisay, Skene, Alexander, of Newtyle (1621?1694), in Oxford Dictionary
of National Biography, eds. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004).
23A longstanding complaint in Scotland and, indeed, wherever rural industry existed.
Rorke, English and Scottish Overseas Trade, 271, 276; De Vries, The Industrial Revolution
and the Industrious Revolution, 258.
Skene went on to explain that the loss of the Plantations by the Dutch
West India Companies is likewise a considerable cause thereof, which
requires that we should wisely consider how and where we may recover
a good off-tract of these Commodities, for it was the Dutch Plantations in
Brasile (which the Portuguyes now possess) that were furnished with our
Plaiding and Fingrams.24
***
Alexander Skene wanted his readers to understand that it was the trans-
atlantic connection to Dutch Brazil that accounted for the plaiding boom
and the brief gush of prosperity that attended it in the 1630s, that the
breaking of that transatlantic connection and the failure to make another
had paved the way for the economic malaise of the 1680s, and that a
revival of that industry and Scottish trade in general depended on finding
new Atlantic markets for Scottish manufactures. In the 1680s, Alexander
Skene was one of a growing number of Scottish politicians and writers
convinced that the key to improving Scotlands economic prospects was
to acquire transatlantic outlets for its exports.25 Few if any of the others,
however, wrote in terms of recovering lost Atlantic markets, and no other
Scottish writer is known to have linked the fate of Scottish overseas trade
to the Dutch West India Company in Brazil. Skene was well placed to
draw such a conclusion. Not only had he witnessed for himself the plaid-
ing boom of the 1630s, but starting in the 1650s he was elected to a series
of key posts on the Aberdeen Town Council, all of which involved immer-
sion in and oversight of the local economy.26 A mid-life conversion to
Quakerism in 1672 ended his career in public office, but did not curb his
interest in public affairs, especially as they pertained to urban governance
and commercial policy.27
Skenes claim regarding the Aberdonian connection to Dutch Brazil is
lent further credence by the striking correspondence between the surge in
plaiding exports from Aberdeen in the 1630s and the fortunes of the Dutch

25Ned C. Landsman, Nation, Migration, and the Province in the First British Empire:
Scotland and the Americas, 16001800, American Historical Review 104, no. 2 (1999): 469.
26Skene served as treasurer, a post requiring wealth; dean of guild, which required
mercantile expertise; and baillie (i.e. magistrate), in which capacity he presided over all
aspects of urban social and economic policy.
27On the Quaker community in Aberdeen, see Michael Lynch and Gordon DesBrisay,
with Murray G. H. Pittock, The Faith of the People, in Aberdeen Before 1800, 303308;
and Gordon DesBrisay, Catholics, Quakers, and Religious Persecution in Restoration
Aberdeen, The Innes Review 47 (1996): 13668.
76 gordon desbrisay
West India Company during the relatively brief period of its commercial
success in Brazil, which lasted from about 1634 to 1644.28 Having failed at
a first attempt to seize control of Brazil earlier in the 1620s, the Company
sent a larger fleet in 1629 and gained a secure foothold in the northeast
of the country the following year.29 Aberdeens second phase of growth
in plaiding exports also began in 1629. In Brazil, the Dutch West India
Company first turned a profit in 1634 and flourished from 1637 until 1645,
when growing Luso-Brazilian settler resistance brought the good times
there to an end for the Dutch. Plaiding exports from Aberdeen were high-
est between 1634 and 1639, at which point the records break off as Scot-
land descended into a long period of civil war, revolution, conquest, and
occupation.30 The peak year for recorded Aberdeen cloth exports, 1639,
was also the peak year for the Dutch West India Companys sugar exports
from Brazil.31
The correspondence noted here could of course be coincidental, and
there are other possible explanations for the sudden surge in Dutch
demand for Aberdeen plaiding in the latter half of the 1630s.32 In light of
Skenes comments, however, it seems safe to conclude that there was a
transatlantic causal connection between the Dutch West India Companys
expansion in Brazil and Aberdeens booming plaiding exports. The precip-
itous decline of plaiding in the 1640s, on the other hand, was clearly driven
by developments within Scotland; that it overlapped with the decline and
fall of Dutch Brazil was a coincidence. Even so, the fact that Aberdeens
transatlantic connection had gone dead at both ends of the line by the late
1640s was significant, because it meant that its merchants could not simply
28Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 15671. See also Ernst Pijning, Idealism and
Power: The Dutch West India Company in the Brazil Trade (16301654), in Shaping the
Stuart World, 20732.
29Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil 16241654, 37; Israel, Dutch Primacy, 162.
30Even in the absence of export statistics, it is clear that war on land and sea disrupted
Aberdeens trade from 1639. In 1645 plague in Edinburgh and the wool producing regions
to the south cut off the supply of wool, and when the disease struck Aberdeen itself two
years later plaiding production and exports ground to a complete halt. E. Patricia Denni-
son and Gordon DesBrisay with H. Lesley Diack, Health in the Two Towns, in Aberdeen
Before 1800, 7090.
31Israel, Dutch Primacy, 169, Table 5.14.
32For example, changes in the supply of Spanish wool prompted a sudden sharp rise
in Dutch production of fine woolens, starting in 1635. It is possible that part of the surge in
demand for plaiding came about as other Dutch suppliers switched over to higher quality
items. Israel, Dutch Primacy, 194. Some English east coast ports also saw their cloth exports
surge in the late 1630s, though cloth exports generally were down. See W. B. Stephens, The
Cloth Exports of the Provincial Ports, 16001640, The Economic History Review 22, no. 2
(1969).
pick up the pieces and resume trade with their best customer once their
own house was back in order and rural production revived. And if the eco-
nomic prospects of Aberdeens cloth merchants had dimmed, the same
was true in spades for the women who spun and the men who wove.
The Atlantic trade revealed by Skene flourished for little more than a
decade, then sputtered for a few more years until brought to a defini-
tive end by the Portuguese reconquest of Brazil, completed in 1654 after
a ten-year campaign.33 Once Aberdeens Dutch portal on the Atlantic
economy slammed shut it was not re-opened. If the Portuguese settling
back into Brazil or the Dutch setting up new plantations in the Caribbean
had any further need of bulk woolens, it seems they turned to other sup-
pliers. No other Atlantic outlet of any lasting significance was ever found
for Aberdeen plaiding.34 The consequences of being shut out of Atlantic
markets in the latter half of the seventeenth century were far-reaching
and ultimately tragic, especially for the legions of poor women and their
dependents in households for which spinning wool was the only way to
earn money for food when the crops failed. To see how deeply rooted in
the textile trade these womens lives were, though, it is necessary to trace
the origins of the textile trade in Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire.
***
In the last quarter of the sixteenth century, inspired in part by govern-
ment initiatives to encourage manufactures and put the poor to work,
and by a helpful devaluation of the Scottish currency that made Scottish
exports more attractive, Scotlands larger burghs set out to expand the
cloth industry.35 It was understood that women made up the bulk of poor
people most in need of work: in 1578, for example, Scottish merchants were
reminded not to import English cloth because it undermined the domestic
textile industry and caused mony vagabund wemen to pas ydill for laik
of woll, laubouring and making of clayth.36 The projects that attracted
33For an excellent brief account of Dutch Brazil, see Israel, Dutch Primacy in World
Trade, 15671.
34Coarse woolen cloth and knit stockings from Scotland were smuggled into the Eng-
lish colonies in the late seventeenth century; see T. M. Devine, Scotlands Empire: 16001815
(London: Allen Lane, 2003), 38. See also Keith, Scottish Trade with the Plantations Before
1700, Scottish Historical Review 6 (1908): 3248. The extent to which goods originating in
and around Aberdeen were involved is unknown. There is no evidence to suggest that the
woolens trade was doing any better than the evidence of licit exports would suggest.
35S. G. E. Lythe and J. Butt, An Economic History of Scotland, 11001939 (Glasgow: Blackie,
1975), 4547. On the currency, see Rorke, English and Scottish Overseas Trade, 28384.
36James David Marwick, ed., Records of the Convention of the Royal Burghs of Scotland,
12951597 (Edinburgh: Published for the Convention of Royal Burghs by William Paterson,
1866), 76.
78 gordon desbrisay
or required central government interest involved fairly large infusions of

capital and almost always centered on urban initiatives. Starting in 1587,
for example, costly but generally ineffectual efforts were made to recruit
up to one hundred families of skilled wool-workers from the cloth centers
of France, Flanders, and Norwich, in the hope that they would jumpstart
efforts to produce higher quality cloth more efficiently in Scotlands larger
towns. By the time a dozen or so adult Flemings finally arrived in 1601,
however, merchants in the towns most concerned could see that it made
more sense to invest in a ruralized industry geared to bulk production
of cheap woolens that peasants already knew how to make.37 Aberdeen
merchants may have come to that conclusion sooner than their counter-
parts in other Scottish towns, because by 1580 they had already begun to
organize the making of plaiding, a traditional peasant handicraft, into an
export trade geared primarily to supplying the Dutch with cheap woolens
for the booming markets of northern Europe.38
Plaiding was a rough twilled cloth that could be put to many uses. In
Scotland it was commonly worn as a shawl for women or a mantle for
men. English travelers seldom failed to note that the majority of Scottish
men, women, and children wore little else but homespun or locally made
coarse woolens. For such writers the ubiquity of plaiding was a sign not
just of poverty, but of backwardness and isolation from civilizing market
forces.39 On the continent, plaiding served most often for blankets, tents,
and military uniforms.40 Any stigma that attached to it overseas had less
to do with cultural associations than with quality control. Versatile, prac-
tical, and cheap it might have been, but plaiding did nothing to improve
the dismal reputation of Scottish manufactures among foreign buyers: an
Englishman griped in 1617 that it be narrow and shrinke in the wetting,41
and a Frenchman sniffed in 1672 that from the price your honour may
37Theodora Pagan, The Convention of Royal Burghs of Scotland (Glasgow: Glasgow

University Press, 1926), 20810; James David Marwick, ed., Records of the Convention of
the Royal Burghs of Scotland, 15971614 (Edinburgh: Published for the Convention of Royal
Burghs by William Paterson, 1870), 107109, 117, 202203.
38Tyson, Manufacturing in Rural Aberdeenshire, 64. It was probably not a coinci-
dence that Aberdeen was not among the towns to which the Flemish experts were sent.
Records of the Convention of Royal Burghs of Scotland, 15971614, 107109, 117, 202203.
39See for example Thomas Kirke, A Modern Account of Scotland Being an Exact Descrip-
tion of the Country, and a True Character of the People and Their Manners ([London: s.n.],
1679), 11.
41Fynes Moryson, Itinerary...Containing His Ten Yeeres Trauell through the Twelve
Dominions of Germany, Bohmerland, Sweitzerland, Netherland, Denmarke, Poland, Jtaly,
Turky, France, England, Scotland, and Ireland (London: 1617), 155.
judge of the goodness of the stuff.42 At the low end of the cutthroat
international cloth trade, however, what mattered most was being able to
deliver a product at rock-bottom prices.43
As exports of plaiding began to take off, lighter serges known as fingrams
were added to Aberdeens product line around 1600. They were better
suited to warmer climates and, as Skene noted, featured prominently in
the Brazil trade.44 Hand-knitted stockings (which unlike cloth were pro-
duced almost entirely by women) began to be sent overseas about the
same time. In the eighteenth century, knitted stockings supplanted rough
woolens as the towns chief export.45 But in the seventeenth century,
plaiding (the term often applied to plaiding and fingrams alike) was, as
the city fathers said in 1635, the speciall commoditie [whereby] the haill
tred of Aberdeen did subsist.46 For much of that century the plaiding
trade presided over by Aberdeen merchants was the largest domestic
industry in the country.47 It was also the key to Aberdeens early involve-
ment in the Atlantic economy and a lifeline for poorer women in and
around Aberdeen.
Customs accounts for the port of Aberdeen bear eloquent testimony
to the swift but uneven growth of the plaiding industry in the first four
decades of the seventeenth century. Around the year 1600, towards the
end of the start-up phase of the industry, an average of roughly 4,400
ells of plaiding per year (an Aberdeen ell was 38.4 inches)48 was shipped
from Aberdeen to ports in northern France, the Baltic, and, especially,
the Netherlands.49 Over the course of the next two decades exports of
42A Foreigner in Scotland, 1672, The Scottish Antiquary, or Northern Notes and Queries
8 (1894): 112. The writer was Denis de Repas, a French official at the English court, in a
letter to Sir Edward Harley.
43Charles Wilson, Cloth Production and International Competition in the Seventeenth
Century, The Economic History Review 13, no. 2 (1960): 20921.
44Skene, Memorialls, 105. Linen was also produced in and around Aberdeen, but not
on the scale of plaiding.
45Ishbel C. M. Barnes, The Aberdeen Stocking Trade, Textile History 8, no. 1 (1977):
7797.
46Louise B. Taylor, ed., Aberdeen Council Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1942), 2:31.
47Tyson, Manufacturing in Rural Aberdeenshire, 64. Smout, Scottish Trade, 45.
48A standard ell was 37 inches, but there were variants, including for Aberdeen plaid-
ing. Ronald Zupko, A Dictionary of Weights and Measures for the British Isles (Philadelphia:
American Philosophical Society, 1985), 119.
49This and the plaiding statistics that follow are, unless otherwise indicated, derived
from the customs accounts for the port of Aberdeen set out in Duncan MacNiven,
Merchant and Trader in Early Seventeenth-Century Aberdeen (M.Litt, Aberdeen Uni-
versity, 1977), 227, Table 3. See also Duncan MacNiven, Merchants and Traders in Early
80 gordon desbrisay
plaiding increased nearly twelve-fold, topping 50,000 ells for the first time
in 1620. Starting in 1621, however, plaiding exports suddenly fell back by
about one-third, and they were to remain flat for most of that decade.50
Much of the problem could be traced to political and economic upheav-
als, most notably the outbreak of the Thirty Years War and the renewal of
economic hostilities between Spain and the Dutch Republic, that afflicted
most of northern Europe and all of Aberdeens trading partners, and over
which the Scots had no control.51 They were equally powerless in the face
of unusually foul weather that precipitated famine in northern England
and Scotland between 1621 and 1624.52
By 1629, the plaiding trade had entered a second phase of expansion
that saw exports climb to an average of 56,000 ells between 1629 and
1633. Then, over the six years from 1634 through 1639, exports soared to
an average of 93,000 ells, exceeding by almost one-third the highest single-
year figure recorded before 1634.53 The best year of all was the last in the
recorded series, 1639, when 121,300 ells of cloth were shipped from the
port of Aberdeenmost of it bound for Veere, the Scots staple port in
Zeeland, and, it seems, transshipment to the plantations of the Dutch
West India Company.
There are considerable gaps in the customs accounts after 1639, but it is
unlikely that the volume and value of the cloth shipped from the port of
Aberdeen that year was ever matched.54 1639 was also the year that the first
shots in the British civil wars (16391660) were fired, not far from Aberdeen.
Plaiding exports may have held up for a few years, but by the mid-1640s the
combined impact of predatory armies, naval blockades, and bubonic plague
had brought the production and export of plaiding to a virtual halt.55 Under
the Cromwellian occupation of the 1650s there began a period of uneven and
Seventeenth Century Aberdeen, in From Lairds to Louns, 6064; and Tyson, Manufactur-
ing in Rural Aberdeenshire, 64. My calculations use somewhat different aggregations of
years, but draw on the same data. These figures do not include Aberdeen cloth shipped
overseas from Leith and other Scottish ports.
50Exports remained relatively flat through 1627. The figures for 1628 are missing.
51See for example Israel, Dutch Primacy, ch. 5.
52Laura A. M. Stewart, Poor Relief in Edinburgh and the Famine of 162124, Inter-
national Review of Scottish Studies 30 (2005): 541; Michael W. Flinn, Scottish Population
History, From the 17th Century to the 1930s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977),
11626.
53The previous high was 66,760 ells, in 1632.
54Tyson, Manufacturing in Rural Aberdeenshire, 64; T. C. Smout, review of Louise B.
Taylor, ed., The Aberdeen Shore Work Accounts, in Northern Scotland 1 (1972): 237.
55Gordon DesBrisay, The Civill Warrs Did Overrun All: Aberdeen, 16301690, in
Aberdeen Before 1800: A New History, eds. E. Patricia Dennison, et al. (East Linton: Tuckwell
ultimately incomplete economic recovery that lasted about thirty years.56

Plaiding exports in the Restoration era (16601685) climbed above 70,000
ells a year on occasion, reaching volumes comparable to those seen just
prior to the surge of 16341639, but at the lower prices that afflicted most
branches of the European textile industry in the second half of the century.57
By the early 1680s, the post-war recovery was over and Aberdeens anemic
economy was beginning to slip into reverse and, along with it, the lives of
many rural women in Aberdeenshire.58
***
As will become apparent below, Skene chiefly worried in the 1680s about
the macroeconomics of growth and had little to say about the lives of the
laboring poor beyond extolling the profit-making potential of their low-
waged industriousness. Whether or not his vision of a more prosperous
nation included a more prosperous peasantry, he surely understood the
paradox involved in trying to improve the lot of the very people upon whose
poverty his plan for prosperity rested. As time passed and the boom years of
the 1630s receded ever further into the past, Skene also came to appreciate
how important having an Atlantic market for its chief export had been for
the port of Aberdeen and the region it served. It had enabled the plaiding
trade to grow and prosper, and it had helped to insulate the local cloth
industry and the large numbers of poor people who had come to depend
on it for a living from downturns in European markets to which, Skene and
others were beginning to see, they were otherwise dangerously exposed.
Once the export of Aberdeen cloth began in earnest at the end of the
sixteenth century, it took just a single generation for the commercial pro-
duction of plaiding to become a fixture of both town and country life in
Press, 2002), 23866; David Stevenson, The Burghs and the Scottish Revolution, in The
Early Modern Town in Scotland, ed. Michael Lynch (London: Croom Helm, 1987), 17886.
56See T. M. Devine, The Cromwellian Union and the Scottish Burghs: The Case of
Aberdeen and Glasgow, 16521660, in Scottish Themes: Essays in Honour of Prof. S. G. E.
Lythe, eds. J. Butt and J. T. Ward (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1976), 116, which
tends, however, to overstate the recovery. Cf. DesBrisay, The Civill Warrs Did Overrun
All, 26465.
57For plaiding exports in the 1670s see T. C. Smout, review of The Aberdeen Shore Work
Accounts, 23537, which corrects earlier (but still influential) overestimates. See also Sham-
mas, Decline of Textile Prices in England and British America Prior to Industrialization,
The Economic History Review 47, no. 3 (1994): 48392, 497.
58DesBrisay, The Civill Warrs Did Overrun All, 26166; R. E. Tyson, Famine in
Aberdeenshire, 16951699: Anatomy of a Crisis, in From Lairds to Louns, 346. Compare
with Allan I. Macinnes, Union and Empire: The Making of the United Kingdom in 1707 (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 22325.
82 gordon desbrisay
the northeast of Scotland.59 As had happened elsewhere, the quick spread

of rural industry drew peasant women and their households more firmly
into the cash, credit, and debt nexus than ever before. The sharp down-
turn in cloth exports in the early 1620s, accompanied by talk in 1622 of
allowing exports of raw wool to England and by the looming threat of
famine, raised widespread concerns.60 In particular, there were worries
about how dependent on cloth production people in the region had
become, and what might happen if plaiding should fail altogether.61 In
1623, the Aberdeen Town Council claimed that wool from the south of
Scotland is all wroght and labored heir and haulds mony poor people
at wark, who would otherwise beg. If wool was diverted to England, city
councillors feared that the whole tred with playding wald decay [which]
is the cheiff commoditie exported of the kindome.62 The Scottish Privy
Council was told in 1625 that 20,000 people lived in the northe by thair
industrie in the woll, as namelie by the making of plaidis.63 That figure
was not meant to be taken literally, but it was intended to convey a sense
of just how vital a part of local life and the local economy the plaiding
trade had become, and how many people had come to depend on it for
all or part of their livelihood. Long before the northeast of Scotland lost its
ties to international markets and the plaiding boom had become a bust,
there were warnings of what would happen to Scotlands proto-industrial
workforce if work became scarce.
However many thousands of people were employed in the plaiding
trade at any given point, we can be certain that a large majority of them
were women. It is usually reckoned that it took five or six women carding
and spinning wool to supply one man with yarn for his loom.64 It was the
59Similarly, in Wrttemberg from the 1560s the production of worsteds Swiftly...

became the most important single livelihood in many villages and small towns in the
region. Sheilagh C. Ogilvie, Institutions and Economic Development in Early Modern
Central Europe, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5 (1995): 225.
60Exporting raw wool would drive the price up in Scotland and likely ruin the plaiding
trade, which needed to keep costs as low as possible in order to compete internationally.
After much fuss, the proposal was dropped.
61On conditions in the 1620s, see Stewart, Poor Relief in Edinburgh and the Famine of
162124, and Michael Flinn, Scottish Population History, 11626.
62Aberdeen Council Letters, 1:201202.
63Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, ser.1, vol. 13, 745. See also Aberdeen Council
Letters, 1:201202, 20611. The figure of 20,000 may not have been entirely fanciful: in the
1790s, when the population was probably not much higher than it had been in the early
seventeenth century, roughly 20,000 people were employed part-time knitting wool stock-
ings for export. Tyson, Manufacturing in Rural Aberdeenshire, 69.
64Tyson, Manufacturing in Rural Aberdeenshire, 68.
same in almost every branch of early modern Europes vast, ruralized tex-
tile industries.65 The fluidity and fungibility of that sea of female and child
labor was an important factor in the rapid adoption and wide spread of the
ruralized plaiding trade.66 The term spinster came to be associated with
single women, but it is clear that widowed and married women as well
as young girls also worked at preparing and spinning wool as part of the
range of activities by which they contributed to the household economy.
For most women in peasant households, spinning for the commercial
cloth trade was subject to negotiations and coordination with other mem-
bers of the household, a matter of shifting more time and energy to a task
that was already part of the established rhythms of their working lives.67
Much spinning was probably done with a distaff and spindle, which cost
next to nothing and could be used while minding livestock or walking to
or from other chores. Spinning wheels were available everywhere by the
seventeenth century and could produce yarn four times faster, but they
were ill suited to multi-tasking, and had to be paid for.68
When Aberdeens Atlantic connection was in effect and the demand for
plaiding was high, spinning and cloth production expanded in and around
the town as well as in the countryside. Near the height of the plaiding
boom in 1636, a census taken in Old Aberdeen, a smaller town imme-
diately adjacent to the port of Aberdeen, listed nine spinsters, including
one man.69 Married women and widows were identified as such in the
census, but the listed occupation of the household was invariably that of
their husband or late husbandso the spinning done by the majority of
women who were not single went unreported. Single women were listed
in the census as having a number of occupations, most often that of ser-
vant. The eight women designated as spinsters all lived without benefit
of an adult male head of household, but the term seems to have been
applied because they really did spin wool for a living.70 Whatever else
there is to know about William Willox, spinster, we can be certain that he
65Deborah Simonton, A History of European Womens Work 1700 to the Present (London:
Routledge, 1998), 40.
66Simonton, A History of European Womens Work, 4445.
67De Vries, The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution, 261.
68Isabel F. Grant, An Old Scottish Handicraft Industry, Scottish Historical Review
XVIII (1921): 280.
69A. M. Munro, ed., Records of Old Aberdeen, MCLVIIMDCCCXCI (Aberdeen: New
Spalding Club, 1899), 1:34755.
70Issobel Carnecorse and Elspet Norie were single women who might have been listed
in these documents as spinsters had the term been used to connote marital status rather
than occupation. Instead they were designated of no calling. Records of Old Aberdeen,
1:351.
84 gordon desbrisay
was not an unmarried woman. 71 Janet Blake and Margaret Seaton shared
a house and were designated spinsteris and sewsteris.72 Issobel Fraser,
spinster, lived with Elizabeth Taylor, candlemaker.73 In that same 1636
census Janet Torrie in Old Aberdeen was listed as a spinster living with
three of her children, the eldest of whom was fifteen; Helene Jameson
lived with her two babies; Barbara Fiddes lived with her daughter; and
Janet Mar lived with her daughter and a servant.74 Unwed motherhood
was more common in northeast Scotland than elsewhere in the country
and in most other parts of early modern Europe.75 The fact that single
women could at least try to eke out a more or less independent living by
spinning, though hardly unique to the region, is probably part of the equa-
tion that produced that complex phenomenon.76
Whether in town or country, and by whatever means, spinning was
proverbially low-paid work, and outside of the boom times it is unlikely
that a woman could make an entire living at it.77 The next comprehen-
sive listing of Old Aberdeen inhabitants was compiled in 1695, when the
plaiding trade was on the point of collapse.78 The small town had roughly
tripled in size since 1636, partly at the expense of the port of Aberdeen,
but no women (or men) were identified as spinsters in 1695, presumably
because it was no longer possible to sustain a household that way.79 Most
women spun at home as their other chores allowed, and with so many
variables in play it is impossible to know how much they might earn in a
71Records of Old Aberdeen, 1:351.

75See, for example, Rosalind Mitchison and Leah Leneman, Sexuality and Social Con-
trol: Scotland 16601780 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989); Michael F. Graham, The Uses of
Reform: Godly Discipline and Popular Behaviour in Scotland and Beyond, 15601610, vol.
LVIII (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996).
76See Andrew Blaikie, Scottish Illegitimacy: Social Adjustment or Moral Economy?,
Journal of Interdisciplinary History 29 (1998): 22141; Gordon DesBrisay, Wet Nurses and
Unwed Mothers in Seventeenth-Century Aberdeen, in Women in Scotland, c.1100c.1750,
eds. Elizabeth Ewan and Maureen Meikle (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1999), 21021.
77See for example Marjorie Keniston McIntosh, Working Women in English Society,
13001620 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 21216; R. A. Houston, Women
in the Economy and Society of Scotland, 15001800, in Scottish Society 15001800, eds. R. A.
Houston and I. D. Whyte (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 12026.
79Records of Old Aberdeen, 1:35573; Robert E. Tyson, The Economy and Social Struc-
ture of Old Aberdeen in the Seventeenth Century, in Old Aberdeen: Bishops, Burgh, and
Buildings, ed. J. S. Smith (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1991), 3856.
given period.80 A skilled spinner was thought to be able to spin a pound

of wool in a day, for which women in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
England could expect to earn between two and four pence sterling.81 Scot-
tish data on seventeenth-century wages and incomes is harder to come
by, but at the height of the plaiding boom in Aberdeen, in 1637, a poor
woman who volunteered to live and work in the new workhouse (a.k.a.
Correction House) could expect to be paid somewhat below the floor of
the English pay scale: twenty-one pence Scots per pound of yarn spun, the
equivalent of 1.75 pence sterling.82 The Correction House wage affords two
other basic comparisons: twenty-one pence Scots was just over double
what an Aberdeen pensioner with no guild affiliations could expect to
receive per day in poor relief in the 1630s,83 and it was just over a quarter
of what a male day-laborer was paid for a days work (or just over half his
take-home pay, if his employers fed him).84
The degree to which wool working on a commercial basis was embed-
ded in the lives of women in both town and country can be seen in the
way that servants wages in the 1630s sometimes included cloth or wool
that they were apparently expected to work and sell on their own behalf.
In rural Aberdeenshire in 1634, Barbara Jacks servant fee included cash,
clothing, shoes, some linen, and one pound of wool valued at ten shillings
Scotsone-eighth her wage for six months.85 The widespread involve-
ment of single, widowed, and married women in spinning and knitting
80Simonton, A History of European Womens Work, 45.

81Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain, The New
Economic History of Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 47.
82John Stuart, ed., Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen 16251642
(Edinburgh: Scottish Burgh Record Society, 1871), 110. The exchange rate was roughly 12
Scots: 1 Sterling.
83The Aberdeen pension in such cases was 15 Scots per year, roughly 10 pence per day.
The average pension fell to 9 later in the century, however, and wages for textile workers
are also likely to have fallen. Gordon DesBrisay and Elizabeth Ewan, with H. Lesley Diack,
Life in the Two Towns, in Aberdeen Before 1800, 63. See also Shammas, Decline of Textile
Prices, 497.
84The basic wage for day-laborers in Aberdeen came to eighty pence Scots per day,
with an option to accept half in exchange for board. I have assumed that women in the
workhouse (willingly) were paid over and above room and board, but that may not have
been the case. It should be noted that most laborers are thought to have worked an aver-
age of four days per week over the course of a year, whereas a full-time spinner could in
theory work six days a week. A. J. S. Gibson and T. C. Smout, Prices, Food and Wages in
Scotland, 15501780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 284.
85Records of the Sheriff Court of Aberdeenshire. 2:397. See also R. A. Houston, Marriage
Formation and Domestic Industry: Occupational Endogamy in Kilmarnock, Ayrshire,
16971764, Journal of Family History 8 (1983): 224.
86 gordon desbrisay
is evident in the many civil court suits for debts involving wool not yet
paid for or returned as yarn or cloth or stockings.86 In 1643, for example,
a married woman named Issobel Philip and a single woman named Agnes
Ross were among a number of country folk indebted to Patrick Walker, an
Aberdeen merchant who awaited payment in specie or in kind for wool
they had received from him.87
Civil court records also reveal women participating in the woolens
industry not just as producers, but as buyers and sellers of wool, cloth,
and stockings. Widows might continue the businesses of their late hus-
bands, and wives might manage the household business jointly with their
husbands, but widows and wives alike could buy or sell entirely or largely
on their own account.88 Margaret Melvill, for example, was a formidable
businesswoman who sold a wide variety of goods through two successive
marriages to shipmasters and a brief widowhood in between.89 She was
Aberdeens most active litigant in 1688. Among those she sued that year
was Issobel Chrystie, a sailors wife, for wool worth 9 Scotsmore than
many female servants earned in a year.90 It was especially common for a
mariners spouse like Issobel Chrystie to take up spinning, knitting, brew-
ing, or all of the above to make ends meet.
Merchants wives often became adept at managing the household
business while their husbands were away at sea.91 Issobel Udnys hus-
band was away longer than most. He was an Aberdeen cloth merchant
who decamped to the Netherlands as the Scottish wars heated up in the
mid-1640s, leaving Issobel behind to manage their affairs.92 In April 1647,
86In Scottish debt litigation, married women involved in a disputed transaction were
named rather than masked behind the names of their husbands, as was usually the case
in England and elsewhere. For the women in the town of Aberdeen, see DesBrisay and
Thomson, Crediting Wives, 8598; for women in Aberdeenshire, see examples in David
Littlejohn, ed., Records of the Sheriff Court of Aberdeenshire (Aberdeen: New Spalding Club,
1907), 2:105, 307, 396, 434, 454, 513.
87Records of the Sheriff Court of Aberdeenshire. 3:23. My thanks to Doug Catterall for
this reference.
88DesBrisay and Thompson, Crediting Wives, passim.
89DesBrisay and Thompson, Crediting Wives, 88.
90Aberdeen City Archives [ACA], Baillie Court Register, xiv, 21 Jan. 1688. Senior female
domestics in Aberdeen earned an average of 10 per year plus room, board, shoes, and
other considerations. See Gordon DesBrisay, City Limits: Female Philanthropists and Wet
Nurses in Seventeenth-Century Scottish Towns, Journal of the Canadian Historical Associa-
tion, new series, 8 (1997): 5254.
91Aberdeen merchants of the seventeenth century are said to have had an outmoded
penchant for traveling with their goods rather than working primarily through agents.
Gordon Jackson, The Economy: Aberdeen and the Sea, in Aberdeen before 1800, 168.
92Her husband George Ross (Scottish women kept their own surnames) was listed as
an exile in 1646. Aberdeen Council Letters, 3:44.
she was heavily fined for buying up huge quantities of plaiding outside
market hours, presumably with the intention of shipping it to her hus-
band.93 The timing of the case suggests that a sense of urgency drove her
to break the rules, or to do so more brazenly than she otherwise might
have. Although overseas buyers were still paying a decent price for plaid-
ing in 1647, Aberdeens cloth trade was in disarray. A year earlier, the
town council had lamented that plaiding, our cheif and only trade, was
at a near standstill due to marauding armies, destruction of local herds
of sheep, the inability to import wool from the south, and competition
from merchants in smaller centers closer to producers unwilling to travel
further than necessary. At a cloth fair that usually attracted two hundred
horse packs of plaiding, there was not one full pack for sale.94 Now, in
the spring of 1647, there were reports of plague in villages near Aberdeen.
Issobel Udny must have been rushing to acquire all the plaiding she could
for one last shipment out before quarantine regulations shut the port of
Aberdeen (as indeed they did a week later), and before news of the infec-
tion reached the Netherlands and provoked an embargo of Aberdeen ves-
sels.95
The cloth that Issobel Udny was rushing to buy was produced by a peas-
ant workforce organized along lines familiar across much of northwest
Europe. Plaiding production was based on a mix of the familiar putting-out
system, in which Aberdeen merchants distributed wool imported from
the south of Scotland to outlying spinners and weavers and bought back
the semi-finished cloth at a pre-arranged piece-rate, and the Kaufsystem in
which workers supplied their own wool and merchants bought the cloth
at local fairs and markets.96 Describing Aberdeenshire fairs of the mid-
seventeenth century, Sir Robert Gordon of Straloch noted that everything
that is produced at home and can be exchanged for money is exposed for
sale, especially coarse woolen webs, which are eagerly sought after by city
merchants for export.97 The vast majority of cloth shipped overseas was
produced in the households of rural Aberdeenshire; only a fraction was
actually made in the town. Those proportions were reversed, however,
when it came to the profits generated by the plaiding trade.
93ACA, Council Register, liii(2), 21 April 1647.

94Aberdeen Council Letters, 3:4347.
95Dennison et al., Health in the Two Towns, 7990.
97Sir Robert Gordon of Straloch, Notes for a Description of the Two Shires of Aberdeen
and Banff in Scotland Beyond the Mountains, in Geographical Collections Relating to Scot-
land Made By Walter Macfarlane, ed. Arthur Mitchell (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society,
1907), 2:306.
88 gordon desbrisay
In the first half of the seventeenth century, Aberdeens new cloth-based

prosperity underpinned significant population growth: from roughly 6,000
inhabitants in 1600, the town reached its seventeenth-century peak of
8,300 inhabitants about the year 1640.98 The 1620s and 1630s witnessed
a major building boom: the tolbooth (townhouse) was rebuilt, churches
were restored, and projects were undertaken to improve the quay, roads,
bridges, mills, water supply, and other infrastructure.99 Existing hospitals
(hospices, really) for the elderly were upgraded, and new ones opened.100
The burgesses of Aberdeen voted for taxes to help pay for these new proj-
ects, and even agreed, in 1619, to a compulsory poor-rate.101 The towns
welfare system was further reinforced by an unprecedented gush of chari-
table legacies and donations that paralleled the rise of plaiding.102 Pen-
sions for the poor increased substantially.
When exports of plaiding reached their peak in the 1630s, and as spin-
ners and weavers worked as never before to meet the sudden demand for
Scottish cloth in Dutch Brazil, townsfolk invested heavily in two major
public projects directly tied to the plaiding boom. At the harbor, a large
stone packhouse was completed in 1634.103 Cloth intended for export
was stored there, inspected, measured, folded, compressed into bales for
shipping, and assessed for customs duties.104 An even more ambitious
project was undertaken in 1637, when a consortium of local merchants
in partnership with the town council and kirk session established the Cor-
rection House, a workhouse where the poor and the fallen would spin
wool that on-site weavers would turn into commercially viable cloth. It
was modeled on English workhouses that Aberdeen merchants, includ-
ing Alexander Skenes father, had traveled south to study.105 Like those
98Robert E. Tyson, People in the Two Towns, in Aberdeen Before 1800, 112.
99DesBrisay, The Civill Warrs Did Overrun All, 23940.
100DesBrisay, The Civill Warrs Did Overrun All, 6567.
101Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen, 15701625, 35961. Com-
pulsory poor-rates were more common in Scottish towns between about 1590 and 1640
than once thought, and much more common than in the remainder of the century. Stew-
art, Poor Relief in Edinburgh and the Famine of 162124, 713.
102In 1632 the office of Master of Mortifications was created to manage the influx of
charitable legacies (mortifications). See Mortifications Under the Charge of the Provost,
Magistrates, and Town Council of Aberdeen (Aberdeen: 1849).
103ACA, Council Register liii(1), March 5, 1634.
104William Kennedy, Annals of Aberdeen From the Reign of William the Lion to the End
of the Year 1818 (Aberdeen: A. Brown and Co., 1818), 2:292.
105Robert Skene and one other merchant traveled to London, Leeds, and Wakefield
in 1632, accompanied by young Alexander Jaffray, sent by his magistrate father to learn
the cloth trade. It would not be unreasonable to suppose that Robert Skene might have
other establishments, Aberdeens was intended for advancing of vertew

and suppressing of vyce amongst the commons and was expected to pay
its own way and, hopefully, earn a profit.106 It was built to house twenty
poor people: ten indigent volunteers paid by the pound of yarn spun, and
ten sinners sent there by the church to work off unpaid fines. The former
were pensioners who could be taken off the pension rolls while they spun
for their crust; the latter were invariably unwed mothers unable to pay the
steep fine for fornication.107
Aberdonians had studied enough workhouses to know that most of
them failed.108 Theirs stood as a testament to the faith of Aberdeens pre-
war mercantile elite. The Correction House was the product of a particular
and, as it transpired, fleeting moment in the towns seventeenth-century
history, when faith in the redemptive (or at least repressive) power of
godly discipline and productive labor was matched by faith that overseas
demand for plaiding and the price it sold for would remain high enough
to offset the costs associated with urban manufactories. It was not to be.
In the short run, production stoppages occasioned by wartime looting
plaiding was useful to soldiers, had resale value, and was eminently
portableand the outbreak of plague forced the Correction House to
close in 1647. There was talk of reviving the Correction House in every
decade to the end of the century and beyond, but little came of those
plans.109 In the long run, an enterprise founded on optimism at the height
of transatlantic demand for Aberdeen cloth made little economic sense
once the plaiding trade had shrunk back to its North Sea base. None of
Aberdeens other initiatives in the areas of poor relief or infrastructure
improvement, sadly, was matched during the economically challenged
and often depressed second half of the century, and some were reversed.
After 1650, only the most essential public works projects were under-
taken, the poor-rate was scrapped, charitable giving declined sharply, and
taken his own son Alexander (then just eleven) on such a trip at some point. The Diary of
Alexander Jaffray, ed. John Barclay (London: Harvey and Darton, 1833), 16.
106Having familiarized themselves with workhouses, however, Aberdonians were pre-
pared for theirs to fail: public funds were handed over only after various failure scenarios
were factored into the contract.
107DesBrisay et al., Life in the Two Towns, 6465.
108The contract between the council and the merchant investors included provisions
for various failure scenarios. Extracts From the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen
16251642, 10612.
90 gordon desbrisay
pensions for the poor shrank.110 Aberdeen had discovered the boom-and-
bust reality of fleeting proto-industrial prominence.
***
Despite this decline, however, men like Alexander Skene could still
dream of a revival of the woolens trade. The vital ingredient for success
was still there, because Aberdeenshire womens lack of other opportuni-
ties to earn a living still ensured a supply of labor cheap enough to help
project limited Aberdonian merchant capital beyond Scottish borders.
Even, perhaps, back out across the Atlantic, if only well capitalized part-
ners capable of operating on that grander scale could be found. Classic
formulations of proto-industrialization theory maintained that upland
regions of dispersed households in a pastoral economy were best suited
to rural industry, but Aberdeenshire is one of many exceptions to that
pattern.111 Rural industry in the northeast took root not in pastoral High-
land regions, but in arable Lowland regions.112 Aberdeenshire had more
arable land than any other county of Scotland, but much of it was of poor
quality, as reflected in rents and valuations that were among the lowest
in the country.113 It was not just the land that was poor. The poverty of
the people thereeven relative to the rest of Scotland, already a poor
countrywas also reflected in wages for male and female farm servants
that were 40 or 50 percent below the already low national averages.114
Very few rural folk owned land. Even tenants were in the minority: the
majority of the northeast population was comprised of an underclass of
sub-tenants, known as cottars, who sublet small plots of arable or grazing
land in return mainly for labor.115
110Gordon DesBrisay, The Civill Warrs Did Overrun All, 23940, 253, 265.
111For pertinent reviews and critiques of the theory, see Ogilvie, Institutions and
Economic Development, 221250; Ian D. Whyte, Proto-Industrialisation in Scotland, in
Regions and Industries: A Perspective on the Industrial Revolution in Britain, ed. Pat Hudson
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 22851; G. L. Gullickson, Agriculture and
Cottage Industry: Redefining the Causes of Proto-Industrialization, Journal of Economic
History 43, no. 4 (1983): 83150; R. A. Houston and K. D. M. Snell, Protoindustrialization?
Cottage Industry, Social Change and Industrial Revolution, Historical Journal 27, no. 2
(1984): 47392.
112Whyte, Proto-Industrialisation in Scotland, 245.
114A. J. S. Gibson and T. C. Smout, Prices, Food and Wages in Scotland, 29394, 302303,
figs. 8.5 and 8.6.; Tyson, Manufacturing in Rural Aberdeenshire, 7172.
115Ian Whyte, Agriculture in Aberdeenshire in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth
Centuries: Continuity and Change, in From Lairds to Louns, 1031.
As Ian Whyte explained, in the cereal-producing Lowlands, where

much of the Scottish textile manufacture was concentrated, the demand
for farm labor was marked by seasonal peaks and troughs. Womens labor
was essential to bringing in the harvest, but in the seventeenth century
women did not normally work in the fields at other times of the year.
More than most men, women were liable to seasonal underemployment.116
In the countryside even more than the towns, however, womens scope
for economic activity was constrained by more than just the material lim-
its of the local economy: as was the case all across early modern Europe,
the range of acceptable employment open to women was severely cir-
cumscribed by custom and law. That combination of chronic necessity
and limited opportunity on the part of rural women helped to ensure the
low cost of labor that attracted urban capital to the countryside in the
first place. As Gay Gullickson noted in her study of eighteenth-century
Normandy, proto-industrialization was most likely to occur where urban
and rural needs complemented each other, that is, where poor peasants,
especially poor women peasants, met prosperous textile merchants.117
Aberdeens merchants were not especially prosperous, but the peasants
of the northeast were exceptionally poor. Rural poverty was the Aberdeen
merchants competitive advantage in the international textiles market.118
The drive for lower costs shaped international trade and in the case of
Aberdonian merchants Skene knew that it had helped them attract busi-
ness from the well-heeled Dutch.
By the early seventeenth century the Dutch were coming to dominate
the quality end of the European cloth market, but for cheaper goods
the efficiencies of their capital markets and merchant marine could not
entirely compensate for the high cost of Dutch labor.119 Dutch employ-
ers, for example, complained that English textile workers were paid only
half as much as their counterparts in the Netherlands.120 Nevertheless,
between 1600 and 1630 Dutch merchants tripled their share of the Baltic
116Ian D. Whyte, Proto-industrialisation in Scotland, 22851.

117G. L. Gullickson, Agriculture and Cottage Industry, 850.
118See for example Charles Wilson, Cloth Production and International Competition
in the Seventeenth Century, The Economic History Review 13, no. 2 (1960): 20921.
119Wilson, Cloth Production, 11921; Jan de Vries, The Dutch Rural Economy in the
Golden Age, 15001700 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 18286; DuPlessis, Transi-
tions to Capitalism in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997),
11519.
120De Vries, The Dutch Rural Economy, 184.
92 gordon desbrisay
cloth trade.121 They achieved that feat mainly at the expense of the English
and largely by concentrating on cheap woolens acquired in part through
outsourcing to lower-cost producers in Scotland, whose workers were
probably paid at least one-third less than their English counterparts.122
Alexander Skene recalled this early seventeenth-century success and
he was therefore especially concerned with reviving Scotlands woolens
exports. He offered plaiding as a case study in the advantages of rural
industry and the importance of Atlantic markets.123 While few of Skenes
readers under the age of sixty had ever seen the business really thrive,
he could recall that when Plading was giving good price in Holland, Sir
Patrick Drummond, the Conservator of the Scottish staple at Veere at
the time, often remarked that Scotland was more oblieged to the city
of Aberdeen for the abundance of money the Merchants thereof brought
to the Nation, then to all the Towns of the Kingdom besides.124 Aber-
donians had been fond of making that claim for themselves in the 1630s,
and it might have been true for a time.125 In the straitened circumstances
of the 1680s, however, it sounded like a distant echo from a lost world.
The trade of this so profitable a commodity, Skene lamented in 1685,
is greatly decayed and become very low.126 As we have seen, he related
the decline of plaiding to the fall of Dutch Brazil.
In telling the story of the rise and fall of the plaiding trade, Alexander
Skene may have relished the opportunity to recount a proud chapter in
the generally unhappy recent past of his town, but he appears to have
mentioned the Brazil trade mainly because it, or rather its demise, was
still a matter of ongoing concern some forty years after the fact as well
as a source of hope for the future. For Skene, the profitable Dutch ties
of Aberdeens glory days held out the possibility of finding another such
imperial outlet to international markets. When he described what the
trade had been, he used the past tense (Dutch Plantations...were fur-
nished with our Plaiding); when he explained why it mattered, he did
121Israel, Dutch Primacy, 14344, esp. Table 5.8.

122Scottish wages were about one-third lower than English, and lower still in Aberdeen-
shire. Gibson and Smout, Prices, Food and Wages in Scotland, 275.
123Similar challenges faced the flagging English woolens industry. Shammas, Decline
of Textile Prices, 497.
125Aberdeens tax assessment relative to other burghs spiked to an early modern peak
in 1639, ahead of Edinburgh on a per capita basis and far beyond every other town. Michael
Lynch, Continuity and Change in Urban Society, 15001700, in Scottish Society, 15001800,
102, 116.
so in the present tense (the loss of the Plantations...is a considerable

cause thereof).127 Thus, he also believed that the woolens trade could be
revived if only a new overseas outlet or off-tract of comparable scale and
dynamism could be identified and tapped into.128 The experience with the
Dutch West India Company and Brazil in his fathers generation showed
that there was good money to be made in transatlantic trade conducted
at one remove, working in partnership with trusted intermediaries in a
foreign entrept. He knew from his Quaker connections that woolens
were in demand and fetching good prices in Englands fast-growing North
American colonies, where wool is very cheap; only work is dear.129 It was
worth the while to consider, Skene wrote in the Memorialls, in words
that reflect his own expansive commercial vision and Scotlands unusual
political circumstances, if we could find a way with any of these that have
Plantations in America now, or if we could fall upon a way of furnish-
ing the French King his armies with these Scottish Cloaths.130 That was
easier said than done, because Scottish merchants lacked a strong state or
a powerful navy to protect and further their interests.
Scotland was really a semi-sovereign state in the seventeenth cen-
tury. After the Union of the Crowns in 1603, it still set its own commer-
cial policy but had little say in foreign policy; it contributed to the Royal
Navy but could seldom call upon it to protect its shipping; and it was
liable to find its overseas initiatives thwarted if they crossed with English
interests.131 This became clear starting in the 1620s, when the Scots first
tried to establish colonies and trading companies of their own. After 1660
Scots were deemed foreigners under the Navigation Acts, and denied easy
access to English colonies.132 In the face of such ambiguity and limitation,
it was understandable that they should consider themselves free to trade
wherever and with whomever they could make the best deal, whether
that meant false papers and illicit trade, shipping goods across the Atlantic

129George Scot, The Model of the Government of the Province of East-New-Jersey (Edin-
burgh: 1685), 193. See also Devine, Scotlands Empire, 38; and Shammas, Decline of Textile
Prices, 502504. Skenes son John was the deputy governor of West New Jersey.
131For an excellent overview of Scotlands position relative to England and its empire,
see Devine, Scotlands Empire, 14, and chs. 13 passim.
132Smout, Scottish Trade,1523; Eric J. Graham, A Maritime History of Scotland, 16501790
(East Linton: Tuckwell, 2002), 710.
94 gordon desbrisay
in English or Dutch hulls, or, as Skene suggested, stoking Louis XIVs con-
tinental war machine.133
Scottish mercantilists such as Skene were wrong about various things to
do with the economy. Nevertheless, as Christopher Smout put it, they were
right to regard foreign trade as the hinge on which the whole prosperity
of the country turned. All economic growth began with its expansion, and
all economic decline was foreshadowed by its contraction.134 That was
especially true for a small country like Scotland, where the domestic mar-
ket was so limited. Skene counseled his fellow merchants to seek oppor-
tunities wherever they might be had. But at the same time, he also joined
the growing chorus of Scots advocating closer trading ties with England
and its colonies in North America and the Caribbean.135 He favored closer
political ties with England as wella compleat Union (which were rather
to be wished)although that hardly seemed imminent in 1685.136
Thus far in the seventeenth century, Dutch ports had served as the
main gateways through which Scottish goods might reach distant mar-
kets. Now, Skene advised, it was increasingly important to keep a good
Correspondence at London, seeing the Merchants there traffeck with both
the Indies, and in all places where the Netherlanders Trade in any part of
the World: it is probable that our Commodities might in some progress
of time make a good Mercat there also.137 The key word there is the last,
also, because it invoked a Dutch Atlantic past and present as well as
a British Atlantic future, and pointed towards the eventual realignment
of Scottish overseas trade from one orbit to the other.138 It also pointed
towards the potential revival of a woolens trade on which the economic
security of so many women and their families depended.
133For a fascinating account of Scottish seaborne enterprise in this period, see Graham,
Maritime History of Scotland, chs. 13.
134T. C. Smout, Scottish Trade, 23.
135Devine, Scotlands Empire, 4957. See also the perceptive comments of Andrew
Mackillop and Steve Murdoch, Introduction, in Military Governors and Imperial Frontiers
C. 16001800: A Study of Scotland and Empires, eds. Andrew Mackillop and Steve Murdoch
(Leiden: Brill, 2003), xxxixxxviii.
137Skene, Memorialls, 98. Skene knew that the English had no need of Scottish woolen
cloth, but linen cloth, linen yarn, and woolen stockings held promise.
138Devine, Scotlands Empire, 26. In 1735 the Scottish Conservator at Veere complained
that The Aberdeen people for some years have found London a better mercate than Hol-
land for their goods, and only carry to Holland what does not sell there. John Davidson
and Alexander Gray, The Scottish Staple at Veere: A Study in the Economic History of Scot-
land (London: Longmans Green, 1909), 255. See also David Ditchburn and Marjory Harper,
Aberdeen and the Outside World, in Aberdeen Before 1800, 39192.
***
Alexander Skene was not alone in extolling the productive potential of
Scotlands impoverished rural population. In 1683, the anonymous author
of a pamphlet promoting the New Mills woolen manufactory near Edin-
burgh proudly declared that in few Nations of the World can work-people
live cheaper, nor do any live so cheap as in this.139 He hoped New Mills
would be a model for similar establishments elsewhere, especially at
Aberdeen.140 Skene had probably seen this pamphlet, may have known
the author, and was certainly familiar with the case being made for invest-
ing in cloth manufactories.141 The Aberdeen Correction House, however,
had taught him that such enterprises proved commercially viable only
when cloth prices were high.142 Workhouses and less punitive woolen
manufactories tended to be alike in that regard, and Skene insisted that a
costly facility employing full-time workers, who must be well appointed
as to bedding and dyet, could not hope to beat out competitors deploying
decently motivated part-time workers living in their own rustic homes.143
To drive the point home, Skene offered the parable of Mr. Barnes, a
substantious wool merchant in pre-war Edinburgh. Barnes apparently
saw Aberdeen merchants spinning gold from the wool he sold them and
decided he could do better. According to Skene, Barnes established a
manufactory and hired workers to produce plaiding for export, only to
arrive in Holland to find that the Aberdonians, despite buying their wool
139A Representation of the Advantages, That Would Arise.... By the Erecting and Improv-
ing of Manufactories: But More Especially, by That of Woollen-Cloath...(Edinburgh, 1683),
10. The same sentiment was repeated in David Black, Essay upon Industry and Trade, Shew-
ing the Necessity of the One, the Conveniency and Usefulness of the Other, and the Advantages
of Both (Edinburgh, 1706), 4.
140A Representation of the Advantages, 8, 23. Glasgows woolen manufactory, estab-
lished in 1699, is said to have employed 1,400. Christopher A. Whatley, Scottish Society,
17071830: Beyond Jacobitism, Towards Industrialisation (Manchester: Manchester Univer-
sity Press, 2000), 34.
141In 1683 there had once again been calls to revive the Aberdeen Correction House,
this time as a knitted stockings manufactory. DesBrisay et al., Life in the Two Towns,
6465.
142Though favoured by legislation and financial incentives, woolen manufactories were
sickly infants vulnerable to any downturn in the market, and never lasted long. New Mills
closed in 1713. Smout, Scottish Trade, 21. Even in the Low Countries municipal workhouses
usually proved industrial white elephants. DuPlessis, Transitions to Capitalism, 132.
143Skene, Memorialls, 102. Women and boys hired to clean, card, and spin at New Mills
were paid 3s.8d Scots per day, just over twice what the Correction House women were paid
in the 1630sthough it remains unclear whether those rates were above and beyond room
and board. Records of a Scottish Cloth Manufactory at New Mills, lxxxvii.
96 gordon desbrisay
at the second hand from middlemen like himself and having to absorb
charges for transporting and born the hazard by Sea for their raw materi-
als, were still selling plaiding for what it cost him to produce it, and yet
with advantage.144 An Aberdeen acquaintance named Alexander Far-
quhar set the man from the bigger city straight as to the economic, social,
and moral advantages of rural industry, patiently explaining that the
key was that the people that wrought their Plaiding, had not by farr such
entertainment as his servants had, and that they drank oftner clear spring
Water than Ale: and therefore they had their Plaiding much cheaper than
he had his, whereupon he quickly gave over his Manufacture.145
For Alexander Skene, it was not just the healthful and morally brac-
ing experience of coping with grinding poverty that suited the rural folk
of Aberdeenshire to the woolens trade, but their equally admirable work
ethic. Notwithstanding that our Commons live at such a sober rate, he
continued, they are so set at work upon the account of their advantage.146
It was not often their advantage, or perhaps more realistically their des-
peration, that Skene focused on when discussing the relationship between
rural poverty and rural industry. Rather, he focused on the benefits urban
merchants stood to gain by employing the rural workforce on terms very
much to the merchants advantage.
While Alexander Skene focused on what an impoverished rural work-
force meant to the plaiding trade, Katherine, Countess of Erroll, writing
at about the same time, described more sympathetically what the plaid-
ing trade meant to the rural poor. She eschewed the kind of gender-neu-
tral language that Skene and other male commentators tended to use by
way of distancing themselves from the men, women, and children they
employed and exploited.147 The Buchan district of Aberdeenshire where
she lived was well peopled, she tells us. Barley and oats could do well
there, but she was concerned with how narrowly based the rural economy
was. The occupation of the Men whether Gentry or Comons, is labour-
ing and Husbandry: other Trades, except what is simply necessary, are

145Skene, Memorialls, 102103. Farquhar, mind you, invested in the Correction House
in the 1630s. Aberdeen Council Extracts, 16251642, 106.
147An Account of Buchan and What Is Remarkable Therein, in Geographical Collec-
tions Relating to Scotland Made by Walter Macfarlane, ed. Arthur Mitchell (Edinburgh:
Scottish History Society, 1908), 22328. The Countess of Erroll is identified as the author
in William Nicolson, The Scottish Historical Library (London, 1702), 57.
scarce plyed.148 Victual is all the Product of this Countrey, she added,
and when it giveth a good price, then it goeth well with the Masters and
Heritours, but when it is otherwise, they are ordinarily much straightened
for money.149 It was not, of course, only landowners who were affected
by rising and falling grain prices.150 Limited employment options and low
wages left the landless majority chronically short of money; the more
straitened the times were, the more important the sums women earned
in the cloth trade were. The plaiding trade was in evident decline as the
countess wrote in the early 1680s and she did not see many alternatives
for Aberdeenshires women. The women of this Countrey are mostly
employed in spinning and working of stockings and making of Plaiden-
Webs, which the Aberdeen Merchant carry over sea. Most tellingly, she
went on to note that it is this which bringeth money to the Comons,
other ways of getting it, they have not.151 With hindsight we can detect a
sense of foreboding in her discussion of Aberdeenshire women and their
dangerously few options for earning a living for themselves and their
families.
Even though the plaiding trade was off the boil in the last quarter of
the seventeenth century, thousands still depended on the small and, as it
turns out, shrinking, income that women and children could earn spin-
ning and knitting. In fact, the amount of money that could be earned from
spinning, in particular, probably grew substantially smaller as the seven-
teenth century wore on. In 1685, Alexander Skene reported that plaid-
ing and fingrams are become to be sold at half of the value which they
did formerly, neither is the half exported.152 When exports were down,
production was scaled back. It was not just that there was less work to
be had in the plaiding trade, but that it almost certainly paid less than
it had. A rare reference to a spinners pay in southern Scotland in 1697
works out to 16 pence per day, about 25 percent down from the 21 pence
recorded in Aberdeen in 1637. Considering that the northeast of Scotland
constituted a lower wage region, a female spinner in Aberdeenshire may
well have received considerably less than 16 pence per day in the late
148An Account of Buchan, 225.

149An Account of Buchan, 225.
150It is perhaps telling that the Countess of Erroll did not specify circustances in which
it goeth well with the Comons, for whom just getting by was doing well.
151An Account of Buchan, 225. The suggestion here that women wove as well as spun
is unusual; weaving was heavy work usually associated with men.
98 gordon desbrisay
1690s, assuming she could find work.153 In and around Aberdeen, as across
much of Britain and Europe, wages and prices remained fairly stable for
most categories of workers and most categories of basic goods over the
latter two-thirds of that century and well into the next.154 Falling cloth
prices constituted the main exception to that rule. Though a boon to
early modern consumers, they almost certainly had an adverse effect on
cloth workers, as cloth merchants tried to shore up their own incomes by
pressuring spinners and weavers to do more or accept less, or both. As
Carole Shammas has suggested, rural, female, and young textile workers
with few other options were vulnerable to speed-ups and to real wage
cuts, when faced with European competition and Asian imports.155 Even
Aberdeens cloth merchants could not take their low-cost advantage for
granted: much as the Scots had once helped the Dutch undercut English
producers, in the late seventeenth century Scotlands woolens trade was
undercut by a nascent Swedish cloth industry established by expatriate
Scots.156 At that point plaiding profits left Scotland altogether, preceded
by the highly mobile capital that underwrote them and leaving both Aber-
donian merchants and Aberdeenshire spinners in a bind from which they
could not extricate themselves.
When the plaiding trade slumped, the people who depended on it were
left with few options. In England, Shammas noted that the main source
of alternative income for textile workers appears to have been the parish
rates.157 That was true in Scotland as well, but just as Scottish workers
were not as well paid as their English counterparts, neither were they as
well provided for when they fell on hard times.158 In and around Aberdeen,
certainly, and probably in rural parishes as well, the resources made avail-
able to the poor rose and fell, like so much else, in step with the plaiding
trade. In the 1620s and 1630s, a compulsory poor rate in the town helped
153C. B. Gunn, ed., Records of the Baron Court of Stitchill, 16551807 (Edinburgh: Scottish
History Society, 1905), 128.
154See Gibson and Smout, Prices, Food, and Wages in Scotland, ch. 8.
155Shammas, Decline of Textile Prices, 497.
156On the Scottish initiative in Sweden, see Steve Murdoch, Network North: Scottish Kin,
Commercial and Covert Associations in Northern Europe, 16031746 (Leiden; Boston: Brill,
2006), 17478. Murdoch suggests it is misguided to speak of the Scottish cloth industry as
blighted in the late seventeenth century; rather, it evolved an alternative structure by
decamping to Sweden. I wonder how the starving labor force of Aberdeenshire might have
responded to that line of capital-centric reasoning?
157Shammas, Decline of Textile Prices, 497.
158Rosalind Mitchison, North and South: The Development of the Gulf in Poor Law
Practice, in Scotland: 15001800, 199225.
fund pensions for the common poor that averaged 15 a year; in the 1670s
and 1680s, long after financial pressures had done in the old poor rate,
the equivalent pensioners received just 9 on average, or 60 percent of
what their grandparents on relief might have received.159
It is not always easy to connect trends in overseas trade to the lived
experiences of ordinary people, but in Aberdeen and the northeast in
the 1690s the connection becomes all too clear. The decline in both the
volume and value of plaiding exports underway in the early 1680s was
exacerbated by the war with France from 1688 to 1697, which further dis-
rupted trade between the British and their new Dutch allies. The French
government banned Scottish imports, while French privateers off the
east coast of Scotland threatened traffic moving in and out of the port of
Aberdeen, increasing both the risk and the cost of seaborne trade.160 In
each of the deadly winters of 1698 and 1699 the town was forced to sup-
port a troop of cavalry sent north to intimidate Jacobites and discourage
a French invasion.161 In the early 1690s, the economic pressures of war
were compounded by harvest failures in Holland and France that drove
food prices there up, and turned the already tepid European market for
woolens colder still.162 By the mid-1690s the demand for plaiding had all
but collapsed, and reports from Holland indicated that bales of Aberdeen
stockings, too, sat unsold on Dutch docks.163 Aberdeen merchants all but
stopped buying yarn, cloth, or knitted stockings they could no longer hope
to export, cutting off what had been the most reliable source of money for
many rural householdsjust as food prices were about to spiral upward
when Scotland was hit with the kind of catastrophic weather that had
afflicted much of northern Europe earlier in the decade.164
In the ensuing famine of 16951699 all the fears first raised in the 1620s
about how vulnerable people in the northeast would be if rural indus-
try and the harvest should fail simultaneously were realized. Only those
who coped with the fallout of the famine, such as physicians, ministers,
and city fathers, were even in a position to tell this part of the story of

160Tyson, Famine in Aberdeenshire, 35; Graham, Maritime History of Scotland, 6399.
France was the prime market for Aberdeen salmon.
161ACA, Council Register lvii: February 2, 1699; June 7, 1699.
162E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England: A Reconstruction,
15411871 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 34042.
163Smout, Scottish Trade, 142; Tyson, Famine in Aberdeenshire, 35; ACA, Council Let-
ters, vol. 7, no. 233: undated, ca. December 1698.
164Flinn, Scottish Population History, 16486.
100 gordon desbrisay
Aberdeenshires spinners. In September 1695, continuance of stormes of

Raine and blasting weather hammered the crops in the fields, so that
in just ten days a promising harvest almost evanished.165 Oatmeal, by
far the most important component of the Scottish diet and a bellwether
for the food supply in general, soon doubled in price, marking the start
of what Aberdeen officials described as ane extraordinar dearth...which
amounted to a famine among the poor.166 Subsequent harvest failures in
1696 and 1698 took the price of oatmeal to triple its pre-1695 level. There
was a trickle-up effect this time, as landowners whose tenants could not
pay their rents in kind or in cash began to feel the pinch. When Aberdeens
city fathers tried to raise emergency funds by calling in some of their loans
to local landowners, one Aberdeenshire laird retorted that money is so
scarce heir that wee cannot so much as get money to keep our pocket,
so that ye need expect none this side of Martinmasse from me.167 How-
ever constrained things might have been for the laird and his family, they
could do what was necessary to acquire food to eat.
With the collapse of rural industry and the woolens trade, the tripling
of grain prices marked a point of no return for people who could nei-
ther grow nor buy food. The landless poor that the Countess of Erroll had
worried about, those in households where womens spinning and knitting
might have been the only source of money available to them, were in dire
straits. Between 1695 and 1699, thousands perished in the northeast of
Scotland from starvation and its attendant diseases. With his physicians
eye, Sir Robert Sibbald in 1699 saw Death in the Face of the Poor, that
abound every where; the Thinness of their Visage, their Ghostly Looks,
their Feebleness, their Agues and their Fluxes threaten them with sudden
Death.168 Hundreds died in Aberdeen itself, where there were 244 pau-
per burials in 1698 alone, by no means all of them for refugees from the
country.169 Nobody knew it at the time, but Aberdeen was the last sub-
165ACA, Council Register, lvii: 18 November,1696. A local minister reported that the
rains continued to the last day of November, then turned to snow that ceased only on 23
December. Diary of John Row, Scottish Notes and Queries (April, 1894): 165.
166ACA, Council Register, lvii: 18 November, 1696.
167Robert Turner of Turnerhall to the Town Council, 16 August, 1698. ACA, Council
Letters, vol. 7, no. 224.
168Robert Sibbald, Provision for the Poor in Time of Dearth and Scarcity. Where There Is
an Account of Such Food as May Be Easily Gotten When Corns Are Scarce, or Unfit for Use:
And of Such Meats as May Be Used When the Ordinary Provisions Fail, or Are Very Dear.
Written for the Relief of the Poor, by a Doctor of Medicine. (Edinburgh: Printed by James
Watson, 1699), 3.
169Tyson, People in the Two Towns, 116, fig. 5.1.
stantial town in Britain where established residents starved to death in

numbers during a famine. In 1695 the towns population stood at about
7,500; over the next five years a falling birth rate, emigration, and several
hundred deaths from starvation and disease reduced the population by
one-fifth, a loss of about 1,500 people. In Aberdeenshire, the population
fell by a similar proportion, a loss of about 25,000 people in all.170
Historians have suspected for some time that the prior collapse of the
plaiding trade helped tip the people of Aberdeen and northeast Scotland
from severe dearth into outright famine.171 That suspicion seems con-
firmed thanks to a recent study by Karen Cullen, Christopher Whatley,
and Mary Young. We can now compare the impact of the ill years of the
1690s on people in and around Aberdeen with the impact in and around
Dundee, an east coast port of similar size located about sixty miles to
the south.172 Like Aberdeen, Dundee and its hinterland also depended
heavily on a rural textile industry, but the chief export there was linens,
not woolens, and their chief market was in England where demand was
robust. That appears to have made all the difference. It now seems that
nature was nearly as harsh in and around Dundee, the naval and military
situation as burdensome, and local people nearly as hard-pressed. But
through the worst of it, the linen trade held up; spinning flax and weav-
ing cloth still paid, and the poor could still earn money for food. Mortality
levels in and around Dundee appear to have remained well below those
recorded just to the north.173 In Aberdeenshire, the poor who depended
on the woolens trade as their last bulwark against starvation had no work
to fall back on.
As he surveyed the catastrophe unfolding around him, Robert Sibbald
stressed that the army of tramping beggars and the sick and dying among
them were not just the rootless vagabonds and other usual suspects his
readers were inclined, and indeed encouraged, to turn their backs on,
but the respectable working poor who had been able to get by until both
170Tyson, Famine in Aberdeenshire, esp. 49, Table 3. See also Flinn, Scottish Popula-
tion History, 16486.
171Tyson, Famine in Aberdeenshire, 35.
172Karen J. Cullen et al., King Williams Ill Years: New Evidence on the Impact of
Scarcity and Harvest Failure During the Crisis of the 1690s on Tayside, Scottish Historical
Review 85, no. 2 (2006): 25076. See also Karen Cullen, The Famine of the 1690s and Its
Aftermath: Survival and Recovery of the Family, in Finding the Family in Medieval and
Early Modern Scotland, 15162; Tyson, Famine in Aberdeenshire, 35; Flinn, Scottish Popu-
lation History, 16486.
173Cullen et al., King Williams Ill Years, 27576.
102 gordon desbrisay
agriculture and rural industry failed them. It is not only common wander-
ing Beggars, that are in this Case; he explained, But many House-keep-
ers, who lived well by their Labour and their Industrie, are now by Want,
forced to abandon their Dwellings & they and their little Ones must Beg
and in this their Necessity they take what they can get.174 Sibbald was not
writing only of the northeast, nor only of women, nor only of the collapse
of plaiding. But he knew what we know: that the northeast was one of
the regions hardest hit by famine; that women there and elsewhere bore
the brunt of immiseration; and that spinning and knitting wool had until
recently been their chief and often only way to earn money.
Through its involvement in the international cloth trade in the first
half of the seventeenth century Aberdeen enjoyed what was by Scottish
standards a precocious and highly profitable, if short-lived, connection to
the Atlantic economy. It was a connection that not only began earlier, but
was of greater consequence to local people, especially women, than his-
torians have previously imagined and than many of those most affected
at the time likely knew. Indirect and under-reported as it was, it is per-
haps fitting that the importance of Aberdeens first Atlantic connection
could only be fully appreciated decades later, when the failure to develop
new Atlantic markets in time to compensate for the European downturn
and stave off the collapse of the plaiding trade in northeast Scotland left
a mainly female rural workforce, still numbering in the thousands, to
face the famine of the 1690s without a critical portion of their household
income. As Aberdeens attenuated and intermittent transatlantic connec-
tions become visible, therefore, so do the convoluted ways in which the
Atlantic world seeped into the lives of women in and around the town:
including not just those few who crossed the ocean themselves; prayed,
yearned, or grieved for those who did; bought, sold, and consumed the
addictive new imports; but also, and especially, the far greater numbers
of women who strove to support themselves and their families by carding
and spinning wool destined for the backs of strangers in faraway lands.
174Sibbald, Provision for the Poor, 3.

PORTS, PETTICOATS, AND POWER? WOMEN AND WORK
IN EARLY-NATIONAL PHILADELPHIA
Sheryllynne Haggerty
On a Saturday in March 1785, Jane Bullion received five lashes of the whip
at the public whipping post in Philadelphia. She had stolen 4lb. of thread
from James Rowan, a shopkeeper on Second Street. Not only was she to
be whipped, but she had to return the goods or pay their value of 1 15s,
and pay a fine and the costs of prosecution.1 Not many of the women
convicted of crimes in the same quarter session were whipped, so per-
haps Jane was a repeat offender. In this regard she is not representative.
However, the nature of the goods stolen indicates a mundane reality. Jane
may have used the thread in order to complete work as a seamstress. In
that regard she does represent the many poor women struggling to survive
in Philadelphia after the American War of Independence. Of course, not
all women resorted to theft, but Janes plight highlights the many difficul-
ties that women faced in finding work in Philadelphia in the early national
period. Political independence did not mean economic dependence from
Britain and these women had to work within an economy which was expe-
riencing slow but important structural changes. Furthermore, women still
labored under feme covert (in which a married womans legal identity was
subsumed under that of her husband), low wages, and socio-cultural ideas
of gender. However, whether through choice or necessity, women were
able to take advantage of the very socio-cultural norms which threatened
to constrain them within an environment in which many husbands were
absent at sea, and yet more men were transient visitors. Women therefore
made a significant, if unquantifiable, contribution to the ports economy
during this important period.
1March Sessions, 1785, Pennsylvania Court of Quarter Sessions, Historical Society of

Pennsylvania (hereafter HSP); Francis White, ed., The Philadelphia Directory for 1785 (Phila-
delphia: Young, Stewart and McCullock, 1785).
104 sheryllynne haggerty
Early-National Philadelphia and the Context for Women and Work
In 1783, Philadelphia was the leading port of the newly created United
States and a major entrept for goods around the Atlantic littoral. The
citys merchants exported flour, bread, and iron, imported and re-exported
manufactured goods from Britain, and acted as distributors for goods from
along the eastern seaboard, including tobacco, rice, and, despite restric-
tions, West Indian sugar.2 When the newly-created Bank of North America
opened its doors in 1781, Philadelphia was also well on the way to becom-
ing a financial center.3 Its importance is further demonstrated by the
fact that between 1790 and 1800 Philadelphia was the capital of the
new nation.4
Independence freed Philadelphia from the mercantilist restrictions it
had been under as part of the formal British Empire, but it did not mean
that the city was free economically. It took time for Philadelphias economy
to become independent, and until at least the early nineteenth century
Philadelphia was still part of the informal British empire.5 Philadelphians
needed to learn or import the skills necessary for large-scale manufac-
turing to replace some of the goods they had previously purchased from
Britain. Yet by 1812 home manufactures were still not considered a large
enough part of the export economy.6 For many years, then, Philadelphias
economy retained the structure of a colonial port which, as we shall see,
meant a lack of opportunities for women.7 However, slowly, the economy
grew in size and complexity. Imports from the US to Great Britain rose
2With independence of course the US was no longer part of the British mercantilist
system. For a description of the manufactures and trade of Philadelphia and its hinterland
see Thomas M. Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Devel-
opment in Revolutionary Philadelphia (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press,
1986), ch. 2; Alice B. Keith, Relaxations in the British Restrictions on the American Trade
with the British West Indies, Journal of Modern History 20, no. 1 (1948): 118.
3Robert E. Wright, The First Wall Street: Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, and the Birth of
American Finance (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Jacob M. Price,
Economic Function and the Growth of American Port Towns in the Eighteenth Century,
in Perspectives in American History, Vol. 8 (Cambridge, MA: Charles Warren Center for
Studies in American History, 1974).
4Gary B. Nash, First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory (Philadel-
phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 12229.
5Sheryllynne Haggerty, The Structure of the Philadelphia Trading Community on the
Transition from Colony to State, Business History 48, no. 2 (2006): 17192.
6Timothy Pitkin, A Statistical View of the Commerce of the United States (1816) (rep. New
York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1967), 37.
7Sheryllynne Haggerty, The British-Atlantic Trading Community 17601810: Men, Women,
and the Distribution of Goods (Leiden: Brill Press, 2006).
ports, petticoats, and power? 105
from 749,000 in 1784 to 2,614,000 in 1810. In return, exports from Britain

to the US rose from 3,679,000 in 1784 to 7,813,000 in 1801.8 As a major
port Philadelphia would have dealt with a large proportion of this trade.
It was not only the size of the economy that grew in the early national
period. Immigration into the city increased its population. From a small
town with a population of about 4,400 in 1700, the number of people grew
to 18,600 by 1760, and to 42,500 by 1790. By 1800 it was around 67,800.9
The nature of labor relations also changed. In the mid-eighteenth century
many of these immigrants had been bound labor, but by 1800, less than
2 percent of the work force were indentured. Although the percentage of
women in the bound workforce increased from 30.5 percent in 1772 to
39 percent c. 17871796, this was mostly in one area: unskilled, domestic
labor.10 Significantly, most women were paid only half of the wages of
even less-skilled men. Furthermore, Philadelphia was a port, and as mari-
ners were the largest occupational group in the city, this meant that many
men were absent at sea, leaving their wives to fend for themselves. These
men were also at the bottom of the economic ladder, and their wives were
poor even when their husbands were around.11 Widows were often the
poorest women in society, and around 10 percent of American women
may have been widows in the eighteenth century. In 1783, no doubt many
more women found themselves widows by virtue of the war.12 This envi-
ronment meant that in the busy shopping area of the High Street Ward
of Philadelphia, for example, women headed 21 percent of households,
and the Chestnut and Mulberry Wards averaged 1011 percent.13
8B. R. Mitchell and Phyllis Deane, Abstract of British Historical Statistics (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1962), 309; see John J. McCusker, The Current Value of Eng-
lish Exports, 1697 to 1800, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 28, no. 4 (1971): 60728,
for a discussion of the differences between official and current prices.
9John K. Alexander, The Philadelphia Numbers Game: An Analysis of Philadelphias
Eighteenth Century Population, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 98
(1974): 31424, esp. 324; Sam Bass Warner, The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of
Its Growth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980), 51.
10Sharon V. Salinger, Artisans, Journeymen and the Transformation of Labor in Late
Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 40, no. 1 (1983):
6284, and esp. 6465, 68.
11Billy G. Smith, The Lower Sort: Philadelphias Laboring People, 17501800 (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1990), 10913.
12Mary Beth Norton, Libertys Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American
Women 17501800 (Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1980), 133.
13Karin Wulf, Assessing Gender: Taxation and the Evaluation of Economic Viability in
Late Colonial Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 121 (1997): 201
34, esp. 219; Carole Shammas, The Female Social Structure of Philadelphia in 1775, Pennsyl-
vania Magazine of History and Biography 107 (1983), 6983, esp. 7173.
Despite the fact that many women had to fend for themselves, many
obstacles were placed in their way. Married women were considered feme
covert under the law, which hindered their access to capital and credit.
People were reluctant to extend capital and credit to women who were not
legally responsible for its repayment. Indeed, the authorities recognized
the necessity of women married to seafarers having to fend for themselves
as early as 1718, where any mariners or others are gone, or shall hereaf-
ter go, to sea, leaving their wives at shop-keeping...all such wives shall
be deemed, adjudged and taken, and are hereby declared to be, as feme-
sole traders.14 However, by explicitly allowing some wives to act as feme
sole, this act implicitly restricted others from doing so. Furthermore, the
Quaker legacy regarding attitudes towards the Kings prerogative meant
that in comparison to southern states such as South Carolina or Virginia,
measures such as separate estates or jointures, which protected womens
access to money during marriage, were frowned upon and were rarely
upheld in court.15 Moreover, Pennsylvanian husbands increasingly left
less money to their wives than allowed under intestacy rules.16 Overall,
women in Pennsylvania therefore had little access to capital and credit,
severely hurting their chances of economic independence.
Even within the new republic, women were at a disadvantage politically
and culturally. Ideas may have been transformed by the political upheaval
of the American War of Independence but positive advantages for white
men were an illusion for women.17 In fact, women could aspire to little
more in 1800 than they could in 1750. Day-to-day experience and circum-
stances changed slowly, even if notions of womanhood had changed.
Whilst women had forged for themselves a wider role in society, this was
not a public function. Women may have gained a republican identity,
14Laws of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, From the Fourteenth Day of October, One
Thousand Seven Hundred to the Twentieth Day of March, One Thousand Eight Hundred and
Ten, Vol. I (Philadelphia: John Bioren, 1810), 99100.
15Marylynn Salmon, Women and the Law of Property in Early America (Chapel Hill and
London: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), ch. 6.
16Carole Shammas, Early American Women and Control Over Capital, in Women in
the Age of American Revolution, eds. Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert (Virginia: Univer-
sity Press of Virginia, 1989), 13454.
17Alfred F. Young, American Historians Confront the Transforming Hand of Revolu-
tion, in The Transforming Hand of Revolution: Reconsidering the American Revolution as a
Social Movement, eds. Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville and London:
Published for the United States Historical Society by the University Press of Virginia, 1996),
34692; Joan Hoff Wilson, The Illusion of Change: Women and the American Revolu-
tion in The American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism, ed.
AlfredF. Young (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1976), 383445.
but it was an increasingly feminized, restrictive one, in which their main

role was to raise virtuous male citizens. Women had been politicized, but
they were not able to participate in the political game, and feme covert
status was enshrined in the new constitution. Women remained in the
same social category as children and the uncivilized races, considered
incapable of having the independent judgement required for political
participation.18
Being in a port city with trans-shipment and financial functions gave
women more entrepreneurial opportunities than they enjoyed in other
towns, or even ports such as Charleston which were less economically
diverse.19 These may often have been taken through necessity rather than
choice, but the port thrived because women worked within it. It is true
to say that their contribution was framed by the economic, social, politi-
cal, and cultural constructs discussed above, yet women often succeeded
by cleverly adapting the very domestic sphere to which they were sup-
posed to be consigned. This chapter uses a variety of sources in order
to investigate the structure and nature of that contribution over the first
quarter century of the new republic. These sources include trade directo-
ries, the main source providing the quantitative framework for this chap-
ter, supplemented by merchants accounts, newspapers, bank records,
tax records, and Pennsylvania Court of Quarter Sessions records. There
are of course problems with using trade directories, especially due to the
under-recording of certain occupations, including indentured servants
and mariners.20 However, they are a source which recorded women by
their occupations rather than with regard to their relationship with men.
18Norton, Libertys Daughters, 29598; Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intel-
lect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Published for the Institute of
Early American History and Culture, 1980), 911; Trevor Burnard, Freedom, Migration, and
the American Revolution, in Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in the Atlantic
World, eds. Eliga H. Gould and Peter S. Onuf (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2005), 295314. See also Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds., Women in the Age
of American Revolution (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1989); Susan Bran-
son, These Fiery Frenchified Dames: Women and Political Culture in Early National Philadel-
phia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001).
19Price, Economic Function. See also Haggerty, British-Atlantic Trading Community,
passim; Haggerty, Miss Fan Can Tun Her Han! Female Traders in Eighteenth-Century
Atlantic Port Cities, Atlantic Studies 6, no. 1 (2009): 2942.
20There are also issues with double entries, but these do not occur very often in the
case of women. Penelope J. Corfield, Giving Directions to the Town: the Early Town
Directories, Urban History Yearbook (1984): 2235; W. K. D. Davies, J. A. Higgs, and
D.T.Herbert, Directories, Rate Books and the Commercial Structure of Towns, Geogra-
phy LIII (1968): 4154.
The directories did not record everyone, of course, and as a group women
were under-recorded. In 1785, women accounted for 11.7 percent of all
entries, and only slightly more, 13.5 percent, in 1791.21 Although women
as a whole were under-represented, Claudia Goldin found that the Phila-
delphia directories recorded female heads of households very well, hav-
ing compared them to the Federal Population Censuses of 1790 and 1820.
This means that the women entered were mostly widows and spinsters,
and white women at that (race was mentioned where non-whites were
entered).22 This chapter therefore concentrates on the economic activi-
ties of white adult single women. Although the contribution of married
women and those employed in the businesses of others are mostly hid-
den in this chapter, this does not mean that they did not make a signifi-
cant one.23 Even with these restrictions, the trade directories allow the
charting of clear trends in the changing economic activities of women in
Philadelphia.
Women and Work in Early-National Philadelphia
This section will outline the main categories of womens work and will
also consider to a lesser extent work that is less well recorded. Table 1
outlines the main categories of work as represented in the trade directo-
ries. It is immediately obvious that the three main categories for women
between 1785 and 1805 were trading, textiles and clothing, and accom-
modation. What we might call today professional work such as caring
or education was also a significant category. Although there were other
opportunities, these were less numerous.
21There were 409 women entered in the 1785 directory, 891 in 1791, and 1,570 in 1805,
representing about 2 percent of the population. In total in 1785 there were around 3,500
persons listed, which accounted for 8.75 percent of the population, while in 1791 the
approximately 6,600 entries accounted for just under 16 percent. In 1785 there were around
3,500 persons listed, which accounted for 8.75 percent of the 40,000 population. Smith,
Lower Sort, 43; A Century of Population Growth: From the First Census of the United States to
the Twelfth, 17901900 (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 1970), 11.
22Claudia Goldin, The Economic Status of Women in the Early Republic: Quantitative
Evidence, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 16, no. 3 (1986): 375404, esp. 38284.
23For the hidden investment of women see Margaret Hunt, The Middling Sort: Com-
merce, Gender, and the Family in England, 16801780 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1996).
Table 1.The Structure of Womens Work in Philadelphia, 17851805

1785 1791 1805
No. % No. % No. %
Trading 106 49.07 121 34.47 253 34.19
Accommodation 42 19.44 74 21.08 140 18.92
Textiles & Clothing 16 7.41 46 13.11 160 21.62
Professional 22 10.19 61 17.38 105 14.19
Coffee house, Tavern, Inn 23 10.65 30 8.55 33 4.46
Food & Drink 3 1.39 15 4.27 22 2.97
Provision & Distribution
Trades & Handicrafts 4 1.85 4 1.14 27 3.65
Totals 216 100.00 351 100.00 740 100.00
Source: Philadelphia Trade Directories, 1785, 1791, 1805. Based on all women listed with an
occupation.24
Despite facing increased competition from New York and Baltimore after
1783, commerce was still Philadelphias most important economic sector
and was therefore large enough to afford women substantial opportuni-
ties within the trading sector.25 However, it is worth noting that while
this sector provided nearly 50 percent of recorded female employment in
1785, this was reduced to just over 34 percent by 1805. Moreover this was
mostly as shopkeepers rather than as merchants or wholesalers. Partly
this was due to the diversification of the economy, which reduced the
trading sector in real terms vis--vis opportunities elsewhere.26 Yet this
more diversified economy only helped female employment opportunities
to a certain extent. Structurally, the core of womens employment only
changed slowly. Most women worked in low-paid occupations sanctioned
24Other women also listed themselves as Widow, Mrs., Gentlewoman, or with no

occupation. These are not included in this table. The Philadelphia Directory for 1785; Clem-
ent Biddle, ed., The Philadelphia Directory for 1791 (Philadelphia: James and Johnson, 1791);
James Robinson, ed., The Philadelphia Directory for 1805 (Philadelphia: Printed for the Pub-
lisher, 1805).
25Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit, ch. 8.
26See Haggerty, The Philadelphia Trading Community.
by their connection to roles culturally constructed as feminine. Therefore,

women were mostly found in only one sub-sector of trading, shopkeep-
ing, and that of the more general kind.27 In 1785, 103 of the 106 listed were
shopkeepers; in 1791 and 1805 the numbers were 113 and 160 respectively.
This demonstrates that the number of more varied opportunities was
slowly increasing and women did run a variety of speciality shops, such
as ironmongery shops, china shops, and bookshops. More representative
however, is Jane Smarle. A shopkeeper in 1785, she probably sold everyday
goods such as tea, coffee, sugar, cotton, and soap.28 Other women ran
stores that stocked textiles amongst other items. Jane Taylor was listed as
a storekeeper or shopkeeper on Front Street in all three years sampled.
She purchased shawls, pieces of bengalls, and other striped materials on
one to two months credit from the Quaker merchants the Fishers in the
1790s.29 Jane Larrimore also purchased goods from the Fishers in 17923,
and was still in business and purchasing merchandise from Thomas Cope
in 1806.30
However, whilst the trading sector included more women as it diversi-
fied in the early-national period, there was only one sub-sector of trad-
ers in which women really benefitedthat of grocery. There were only
two female grocers in 1785, but 61 were listed in 1805. This was partly due
to the fact that as the economy diversified, merchants (mostly men of
course) lost their complete hold over importation and wholesaling. Many
sub-sectors of traders developed in the distribution function of the port
as it became more diversified after independence and slowly started to
resemble the trading community of metropolitan ports such as Liverpool.31
27For a far more detailed analysis of women in the Philadelphia trading community
see Haggerty, The British-Atlantic Trading Community. The figures listed here do not tally
with those in the former work, because womens work has been classified differently for
this chapter.
28For more on shopkeeping see Hoh-Cheung and Lorna H. Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping
in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1989); Thomas M. Doerflinger, Farm-
ers and Dry Goods in the Philadelphia Market Area, 17501800, in The Economy of Early
America: The Revolutionary Period, 17631790, eds. Ronald Hoffman, John J. McCusker, Rus-
sel R. Menard, and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville: Printed for the United States Capitol
Historical Society by the University Press of Virginia, 1988), 16695.
29Samuel Thomas and Miers Fisher, Journal 17921796, HSP, f.90. Bengalls was a col-
lective term for textiles from that area of India. See Nancy Cox and Karin Dannehl, eds.,
Dictionary of Traded Goods and Commodities, 15501820, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/
source.aspx?pubid=739, accessed February 12, 2012.
30Thomas, Samuel and Miers Fisher Journal 17921796, HSP, f. 90; Thomas P. Cope and
Sons Ledger, Book 135, HSP, f. 347.
31Haggerty, Atlantic Trading Community, ch. 3.
Grocery could be seen as genteel, dealing in imported goods such as tea,

coffee, sugar, and spices for example, and therefore a suitable employ-
ment for women. Note, however, that none of these women were in the
wholesale grocery sector, which would have required far more capital, and
very few women were dealers, a line of work that often involved a certain
level of wholesale activity.32 There were also very few women running
warehouses, although in 1805 Hannah Baker was running a tea warehouse
and widow Servoss was in charge of a hat warehouse. Both, it should be
observed, dealt in wares that represented feminine functions which would
have sanctioned their activities.
Women were very rarely found at the top of the trading status tree as
merchants, wherever they were in the Atlantic world.33 This sub-sector
required large amounts of capital and education in accounts, languages,
and trading information to which women did not have access. Only three
women were listed as merchants in 1785, one in 1793 and seven in 1805.34
Many were widows carrying on a husbands business, in some cases
on behalf of a male heir, a normal phenomenon in the British-Atlantic
world.35 Mrs. Gilpin, listed in the 1785 directory, may have been holding
on to her husbands business for her son, who apparently took over in
1791 and continued until at least 1805. Certainly her bank account was
not active enough to suggest trading activity in 1791.36 Five of the seven
women listed as merchants in 1805 specifically listed themselves as wid-
ows, and one other, Hannah Holland, most likely took over from Benja-
min Holland. He was listed as a shopkeeper and then as a merchant in
1785 and 1791 respectively at the same address at which she was listed in
1805. However, as early as 1791 Hannah had her own account at the Bank
of North America, dealing in cash and discounted bills, suggesting that
she was trading on her own account before Benjamins death. Margaret
Duncan was another exception to the rule. She was listed in 1785 as a
32There was one female dealer in 1785 and 1791 and six in 1805.
33Haggerty, Miss Fan Can Tun Her Han!; Clearys Elizabeth Murray was one of
the exceptions that prove the rule. Patricia Cleary, Elizabeth Murray: A Womans Pursuit
of Independence (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000). See also Serena Zabin,
Womens Trading Networks and Dangerous Economies in Eighteenth-Century New York
City, Early American Studies 4, no. 2 (Fall 2006), 291321.
34The women listed as merchants were: 1785, Ann Gibbs, Mrs. Gilpin, and Mrs. Slonne;
1791, Margaret Duncan; 1805, widow of George Leipe, widow of Joseph Hilborn, widow of
Joseph Roberts, widow of Thomas Morgan, Mrs. Callaghan, Hannah Holland, and widow
of William Lewis.
35Salmon, Women and the Law of Property.
36Personal Ledgers, Bank of North America, 1791, HSP.
shopkeeper, but in 1791 as a merchant. She may also have been running a
business in tandem with her son David in 1791 given that he was listed as
next door to her at 3 Water Street. She had her own bank account at that
time, depositing cash and large bills.37 Whilst women were therefore not
often merchants, they had the knowledge and skills to become so when
given the opportunity, including dealing with major institutions such as
the Bank of North America.
Many women trading in Philadelphia did not get listed in the trade
directory, but appear elsewhere in the records. These women may have
been married and trading either as feme sole or as part of the family
economy. Ann & Sarah Asbridge purchased $77.25 worth of goods from
Thomas P. Cope & Sons in 1803 and Phebe Goodman bought $92.87 worth
of goods from them in 1804. Sarah McMullen purchased merchandise
worth $465.55 between September 1803 and December 1804 and was still
in business in 1809. There were many other women listed in their accounts
too.38 In 1787 sweet and sour oranges could be bought at Mrs. Hulls by the
barrel or the hundred, but she too was not listed in Philadelphias trade
directories.39 Women therefore made a far larger contribution to Philadel-
phias economy than is recorded by the trade directories.
Much of this contribution was made by female traders at the margins
of society. In 1784 itinerant dealers were obviously perceived as a problem
and An ACT for regulating of hawkers and pedlars attacked the many idle
and vagrant persons who commit felonies and misdemeanors.40 Female
traders nearer the margins, both black and white, were often seen as prob-
lematic in port cities, including Charleston, New York, and Liverpool, even
if for different reasons. In Charleston and Kingston it was women of color
in the markets that were judged a problem. In Philadelphia and Liverpool
they were often associated with illegal trading and fencing stolen goods.41
Those wanting to trade were supposed to get a recommendation from a
37Personal Ledgers, Bank of North America, 1791, HSP. Neither Margaret or David was
listed in the 1805 directory.
38Thomas P. Cope and Sons Ledger, Book 135, HSP, ff. 146, 167, 175.
39Pennsylvania Packet and Daily Advertiser, January 20, 1787.
40Laws of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, From the Fourteenth Day of October, One
Thousand Seven Hundred to the Twentieth Day of March, One Thousand Eight Hundred and
Ten (Philadelphia: John Bioren, 1810), Vol I: 99.
41Robert Olwell, Loose, Idle and Disorderly: Slave Women in the Eighteenth-Century
Charleston Marketplace, in More than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas,
edited by David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine (Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 1996), 97110; Zabin, Womens Trading Networks, 293; Haggerty,
British-Atlantic Trading Community, 100; Haggerty, Miss Fan Can Tun Her Han!
justice of the county court, but no doubt many could not afford the 5 for
the license to use a horse, or even the 45s to trade on foot. Whilst this act
was aimed at both men and women, women were even less likely to be
able to afford the license, and many traded illegally.42 In September 1785,
five pedlars licenses were awarded by the Pennsylvania Court of Quar-
ter Sessions, but not one of them went to a woman.43 Many, of course,
were forced by circumstances to trade illegally. Perhaps Ann Winters, who
was found guilty of stealing goods from John George valued at $10, had
wanted to sell them on. She received a $10 fine, had to pay the costs of
prosecution, and served one years hard labor. In the same year Margaret
Dyer, Eleanor Wright, Negro Dinah and Catharine Middleton were much
luckier, if still suspect. They were all tried together on a charge of stolen
goods, but were found not guilty.44 Whilst on the whole the number of
women recorded as working in the trading sector declined in real terms,
this is somewhat deceptive as many women no doubt continued in this
area at the margins and unrecorded throughout the period.
Whilst the trading sector saw the largest downturn in recorded partici-
pants for women, the textiles and clothing sector was the largest growth
area, rising from 7.41 percent to 21.62 percent. The clothing industry is
obviously one clearly related to feminine roles. However, the growth in
opportunities in this category nearly compensates for the loss in oppor-
tunities in the trading sector. However, much of the work in this category
offered little remuneration, even if it could be conveniently performed
in the home. Most women were employed as seamstresses and mantua
makers, though some women were to be found among the more pres-
tigious milliners. Seamstresses were not listed in 1785 (surely to some
extent an omission in recording), but there were twenty-one in 1791 and
forty-seven in 1805. For mantua makers, the numbers were four, twelve,
and forty-two respectively; and for milliners, eight, six, and thirty-eight.
Interestingly, there were twenty-one tailoresses in 1805, notable because
this trade was usually associated with mens clothes making.45 Perhaps
these women were simply more skilled seamstresses or mantua-makers.
There were also a few women working as dyers, shoemakers, shoebinders,
and one staymaker in 1785.
42See David Jaffee, Peddlers of Progress and the Transformation of the Rural North,
17601860, Journal of American History 78, no. 2 (1991): 51135.
43Pennsylvania Court of Quarter Sessions 17801785, HSP.
44Pennsylvania Court of Quarter Sessions 17801785, HSP.
45Norton, Libertys Daughters, 14142.
Not one woman was listed twice as a seamstress in the trade direc-
tories sampled, suggesting that this was not a long-term employment
(some could have married and changed their names of course). This was
no doubt because most seamstresses would have been quite poorly paid,
and mantua-making was also considered very hard work and badly paid
unless a woman could set up in business for herself.46 Some also worked
in pairs, either as sisters or mother and daughter; for example Hannah and
Sarah Wright at 198 Vine Street in 1791, and A. and M. Sutton at 12 Willings
Alley in 1805. Mantua making may have been a slightly better prospect,
as a few women could be traced over time. Susannah Bliss was at 47 Vine
Street in both 1791 and 1805. Mary Harman was in the 1791 and 1805 direc-
tory, though at different addresses, and if Catharine Coleman was also
known as Kitty so was she. A few women may have aspired to greater
things, or at least advertised so as to give that impression. Mrs. Bourchett,
for example, advertised that she was a French Mantua Maker in Walnut
St. next door to Mr. Brunot, possibly part of a French network. Her goods
arrived in the ship Washington and she made dresses a la Jannette in the
newest style.47 On the whole, however, mantua making remained a short-
term and not very profitable prospect, despite the increased employment
in the textile sector.
Those women that managed to set up their own shops as milliners, how-
ever, may well have been better off, sometimes employing other women
in turn. In 1787, Jane Gee was obviously in this category. She noted that
as she has at all times a number of assistants, she is enabled to complete
the orders entrusted to her, with the utmost punctuality and dispatch
and wanted, Several Apprentices.48 In 1785 Jane Coulthard was using
her recent arrival from England as evidence of her awareness of the latest
London fashions and of her genteel connections.49 Mrs. Mercier, whilst
selling herself on the strength of her French connections, was prepared
to dress hair as well as conduct a millinery business; but those wishing
to use her services had to apply to Mr. Beragh, a grocer at the corner of
South and Penn. It is possible that she simply had not yet had time to set
up shop formally, or maybe she could not afford to do so.50
46Norton, Libertys Daughters, 24, 42, 14142; Ivy Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the
Industrial Revolution, 17501850 (1930; repr., London: Virago Press, 1981), 28790.
47Pennsylvania Packet and Daily Advertiser, January 3, 1785.
48Pennsylvania Packet and Daily Advertiser, December 15, 1787.
49Pennsylvania Packet and Daily Advertiser, August 4, 1785.
50The Federal Gazette and Philadelphia Daily Advertiser, November 9, 1791.
Even if milliners were somewhat better off than their seamstress and
mantua maker counterparts, none of these employments appears to have
been particularly lucrative. No women appeared in the tax list for 1783 as
milliners, seamstresses, or mantua makers, suggesting that women in this
sector had little taxable wealth.51 Some subconscious gendering of their
evaluative categories may have caused the tax assessors to exclude women
in the textile sector, but it is more likely that they were simply too poor
to be taxed.52 Many would have been in desperate circumstances. Jane
Bullion, who stole the 4lb of thread in 1785, may have been trying to finish
some work in order to get enough money to eat. Philadelphias economy
may have been slowly diversifying and producing different opportunities
for women, but the upturn in the textile and related industries was some-
thing of a mixed blessing, especially when compared to Liverpool over the
same period, which was de-industrializing yet producing more opportu-
nities for women.53 Except for a lucky few, these putative opportunities
meant poor, short-term employment, and did not represent an improve-
ment in these womens circumstances.
One way in which women could earn money easily was to rent out
rooms in their own home. Providing accommodation was a common
strategy used by women throughout the period to generate income,
accounting for a fairly consistent 19 to 21 percent of all women in Philadel-
phias workforce.54 This suggests that this income opportunity was inde-
pendent of wider changes in the economy. Though it was not only single
women who offered hospitality to earn income, it was no doubt one way
in which spinsters and widows could use their home, and many, such as
Rachel Draper, used it as part of a mixed survival strategy.55 Of course in
some ways opening up the home in this way allowed men who were not
family into the domestic sphere, but this was sanctioned by the fact that
these women performed a female caring function. Some visitors found
51Philadelphia Federal Tax List, 1783, Pennsylvania Archives, 3rd series, no. 16.
52Karin Wulf, Assessing Gender: Taxation and the Evaluation of Economic Viability
in Late Colonial Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 121 (1997):
20135.
53Sheryllynne Haggerty, Women, Work, and the Consumer Revolution: Liverpool in
the Late Eighteenth Century, in A Nation of Shopkeepers: Five Centuries of British Retailing,
eds. John Benson and Laura Ugolini (London: Taurus, 2003), 10626, esp. 112.
54Karin Wulf, Not All Wives: Women of Colonial Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 101.
55Wulf, Not All Wives, 120.
it odd that young women would perform this role, but others perceived
these spaces as safe gathering spots for women in Philadelphia.56
No doubt there was a wide range of boarding and lodging available to
provide for the growing population, depending on the initial circumstances
of the woman providing it. Some women obviously had reasonably com-
modious houses. Mrs. Newark, for example, provided genteel Boarding
and Lodging at her house at 62 Spruce Street.57 Elizabeth Hitman also
had quite a good-sized house at 59 Third Street. In 1805 she advertised
that a few gentlemen could be accommodated in a genteel manner oppo-
site the US bank.58 Gentility, or respectability, was obviously an important
commodity in the lodging trade. This was especially true in the case of the
British West Indies, where despite, or perhaps because of its reputation for
a bawdy lifestyle, women providing board and lodging there protected and
promoted the gentility of their establishments.59 Single women boarding
men had to protect their reputation, wherever they were working in the
British-Atlantic world. Therefore we find yet another woman advertising
genteel boarding; A Lady unincumbered with any family, is desirous of
a few respectable boardersthe situation is plesant [sic] and the house
very roomy. Apply at 179, north side of Market-street.60 She also had a
coach house and stable to rent at the same premises. Many of the board-
ing and lodging houses, however, were on Front, Second, and Third Street
southnear the waterfront, and were likely to be poor establishments
catering for sailors and other visitors. One was in Elfriths Alley, a row of
small houses near the waterfront. The accommodation there would have
been cramped for a small family, let alone paying guests, yet mariners and
other poor visitors were no doubt thankful for this cheaper option.
Some of these businesses could be long term. Ann Clinton ran a board-
ing house at 5 South Fourth Street in 1791, and perhaps passed the business
on to her daughter, Elizabeth, who was listed as a boarding house keeper
at the same address in 1805. Hannah Holmes was listed as a boarding
house keeper in both 1785 and 1791, though she moved from Grays Alley
to Carters Alley during that time. Mary Jenkins was listed for the same
two years, but had also moved. Hannah Lapless ran her business between
56Norton, Libertys Daughters, 144; Wulf, Not All Wives, 102.

57The Federal Gazette and Philadelphia Daily Advertiser, January 3, 1791.
58Relfs Philadelphia Gazette and Daily Advertiser, February 18, 1805. Elizabeth Hitman
was listed in the Trade Directory for 1805 as a boarding house keeper.
59Natalie Zacek, Between Lady and Slave: White Working Women in the Eighteenth-
Century Leeward Islands, in this volume.
60Relfs Philadelphia Gazette and Daily Advertiser, June 11, 1805.
at least 1791 and 1805.61 Mostly, however, listings appeared in only one of
the directories sampled. No doubt women got married or perhaps saved
enough capital to move to another occupation. Although opportunities
increased numerically in this sector along with the rise in trade and popu-
lation, they declined marginally in real terms.
In contrast to boarding and lodging, opportunities for women grew to
some extent in what I have called the professional sector. This includes
teachers, midwives, and nurses as well as a minister, a scrivener, and a
tax collector. Whereas there were only twenty-two women listed in this
sector in the 1785 directory, 105 were so entered in 1805. This represented
a rise from around 10 percent to 14 percent of the female workforce as
recorded in the trade directories. That said, these increasing opportunities
were not particularly varied. In the early years this sector was dominated
by teaching. In 1785, fifteen of the twenty-two women in this sector were
schoolmistresses. In 1791, this figure was forty-two out of sixty-one (one of
whom was listed as a boarding school mistress), but by 1805 had fallen to
forty-one of the 105 listed (three of whom were listed as running a ladies
academy). These schools largely conformed to late eighteenth and early
nineteenth-century expectations of female education and accomplish-
ment. Notwithstanding republican motherhood, education in post-
revolutionary America was still gendered. Although grammar, rhetoric,
history, and geography were available in some schools for women, many
establishments continued to offer a more restricted curriculum.62 In 1785
Mrs. Wilson opened her school in Laetitia Court and notified her friends
that she taught reading and spelling but also plain and fine needle work,
[and] great care will be taken to teach good morals, genteel behaviour
etc.63 In the same year Mrs. De la Croix opened a French Boarding School
on Second Street near Arch. She intended to unite a liberal education with
female accomplishments. This included millinery work in the best taste,
embroidery, and point work. Dancing and singing were taught on certain
days.64 Nor had things apparently changed by 1805. Mrs. Rowan taught all
61A positive connection was only made where the name listed was exactly the same.
There were many other possibles, where in one year a listing given was as Mrs. and
another year with a first name.
62Sarah E. Fatherley has recently argued that wealthy women in colonial Philadelphia
received a substantive and not just ornamental education, The Sweet Recourse of Rea-
son: Elite Womens Education in Colonial Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Magazine of History
and Biography CXXVIII, no. iii (2004), 22956; see also Wulf, Not All Wives, ch. 9.
63Pennsylvania Packet and Daily Advertiser, August 5, 1785.
64Pennsylvania Packet and Daily Advertiser, February 2, 1785.
types of needle and fancy work for young ladies.65 Cultural attitudes were
therefore also important alongside changes in the wider economy.
If opportunities for teaching had ceased increasing by 1805, other ave-
nues were nursing and midwifery. These overtook teaching as an occupa-
tion in this sector by 1805. In 1805 there were thirty-six nurses recorded
in the directory, two of whom were also layers out of the dead. There
had been no nurses listed in 1785 (perhaps a function of recording proce-
dures), but twelve were listed in 1791. In 1785 there were only four mid-
wives and one lady who made preparations against the ague. By 1805
there were twenty-four midwives listed. Nurses were in demand because
the work covered a wide range of roles. Some cared for the sick, either in
the home or at the Pennsylvania Hospital, and some specialized in infant
care or infectious diseases. Others worked looking after children, as wet
nurses, or in taking general care of young children. Still more cared for
people who were injured and convalescing in their homes. Many of these
women would have been unskilled, perhaps caring first for relatives and
others close to them before hiring themselves out for an income; certainly
many were perceived as nothing more than domestic servants.66 None of
the nurses were found in any more than one directory, which confirms the
short-term and low-skilled nature of their work and the poor remunera-
tion they could expect for it. Yet again, changing opportunities did not
necessarily turn into long-term advantages.
Those women working as midwives occasionally had long careers,
something that did not occur for the nurses. At least four women worked
as midwives between 1791 and 1805: Sarah Coltman, Ann Emes, Ann Kill-
patrick, and Susannah Rose. On January 13, 1790, Ann Emes advertised
that:
From the long experience which Ann Emes has had in the practice of Mid-
wifery, as well as from the good understanding which ever subsisted between
Catherine Patten, Lydiah Darrah and herself, she hopes every future trial of
her skill and tenderness will justify her title to the care of Ladies expecting
and under confinement.67
65Relfs Philadelphia Gazette and Daily Advertiser, October 30, 1805.

66Wulf, Not All Wives, 13940; Norton, Libertys Daughters, 13941; Jacques Carr, Hos-
pital Nurses in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Service without Responsibility, in The Invis-
ible Woman: Aspects of Womens Work in Eighteenth-Century Britain, eds. Isabelle Baudino,
Jacques Carr and Ccile Rvauger (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 89100, esp. 89.
67The Pennsylvania Gazette, January 13, 1790.
None of the other ladies was listed in the trade directories, perhaps due
to the fact that they were not householders, but this highlights the impor-
tance of informal female networks. This would suggest that midwifery
increasingly provided some serious prospects for women, and it was cer-
tainly the most respected of the female caring professions.68 Furthermore,
playing such an important role in the lifecycle of women may have meant
that they were an important part of local networks, gaining respect from
the local community.69
There were also a number of entries for women working in various
other professional occupations. The widow of Lewis Bitting was listed as
a minister, the widow of John Lewis as a scrivener, and the widow of Jacob
Hull as a tax collector, all listed in 1805. It is most likely that these women
took over from their husbands. Other women working in the professions,
but not appearing in the trade directories include Christiana Leech, who
used her brother Williams reputation as a botanist in order to set up a
business selling a balsam after his death.70 Yet it was not always easy to
find careers of this sort and many women had to settle for something
that corresponded to popular notions of what constituted a womans role.
Even then it could be trying. One person, for example, advertised for a
middle-aged woman to take care of children, for which good wages will
be given, but the candidate still needed to come properly recommended.71
Therefore, it is obvious that professional activities for women remained
linked to female roles, and often they perpetuated notions of what was
a correct (if changing) role for a woman.
Despite the increase in the number of women entered in the trade
directories, and the continuing importance of Philadelphia as a commer-
cial center, the number of women listed as running coffee houses, taverns,
and inns fell from 10.65 percent to 4.46 percent. Mostly women in this
sector ran taverns, and a few ran beer houses.72 Although no women were
listed as running taverns in 1785 (surely a function of the low number of
68Norton, Libertys Daughters, 13940. In Europe the reputation of midwives was

more complicated. Although midwifery was licensed and some catered to the elite, many
women worked without a license, and sometimes even for poor relief rather than pay.
Their knowledge of medicines to bring on miscarriages was likened to that of whores.
Olwen Hufton, The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe, Vol. I,
15001800 (London: Harper Collins, 1995), 170, 18386.
69Wulf, Not All Wives, ch. 4.
70The Pennsylvania Gazette, December 28, 1791.
71The Federal Gazette and Philadelphia Daily Advertiser, November 9, 1791.
72One woman ran a beer house in 1785 and three did so in 1791.
entries in Philadelphias first directory, as Peter Thompson argues that

women ran around one quarter of public houses in the colonial period),
fifteen were listed in 1791 and twenty-six in 1805.73 Very occasionally this
provided a long-term occupation for women. Mary Lendell/Landell ran
her tavern between at least 1791 and 1805 on North Front Street, and Mar-
garet Thompson ran her tavern for the same period at Swanson Street in
Southwark. But these were the only two women listed as tavern keep-
ers in more than one trade directory; yet again employment in this area
remained short-term for most women. However, the addresses of the tav-
erns listed as run by women were dotted all over the city, suggesting that
women catered for the permanent population as well as the transient one
near the docks.
Women were also increasingly less likely to run inns. In 1785 at least
fourteen women were doing so. By 1805 only seven were listed: Sarah
Brown, Catharine Davies, Mary Hill and Widows Duncan and Etwein.
Widow Paul ran her inn at the sign of the Indian King on Market Street
between at least 1785 and 1791, where those who were owed money from
Mary Hinshelwoods estate were asked to meet on August 15, 1791.74 Simi-
larly, in 1805 George Davis creditors were requested to meet his assignees
at Mrs. Hardys Inn on Market Street, but the number of women listed
as innkeepers tells us that Mrs. Hardy was bucking the general trend.75
Indeed, these adverts give us the first clue as to the reasons for this decline.
In Philadelphia, as in Liverpool and Virginia, certain public functions were
increasingly held at inns and taverns, including auctions and meetings
regarding debtors and creditors.76 Even the waterfront taverns were often
used by ship owners and captains to conduct business. As spaces there-
fore, inns, and taverns were increasingly used for business and other pub-
lic roles, which made it less culturally acceptable for women to both run
and work in them, especially as ideas of separate spheres took hold.77
73Peter Thompson, Rum Punch and Revolution: Taverngoing and Public Life in Eigh-
teenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 41.
74The Pennsylvania Gazette, June 22, 1791.
75Relfs Philadelphia Gazette and Daily Advertiser, November 22, 1805.
76Haggerty, British-Atlantic Trading Community, 188. In Virginia however, middling
womens expertise in running these establishments was used as a form of social control;
see Sarah Hand Meachem, Keeping the Trade: The Persistence of Tavernkeeping among
Middling Women in Colonial Virginia, Early American Studies (Spring 2005), 14063.
77Linda K. Kerber, Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Womans Place: The Rhetoric of
Womens History, Journal of American History 75, no. 1 (1988): 939.
For the same sort of reasons, Philadelphian women were increasingly

less likely to run coffee houses. Only one woman was listed as doing so in
1791, Catharine Pugh of the Delaware Coffee House. Like inns and taverns,
coffee houses were also being used more and more for business. The City
Tavern was used as the merchants exchange but the Old London Cof-
fee House was also a popular meeting place for businessmen. However,
many coffee houses were of the coarser type, full of bawdy conversation,
illegal gambling, billiard playing, and prostitutes, and were therefore seen
as unsuitable places for women. Many women would have wanted to
avoid the debauchery within these spaces in order to preserve a gen-
teel reputation. Men, on the other hand, used their unsavory reputation
as a justification for excluding women and for using these areas as male
social spaces where they did not have to be careful of their language and
etiquette. Women who did enter taverns and inns might find themselves
stared at and the object of speculation as to their respectability.78
Some of these taverns and inns may have had a certain air of respect-
ability, but many clearly did not. As we have seen, women who ran busi-
nesses that were on the margins of the economy in some way, or were
married, did not warrant an entry in the trade directories. Such women
included Ann Carpenter who found herself in court along with her hus-
band Benjamin for running a disorderly house in September 1783. She was
also found guilty of running a tippling shop in December 1785, for which
she was committed to jail until she could pay her 10 fine. Ann Stotes was
similarly tried for running a disorderly house in September 1783 along-
side her husband George, although they pleaded not guilty. Elizabeth
Vaughan was rejected for a tavern license in September 1783, but this did
not stop her from working in this area as she was charged with running
a tippling house in March 1784. Although her business was not listed in
the trade directories, it was nevertheless large enough to warrant hav-
ing an apprentice. However, at the same quarter sessions she was also
charged with having mistreated this poor apprentice girl, noted strangely
as an infant, and so perhaps Elizabeth and her establishment were not of
the best sort.79 Natalie Zacek has argued that women dominated in the
lowest sectors of drinking establishments in the British Leeward Islands,
often because the licenses were cheaper, but also because poor women
78Thompson, Rum Punch and Revolution, 80, 85, 90, 93, 106107, 14654; see also Brian
Cowan, Publicity and Privacy in the History of the British Coffeehouse, History Compass
5 no. 4 (2007): 11801213.
79Pennsylvania Court of Quarter Sessions 17801785, September 1783, December 1785.
were often granted these licenses to keep them off poor relief.80 In Phila-
delphia, however, many such lower tavernkeepers were not considered
important enough to be listed in the Philadelphia directory, and were
not considered worth taxing either. Neither the widow Paschall or Rachel
Ellensworth were taxed in 1783.81 Women often had their applications for
a tavern license rejected, maybe because the courts decided they would
not be running a respectable business. Elizabeth Chatham, Mary Jones,
and Mary Fordhams requests for licenses in March 1783, for example,
were all rejected. However, fifteen women were awarded licenses later in
September of that year, only two of which could be positively identified
in the 1785 trade directory.82 This suggests that more women, both mar-
ried and single, were working in this area than were listed in the trade
directories, but that much of it was small scale and at the bottom of the
market. The smaller, partially-licensed dram shops may have been run
disproportionately by women. This was partly because the licenses were
cheaper and partly because they did not have enough money to set up
larger establishments.83
Linked to the provision of drink was the provision of food. Those
women who were listed in this sector were mostly involved in baking
(those running more general shops which also provided hardware or gro-
ceries of some kind have already been considered under trading). Of the
three women listed in this sector in 1785, one was a distiller, one a biscuit
baker, and the other a baker. In the same year, Mary Miller, who was not
listed in the trade directories, ran her distillery on the east side of Sec-
ond Street. She sold all kinds of cordials, cognac, brandy, Jamaica spirits,
and West India rum. She may have had a business of a considerable size,
because she would sell larger quantities making considerable Allowance
to those who buy to sell again, thereby (unusually for a woman) acting
as a wholesaler as well.84 In 1791, five women were pastry cooks, three
were bakers, and one a cake baker. Only six female butchers were ever
entered, all in 1791.
In 1805, baking of various kinds dominated again, with twelve women
listed as such. There were also three confectioners, and one woman was
80Zacek, Between Lady and Slave, 139143 in this volume.

81Philadelphia Federal Tax List, 1783.
82These were Hannah Dutton, listed as running a beer house, and Mary Ridge, listed
as a tavernkeeper.
83Thompson, Rum Punch, 4546.
84Pennsylvania Packet and Daily Advertiser, October 6, 1785.
listed as running a cook shop. Although some baking was done in the
home, especially using cheaper grains such as the heavy rye and Indian
which did not need an oven, many houses lacked proper ovens. For those
who took their own bread to be baked as well as for those who bought
loaves from the bakers stores, bakers were very important providers of
food to the poor. However, they were subject to much regulation, which
would have meant confiscation of their product for women not properly
informed.85 Confectioners may also have had their own premises on which
to bake and sell their wares, and women involved in this sub-sector may
have required some capital in order to set up in business. Another area in
this sector was victualling. Here the term is probably meant as providing
food on the street rather than the traditional meaning of supplying vict-
uals to ships, and six women were listed in this way in 1805, although not
in the earlier years. No doubt participation in this sector was significantly
under-recorded in the directories and the newspapers, as many women,
married and single, could easily have provided food from a small stall to
cater to the increasing population and migrant workers.
Women also worked in a wide range of trades and handicrafts, although
there were never numerous opportunities. In 1785 the four women in arti-
sanal roles were a shipbuilder, a tallow chandler, and two upholsterers.
However, women in various forms of transport such as carters, mariners,
pilots, and porters were only listed in 1805. Thus, if opportunities in arti-
sanal trades were never proportionally significant, the range and number
of women working in them did increase. Therefore we find an umbrella
maker and pewterer in 1791. In 1805 women were listed as a book folder, a
cedar cooper, a paper card maker, a jeweller, a shipwright, a soap boiler,
and upholsteresses amongst the twenty female artisans/tradeswomen.
Participation in these trades would not have conformed to notions of
feminine roles, and may have more to do with the needs of a diversify-
ing economy for labor and/or continuing the trade until sons came of
age. Other women were able to take advantage of women trying to find
employment. Hannah Wigmore of 72 Walnut Street informed the public
that she had been induced to open an Intelligence Office on the usual
principles, and on the most reasonable terms.86 In this way, being near
the city tavern, she was taking advantage of the increasingly business-
85Karen J. Friedmann, Victualling Colonial Boston, Agricultural History 47 no. 3

(1973): 189205, esp. 18395.
86Relfs Philadelphia Gazette and Daily Advertiser, December 17, 1805.
d istrict nature of this part of the city. We cannot, given the numbers, argue
that this represented any significant form of opportunity for women, but
it does demonstrate that these women could do various types of work,
even if it was only to keep these businesses going for their sons.
Many women, whichever sector they were in, were on the margins of
economic and legal survival. No doubt this was as true following indepen-
dence as beforehand, and many were unable to cope with the structural
changes in the economy, however slow. Some went past that boundary and
were jailed, fined, flogged, or all three. In September 1784 Margaret Marr
Aiding was charged with larceny and abetting the presumed thief George
Crowder. In March 1785 Mary McKinsey was charged with larcenysteal-
ing the goods of John Simon valued at 5 for which she pleaded guilty. She
was sentenced to restore the goods or the value thereof, to pay a fine of
5 to the use of the state, to pay the costs of prosecution, and to remain
committed until this was complied with. To complete her ignominy she
received eleven lashes at the public whipping post.87 Many women were
charged with larceny but found not guilty. There may have been an ele-
ment of public mercy here, or perhaps enlightened self-interest due to the
cost of holding them at public expense. The Pennsylvania legal system
followed the English model on the whole (except for changes according to
Quaker prejudices).88 It is likely therefore that ideas of justice and mercy
were similar to those in England and that the treatment of women was
substantially different from that of men.89 Not all crimes were taken to
court, and people often advertised in the first instance in order to help
them find thieves. One person offered five dollars reward for the identifi-
cation of a girl of sixteen to seventeen years old. The alleged thief was 5
ft high, stout made, down look with a slight cast in her eyes, and called
herself Kitty Elli. Having told a sad story about her parents death, she had
been taken in as an act of mercy, and then had stolen from the house.90
Mary Elter told a similar story in 1805 of Sarah Delaney who was about
twelve years old with a dark complexion, black hair, her arms appeared
spotted and dirty who came to my house, apparently in distress, but
87Pennsylvania Court of Quarter Sessions 17801785, September 1784, March 1785.

88William Penn, having been hounded by the law in England, wanted to simplify the
law. Joseph E. Illick, Colonial Pennsylvania: A History (New York: Charles Scribners Sons,
1976), 7, 7172, 102103.
89J. M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England 16601800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1986), 438.
90Pennsylvania Packet and Daily Advertiser, February 7, 1785.
with an artful design to steal and had taken a variety of bedding and
clothing.91
It was not only thieves that got into trouble. Indentured servants may
not have been listed in the trade directories, but they certainly appeared
in the newspapers either as having been sold or having run away. In 1805
a German girl who had eight years to serve and was strong and healthy
was to be sold.92 She obviously had very little choice over who was to be
her next employer. Indeed many servants found their lives intolerable for
one reason or another. A Dutch servant girl, Catharine Mayer, ran away
from Lewis Dewees of Love Lane. Described as pockmarked, she was last
seen wearing a light blue petticoat and a green baize gown.93 Even those
bound in servitude took action to try to better their situation.
Conclusion
The plight of Jane Bullion, the woman whipped for stealing thread, may
not have been typical, but her case highlights the difficulties under which
women labored. They were often poor, having little access to capital and
credit, were legal non-entities when married, and socially, politically, and
culturally restricted as to what work they could perform. Many women
were not recorded in the trade directories, a symptom of their poverty,
coverture, and the often legally-marginal nature of their role. There are
clear trends in their changing opportunities, but these occurred only
slowly as it took time for Philadelphia to become economically, as well as
politically, independent of its ties with Britain.94 Ironically, being a port,
Philadelphias newly diversifying economy meant declining opportunities
in its trading sector in real terms for women in the first quarter century
of independence. To some extent, these declining opportunities were
replaced by others in the textile sector, but often these were short-term
and poorly paid. While women continued to provide accommodation in
the home, this was not a growth area, and women in Philadelphia did not
prevail amongst the increasingly male-oriented spaces of the coffeehouse,
tavern, and inn. Professional opportunities increased, but only in those
91Relfs Philadelphia Gazette and Daily Advertiser, January 9, 1805.

92Relfs Philadelphia Gazette and Daily Advertiser, January 9, 1805.
93The Federal Gazette and Philadelphia Daily Advertiser, May 9, 1791. Unfortunately no
reason was given for her running away.
94Haggerty, The Structure of the Philadelphia Trading Community.
areas that had become public extensions of domestic space and tasks and
therefore sanctioned as feminine. Many of these occupations were short-
term and poorly paid, further perpetuating womens poverty. Women may
have felt that in the new republic, Philadelphias changing economy did
not offer them any increases in economic, let alone political, power.
Despite these culturally constrained roles, women made a significant,
if unquantifiable, contribution to the economy. Often this was by using
those roles to their advantage. Although opportunities were changing
slowly, women were still a vital part of the workforce and did move into
growth sectors such as textiles. What is impressive is the tenacity and
resourcefulness of these women to be able to so within this environ-
ment. Moreover, the women presented here are only the tip of the ice-
berg. Wives, sisters, and daughters also helped in the family business and
contributed to the Philadelphia economy. Many of those on the margins
and those employed within the businesses of others also remain invis-
ible. The amount of womens work may be under-recorded, but we should
not undervalue it as well. However, the early republic appeared to offer
changing rather than increased opportunities. Philadelphia, like other ex-
colonial port cities, struggled at first to gain economic independence, and
the opportunities available to women in this period reflected this slow
change.
BETWEEN LADY AND SLAVE: WHITE WORKING WOMEN
IN THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LEEWARD ISLANDS
Natalie Zacek1
Several decades ago, the Caribbean historian Michael Craton described

the endeavor of uncovering the lived experience of the West Indian
plantation slave as an exercise in searching for the invisible man.2 This
phrase could just as accurately be applied to the historians attempt to
gain a detailed and nuanced understanding of the lives of non-elite whites
within the plantation societies of the Americas, and particularly those of
the English colonies in the Caribbean. Although the past two decades
have witnessed an efflorescence of scholarship on the part of historians,
literary scholars, sociologists, and anthropologists on the subject of the
history and culture of the British West Indies, to a large extent this work
has examined either the lives of those who owned the islands plantations
or those of the slaves who labored upon them.3 Little attention has been
devoted to the experiences of those who constituted these islands white
working classes. Some scholars have asserted that, by the middle of the
1Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the 2002 meeting of the Bi-Annual
Southern Labor Studies Conference in Miami, and at the Staff Work-in-Progress Seminar
of the Department of History at the University of Manchester, March 2007. I would like to
thank these audiences, and especially Laurence Brown, for their valuable comments.
2Michael Craton and Garry Greenland, Searching for the Invisible Man: Slaves and Plan-
tation Life in Jamaica (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978).
3See, for example, David Barry Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels: A Study of Master-Slave
Relations in Antigua (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); Alan L. Karras,
Sojourners in the Sun: Scottish Migrants in Jamaica and the Chesapeake, 17401800 (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1992); Howard Johnson and Karl Watson, eds., The White
Minority in the Caribbean (Oxford: James Currey, 1998); Andrew J. OShaughnessy, An
Empire Divided: The American Revolution in the British Caribbean (Philadelphia: Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); Vincent Brown, Spiritual Terror and Sacred Authority
in Jamaican Slave Society, Slavery and Abolition 24 (2003): 2453; Sarah M. S. Pearsall,
The Late Flagrant Instance of Depravity in My Family: The Story of an Anglo-Jamaican
Cuckold, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 60, no. 3 (2003): 54982; Trevor Burnard,
Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican
World (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Barry Higman, Planta-
tion Jamaica, 17501850: Capital and Control in a Colonial Economy (Kingston, Jam.: Univer-
sity of the West Indies Press, 2005); Sean X. Goudie, Creole America: The West Indies and
the Formation of American Literature and Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2006).
128 natalie zacek
eighteenth century, nearly every niche in artisanal production, commerce,

and manual labor had been filled by slaves or free people of color, encour-
aging those whites who lacked sufficient capital to establish themselves
as sugar planters or as successful transatlantic merchants to try their luck
in a good poor mans country such as the less socioeconomically devel-
oped West Indian islands or the backcountry regions of Britains North
American mainland colonies. Others have claimed that, although some-
thing that could be considered a white laboring class did develop in the
islands, the nexus of capitalism and slavery rendered these white workers
desperately poor, politically disenfranchised, and completely lacking in
agency both in the public sphere and in their own lives.4
If non-elite white men have remained largely invisible within the
historiography of the English, and subsequently British, colonies in the
West Indies, this invisibility is still more characteristic of the experi-
ences of working-class white women. As Trevor Burnard has noted, the
existing historiography of gender relations in these societies has focused
almost exclusively either upon the lives of elite white women, particu-
larly the wives and daughters of the wealthier planters, or on the varying
experiences of women of different races, rather than those of different
classes within white society. The result has been a picture of the lives
of West Indian women in the era of sugar and slavery which conceives
of them as white ladies, coloured favourites, and black wenches, or
more specifically as consuming white women, producing black women,
and parasitical brown women, that is, as planters wives and daughters,
African female slaves, and women of mixed racial heritage, many of
whom became, whether by choice or coercion, the sexual partners of the
wealthier planters.5 Although this tripartite distinction was first presented
in the works of eighteenth-century commentators such as the Jamaican
planter-historian Edward Long and Mdric-Louis-Elie Moreau de Saint-
Mry, for many years a French colonial official in Saint-Domingue, they
have remained largely unchallenged within the historiography of West
Indian plantation society. Non-elite white women simply do not seem to
4Hilary MacDonald Beckles, A Riotous and Unruly Lot: Irish Indentured Servants and
Freemen in the English West Indies, 16441713, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 47,
no. 4 (1990): 50322; Riva Berleant-Schiller, Free Labor and the Economy in Seventeenth-
Century Montserrat, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 46, no. 3 (1989): 53964.
5Trevor Burnard, Gay and Agreeable Ladies: White Women in Mid-Eighteenth-
Century Kingston, Jamaica, Wadabagei 9, no. 3 (2006): 28; Barbara Bush, White Ladies,
Coloured Favourites and Black Wenches: Some Considerations on Sex, Race, and Class
Factors in Social Relations in the British Caribbean, Slavery and Abolition 2 (1981): 245.
between lady and slave 129
have any place within our understanding of the trajectory of the social,
economic, and cultural development of these island communities, par-
ticularly as these colonies moved ever closer to sugar monoculture over
the course of the eighteenth century, and the numbers of white residents
declined both in absolute terms and in relation to the black population.
Throughout this period, many small farmers and landless artisans and
laborers chose to relocate to Britains North American colonies or to less
socioeconomically stratified Caribbean islands, seeing little future for
themselves or their families in communities in which most occupational
niches came to be occupied by slaves or free people of color, and in which
agriculture was dominated by the great sugar cultivators. If white men
of the laboring classes could not make a place for themselves in these
islands, what opportunities could have existed for their wives, widows,
sisters, or daughters? While the female legatees of successful planters
and prosperous merchants might continue their late male kins business
endeavors and profit from these mens Atlantic commercial networks, the
non-elite women examined here, whether they established themselves as
shop-keepers, as hoteliers, or as proprietors of taverns and punch-houses,
also took advantage of the opportunities generated within the port towns
of the Atlantic world, and simultaneously distinguished themselves from
prostitutes, indigents, and other elements of the lowest rank of white
womanhood in these islands. But for them, too, economic life remained
an ongoing struggle.
Under these less than propitious circumstances, we might expect that
the white female population of the West Indian colonies would have
declined dramatically throughout the eighteenth century. Yet in the case
of the Leeward Islands of Antigua, Montserrat, Nevis, and St. Kitts, upon
which this essay will focus, the opposite was true. In 1678, the first year for
which reliable census data exists, there were 176 white men to every 100
white women in the Leewards, but by 1720 the ratio had altered consider-
ably to one of 108 to 100, and by 1756 it was 104 to 100. This represented
a dramatic re-balancing brought about at least in part by the end of the
islands frontier stage, during which white migrants were overwhelm-
ingly single men, and by the tendency of men in the islands to die more
rapidly than women.6 Although the white segment of the population
within each of the four islands comprising the federated Leeward colony
6Robert V. Wells, The Population of the British Colonies in America Before 1776 (Prince
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 218.
130 natalie zacek
decreased steadily throughout the eighteenth century, both in absolute

numbers and in relation to the numbers of the enslaved, the percentage
of that population that was female continued to rise, as male slaves came
to fill many occupational niches and displaced white men sought better
opportunities elsewhere in the British Atlantic world. Who were these
white women, and what roles did they perform within these small and
socioeconomically stratified plantation societies? Although a significant
number of these women were the wives, daughters, and other female kin
of the Leewards coterie of successful planters, many lay outside of this
elite class, as an examination of the 1753 census of Antigua, the largest and
most populous of the four islands, makes clear.
According to this census, which was commissioned by Leeward Gov-
ernor George Thomas, the white population of Antigua consisted of 3,261
people, of whom 1,433 were men, 1,123 women, 439 boys, and 266 girls;
thus 43 percent of the white adults were female. The census is broken
down by divisions, administrative districts from which members of the
islands governing house of assembly were elected, and within each divi-
sion the residents are enumerated not by their individual names, but by
that of the head of household, after which are listed the numbers of white
men, women, boys, and girls within that household.7 What is noteworthy
for our purposes is the large number of female-headed households listed
within this census: of the 1,114 households, or Familys enumerated, 277,
or just under a quarter, were headed by a woman. But this prevalence
of female-headed families was not spread equally throughout the various
divisions, but instead applied overwhelmingly to the town of St. Johns,
the islands capital as well as the administrative center of the Leewards,
where 221 of 701 households, or 31 percent, were listed under the name of
a woman. In the other divisions, the rate ranged from a high of 20 percent
in Falmouth to a low of just below 4 percent in Popes Head; of the ten
households listed in the return for the division of Mercers Creek, all
were headed by men. The prevalence of independent white women in
the islands sole large town, and their scarcity in rural districts, mirrors
the situation in contemporary Jamaica; as Burnard has observed, the
irrelevance of white women to social, economic and political patterns in
the British West Indies is less clear when we examine women in urban
settingsareas which were much more white female settings than were
7The census is reprinted in its entirety in Vere Langford Oliver, The History of the Island
of Antigua (London: Mitchell and Hughes, 1894), vol. I, cixcxv.
rural plantation worlds.8 In this respect, the port towns of the Leeward
Islands were similar to comparable towns throughout the British Atlan-
tic world, whose populations throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries included high percentages of women.9
As Cecily Forde-Jones has noted, having neither land nor slaves to
buy or sell and precious few possessions to bequeath to dependents,
poor white women [in the British West Indies] rarely are immortalized
in public records.10 In the absence of local newspapers, collections of
personal papers, or other documents which might have allowed the his-
torian to learn more than the names of many of the women named as
heads of households in this census, it is a challenge to interpret these
returns in a way which might illuminate the economic or personal lives
of the poorer of these women. It is far easier to gain a sense of the social
and economic situations of the significant number of the female heads of
households who were the wives, widow, daughters, sisters, or other female
kin of the more affluent and influential men of mid-eighteenth-century
Antigua. Surnames such as those of Rachael Boone, Dorothy Crabb, Mary
Crump, Elizabeth Parry, and Sarah Symes are associated with the fami-
lies who had arrived in the island during its struggling days in the later
seventeenth century, and who had been rewarded for their attempts to
hew a fortune out of the wild woods by generous land grants from gov-
ernors anxious to build up the islands white population and develop its
plantation economy. The surnames of Elizabeth Delap, Ann Duncombe,
Penelope Halliday, and Mary Ann Oliver are those of later arrivals who
quickly established themselves within the ranks of the islands colonial
gentry in the second and third quarters of the eighteenth century.11 Com-
parison of the surnames of female heads of household with Vere Langford
Olivers exhaustively annotated pedigrees of the islands leading colonial
families in his History of Antigua shows that a number of these women
were the heiresses of rich husbands, fathers, or brothers. Dinah Christian,
for example, was the widow of Gustavus Adolphus Christian, who upon
8Burnard, Gay and Agreeable Ladies, 30.

9See, for example, the essay in this volume by Sheryllynne Haggerty, as well as Elaine
Forman Crane, Ebb Tide in New England: Women, Seaports, and Social Change, 16301800
(Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), and Crane, The Socioeconomics of a Female
Majority in Eighteenth-Century Bermuda, Signs 15 (1990): 23158.
10Cecily Forde-Jones, Mapping Racial Boundaries: Gender, Race, and Poor Relief in
Barbadian Plantation Society, Journal of Womens History 10 (1998): 16.
11Richard B. Sheridan, The Rise of a Colonial Gentry: A Case Study of Antigua, 1730
1775, Economic History Review 13, no. 3 (1961): 34257.
132 natalie zacek
his death in March 1752 had bequeathed her his entire estate, and Ann
Duncombe had inherited not only negros & lands but also jewels, plate,
linen, china and furniture from her husband John Duer Duncombe, who
had died in December 1750.12 The will of Elizabeth Glanvilles husband
William, who had died in 1735, had provided their children with landed
property in England. Despite that generosity, Elizabeth apparently had
expressed a preference to remain on the island during her widowhood,
and William had ensured that she would live there in comfort by granting
her the ownership of fourteen slaves for as long as she reside in Antigua,
as well as endowing her with money, plate, jewelry, and a chariot and
four horses.13 Lucy Dunbar Parke, who had been a widow for nearly a
quarter of a century by the time at which the census was taken, appears
not to have inherited any significant property or money from her late
husband Charles. She did, however, own a three-hundred-acre plantation,
Gambles, which her natural father, Leeward Governor Daniel Parke, had
devised to her in his 1710 will on the condition that she and her future
husband would take the Parke name and pass it on to any children they
might have.14 Even unmarried women, or spinsters, might live comfort-
able lives if they were lucky enough to receive substantial inheritances
from their male kin. Mary Crump, who was just eighteen years old in 1753,
was assured of the receipt of the vast sum of 1,000 pounds on her twenty-
first birthday, as mandated by the will of her late uncle George Crump. In
like manner, Ann Ellyatts brother, a planter named John who had died in
1733, made sure of her continued well-being by charging his large estate
with a generous maintenance for his sister.15
Clearly, some women who lived independently of men, whether as
widows or as spinsters, were able to lead economically secure and even
prosperous lives without the need to find paid employment. Others, par-
ticularly those who appear in the census returns from rural divisions such
as those of Belfast, New North Sound, Willoughby Bay, and Dickinsons
Bay, may have taken on at least some of the responsibilities of their late
husbands or fathers as slave-holding plantation owners. In carrying out
these responsibilities, they were most likely assisted by male managers,
attorneys, and overseers. We do not know whether or not Sarah Denbow
persisted in her husbands career as a vintner, or if Elizabeth Montero
12Oliver, Antigua, vol. I, 134, 227.

13Oliver, Antigua, vol. II, 19.
14Oliver, Antigua, vol. III, 2.
15Oliver, Antigua, vol. I, 184, 237.
c ontinued her fathers commerce as a successful merchant. That said, prec-

edent existed within recent Leeward history for a woman to carry on the
economic endeavors of a deceased kinsman, as shown by the experience
of Esther Pinheiro, a Sephardic Jewish woman who resided in Nevis in the
first quarter of the eighteenth century. Like Sephardic women throughout
the Atlantic world, and like both Jewish and non-Jewish women of early
colonial New York City, Esther emerged in her widowhood as her late
spouses replacement in affairs of business.16 Upon the death of her hus-
band, the successful transatlantic merchant Isaac Pinheiro, in 1710, Esther
was his principal legatee, inheriting all the Houses and Land he owned
in Charlestown, the capital of Nevis. She also assumed his place at the
head of his vibrant commercial network, maintaining and even expanding
the familys business interests, primarily through the acquisition of a small
fleet of merchant vessels that traveled between New York, New England,
Britain, and the Leewards, with an occasional stop at Madeira to take
on casks of the wine so popular among West Indian planters.17 Between
1716 and 1718, Esther herself made a number of voyages to the ports of
New York and Boston in her twenty-ton sloop, the Neptune, exchanging
cargoes of sugar, molasses, and other island commodities for New Eng-
land timber and provisions and European manufactured goods.18 By 1720,
Esther was the owner of another vessel, the sloop Samuel, a twenty-five-
ton ship with a crew of five, which made several round trips each year
between Boston and Nevis from 1720 to 1722. The Samuel ceased to appear
in Neviss Naval Office records after 1722, implying that it had been lost at
sea or sold to someone outside of the island. By the beginning of 1724, it
had been replaced in the Pinheiro fleet by the brigantine Esther, a sixty-
ton vessel. The eponymous Mrs. Pinheiro owned this new addition in
partnership with Jonathan Dowse of Charlestown, Massachusetts, where
the ship had been built the previous winter. Initially, the Esther appears
to have replaced the defunct Samuel on the Boston-Nevis route. By 1728,
when Ebenezer Hough, another Bostonian, had replaced Dowse as the
ships co-owner, it began to make far more ambitious transatlantic voy-
ages between Nevis and the ports of London and Cork. Around this time
16See, for example, Gayle Brunelles contribution to this volume.

17See David Hancock, Commerce and Conversation in the Eighteenth-Century Atlan-
tic: The Invention of Madeira Wine, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 29, no. 2 (Autumn
1998): 197220.
18C[olonial]. O[ffice]. 187/1 and 187/2, Naval Office Returns, Nevis, 17201729, National
Archives of Great Britain, Kew, London.
134 natalie zacek
Esther acquired yet another ship, the Abigail, a small brig of thirty-five
tons, which plied the route between Nevis, London, and Madeira.19 The
Pinheiro fleet was small in comparison with those controlled by the great
transatlantic merchant houses of the era, such as that of Micajah Perry of
London. Nevertheless, it was in its time the largest group of vessels owned
by any Nevisian colonist, and its endeavors placed the Widow Pinheiro at
the heart of the islands mercantile community.20
Even women whose late husbands or fathers failed to provide them with
an obvious livelihood, such as ownership of a thriving plantation or of a
successful mercantile concern, might inherit assets or relationships which
allowed them to become or remain financially independent. When the
Scotswoman Janet Schaw arrived in Antigua in December 1774, she and
her sister took lodgings in St. Johns, renting rooms within the house of a
well behaved gentlewoman, who welcomed us, not as the Mrs of a Hotel,
but as the hospital women of fashion would. According to Schaw, Mrs.
Dunbars hall or parlour was directly off the Street. Tho not fine, it was
neat and cool, and the windows all thrown open. A young black female
servant presented the Schaws with a glass of what they call Sangarie,
which the ladies sipped as they chatted with Mrs. Dunbar, her niece, and
another woman, whose husband was a member of the Governors Council
of Antigua, and who waited his return from the Council-board, to carry
her to her house, a few miles up the country.21 Although Mrs. Dunbar had
long been a widow, and her late husband, a Scottish doctor, had appar-
ently been unable to leave her well off, two assets remained to her, a good-
sized house in the center of the islands principal town and a link to the
remarkably cohesive networks of mutual assistance which linked Scots
in the metropole and throughout the British Empire, and upon which
so many contemporary visitors to the American colonies commented.22
Ownership of a large, comfortable, and well-situated town house not only
allowed Mrs. Dunbar to support herself as a landlady, but permitted her
to cater to a clientele of genteel women, rather than potentially destruc-
tive and disreputable sailors or tradesmen. Moreover, she did not have to
present herself as the Mrs of a Hotel, an occupation frequently associ-
19C. O. 187/1 and 187/2, Naval Office Returns, Nevis, 17201729.

20See Jacob M. Price, Perry of London: A Family and a Firm on the Seaborne Frontier
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
21Janet Schaw, The Journal of a Lady of Quality, eds. Charles and Evangeline Walker
Andrews (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1924), 7879.
22See Karras, Sojourners, 118, and Douglas J. Hamilton, Scotland, the Caribbean, and the
Atlantic World, 17501820 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 148.
ated, notably in Barbados and Demerara, with women of mixed lineage

who supposedly provided male lodgers with sexual services as well as with
food and accommodation. Rather, she cut a figure as a hospital woman
of fashion whose home, though not imposing, was tasteful and comfort-
able, and in which at least one black servant or slave was employed to
wait upon her and her guests.23 The Scottish connection between the
late Dr.Dunbar and the Antigua councillor and his wife also allowed
Mrs. Dunbar to portray herself and her establishment as entirely respect-
able, even socially elevated, and thus to attract an affluent and similarly
respectable clientele. Running a lodging-house was a traditionally female
occupation throughout the Anglo-American world, and it was a profes-
sion which offered displaced gentlewomen the possibility of making a
respectable and reasonably comfortable living by engaging commercially
in socially approved rituals of hospitality and sociability, an opportunity
less available to men.
Participation in Scottish commercial networks was likewise beneficial
to another Antiguan widow whom Schaw encountered in the course of
her stay at Mrs. Dunbars. Mrs. Tudhope, whom Schaw described as being
of a most amiable character and generally esteemed, was a member of
the mercantile community of St. Johns, where they have the fashions
every six weeks from London, and London itself cannot boast of more ele-
gant shops. At Mrs. Tudhopes establishment Schaw saw as neat done up
things as ever I met with in my life, and it appears that it was the propri-
etresss metropolitan contacts, particularly those through her brother, the
Edinburgh writer Mr. Ross, that granted her access to the sophisticated
and stylish dry goods whose sale furnished her with a comfortable and
respectable lifestyle.24 Prosperous friends came similarly to the assistance
of Mrs. Mitchel, another St. Johns widow, when her husband, a ships cap-
tain, died at sea and left her with few resources. In her husbands absence,
Mrs. Mitchel had rented lodgings to respectable men, including Colonel
Melville of the 38th Regiment of Foot, then stationed in the island, and
Thomas Hulton, deputy collector of customs for Antigua. Upon hearing
of the difficulties into which this decent woman had fallen upon her
widowhood, the collector proposed to the colonel that they assist her. He
suggested that they take up a subscription for the publication of a lengthy
23Jerome S. Handler, Joseph Rachell and Rachael Pringle-Polgreen: Petty Entrepre-

neurs, in Struggle and Survival in Colonial America, eds. David G. Sweet and Gary B. Nash
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 383.
24Schaw, Journal, 115.
136 natalie zacek
poem which Hulton had composed, and that the funds raised through this
subscription would be donated to Mrs. Mitchel. Hulton reported in his
Account of Travels that the widow cleared about twenty pounds by it,
a sum which allowed her to regain a solid financial footing. The collector
claimed that our readiness to assist the poor woman, was imputed to a
cause that did us no great honor, for it was generally insinuated that we
took that method of paying her for all favors. Still, the very fact that the
members of respectable local society to whom the generally censorious
Hulton restricted his contact were willing to reach into their pockets to
assist Hulton and Melville in helping Mrs. Mitchel implies that his anxiet-
ies about any perceived immorality were unfounded.25
From the above examples, it is evident that at least some white Leeward
women were able to find ways to support themselves even in the absence
or death of a spouse. But what of women who were not so lucky as to
inherit money, land, or other assets from a male kinsman, or who lacked
the ties of family and friendship that might have contributed to their eco-
nomic well-being? Throughout the eighteenth century, many Leeward
planters became sufficiently prosperous that they chose to spend much
of their time pursuing the social, political, and cultural benefits associ-
ated with life in the metropole. Opportunities abounded for bright and
well-educated, but impoverished young men, particularly Scots, to come
out to the islands to serve as managers, overseers, bookkeepers, or physi-
cians on the estates of absentee planters. A man who proved himself to
be honest, hard-working, and capable might not only be able to negotiate
an excellent salary and benefits for himself, but in many instances could
within a few years purchase a bankrupt plantation and use his savings
and his expertise to rebuild it, and thus might join his former employer
within the ranks of the local elite.26 But even though absentee plant-
ers complained about the difficulty of attracting and retaining qualified
managerial and medical personnel, no possibility existed for even a well-
educated and experienced woman to fill such positions. Women were
similarly barred from competing with lower-class white men for the scant
opportunities that existed for artisans and manual laborers in the era of
large-scale slavery.27 As white men saw male slaves and free men of color
25Hulton, Account of Travels, Codex Eng. 74, John Carter Brown Library, Providence,
Rhode Island, 5051.
26See Hamilton, Scotland; Karras, Sojourners.
27Beckles, White Women and Slavery in the Caribbean, History Workshop Journal 36
(1993): 70.
replacing them in nearly every occupation, the same was true for white
women. Enslaved and free colored women increasingly took on the roles
of seamstresses, hairdressers, cooks, housekeepers, laundresses, nannies,
and midwives.28 One might assume that women who found themselves
blocked from other sources of employment might turn to prostitution,
but there is little evidence that many white Leeward women engaged in
paid sex work. The islands legal codes paid little attention to the issue of
prostitution, and none of the four Leewards developed the church courts
that would have sought to regulate the sexual lives of their communities
and to punish such perceived immorality. Despite the lack of regulation,
the islands court records include only a few brief references to a local
man or womans keeping of a disorderly house, and no white woman is
recorded as having been prosecuted or otherwise punished for working
as a prostitute. It seems likely that even in this area white women were
supplanted by slaves and free women of color. Those among the islands
white men who desired non-marital sex sought it elsewhere. Some chose
enslaved women, who had little choice but to submit to white mens sex-
ual advances. Others preferred free black or mixed-lineage women, whom
Anglo-American society mythologized as exotic, sexually adept priest-
esses of Venus.29 Schaw, among others, also claimed that these women
set out to attract wealthy white lovers whom they hoped would rescue
them from the poverty to which both their race and their class seemed
certain to consign them.30
***
In order to gain some sense of how non-elite white women might have
created literal and figurative spaces for themselves within eighteenth-
century Leeward plantation society, let us return briefly to the wider
question of the socio-spatial organization of this society. In particular it
is important to examine the experiences of men as well as women of the
islands white working classes. One explanation for the alleged social and
economic marginality of white workers stems from long-held ideas regard-
ing the social geography of the British West Indian colonies. Because of
the small size of these islands, and the desirability of turning over every
available acre of arable land to the lucrative production of sugar or other
28OShaughnessy, An Empire Divided, 28.

29J. B. Moreton, Manners and Customs of the West India Islands (London: W. Richard-
son, 1790), 78.
30Schaw, Journal, 112.
138 natalie zacek
valuable tropical products, historians have conceived of these landscapes

as largely devoid of urban development. To the extent that British colo-
nists in the West Indies did establish cities or towns, the story goes, they
did so largely to gratify the needs of the elite. Thus towns were intended
to provide facilities for the importation and exportation of merchandise,
the carrying out of financial arrangements, and the administration of local
government. Here, it would appear, no space existed for the white worker,
who would lack the resources to purchase imported goods, and would
have little need to engage a lawyer or consult a merchant or factor. The
property qualifications for holding office in these islands were sufficiently
high that only the wealthier planters were eligible to sit in the assembly
or on the council, or serve as a justice of the peace, a vestryman, or a com-
mander of militia. Although slaves would presumably have had still fewer
opportunities to avail themselves of urban spaces, they were able to some
extent to carve out a place of their own in the context of the slave quar-
ters. But where might non-elite whites gather in order to be entertained,
exchange news, and, most importantly, at least within the context of this
essay, attempt to renegotiate their role within plantation society by claim-
ing a space of their own? Or, as Bertolt Brecht asked in Questions From a
Worker Who Reads, in what houses of gold-glittering Lima did its build-
ers live?/Where, the evening that the Great Wall of China was finished/
Did the masons go?31 The answer to Brechts apt question, in the context
of the West Indies, is the tavern.
The tavern was more than a place of white working-class sociability
and self-assertion. It also served as a space of formal and informal poli-
tics, a nascent public sphere in a set of small island societies which had
yet to develop the physical institutional spaces associated with the politi-
cal life of eighteenth-century Britain and its North American colonies. As
Sarah Hand Meacham has stated of taverns elsewhere in colonial Brit-
ish America, these spaces served the common good in numerous ways,
serving as spaces where men shared news and sold goods and slaves,
where strangers and visitors rested, and where people gathered to discuss
politics and crop prices, and to retrieve their mail. They were critical
as social venues in colonies which lacked the church ales, gentry festi-
vals, and other sponsored pleasantries of England and New England.32 As
31http://www.msu.edu/user/sullivan/BrechtWorker.html.
32Sarah Meacham, Keeping the Trade: The Persistence of Tavernkeeping among Mid-
dling Women in Colonial Virginia, Early American Studies 3 (2005): 14445.
sophisticated a man as the London-educated barrister John Baker, who

served as Solicitor General of the Leeward Islands in the mid-eighteenth
century, found himself visiting the taverns of Basseterre, St. Kitts, for busi-
ness and pleasure alike. On July 9, 1756, he recorded in his diary that he
had attended a Forenoon sale at Merchants Tavern of Captn. Cradocks
leaseholds. Then, on January 9, 1757, he Apres-midi went to hear a taylor
preach at McCabees tavern.33 Moreover, tavern-licensing functioned as
a source of poor relief in colonies in which the presence of the Church of
England was on the whole very limited, and in which vestry boards had
such difficulty in attracting members and collecting funds that at many
moments throughout the eighteenth century they essentially ceased to
function. Furthermore, legislative and vestry records show that women,
whether single or widowed, were frequent recipients of tavern licenses.
Consequently, an enquiry into the nature of tavern life in the English West
Indies allows us to gain a conception of the experiences of white women
in these islands beyond the caricatured figures of white ladies, coloured
favourites, and black wenches. An increased understanding of the lives
of this particular group of white working women offers a more nuanced
understanding of the reciprocal relationships between categories of class,
gender, and race in slave-based colonial societies. Equally important, it
also allows us to reconceptualize these societies in terms beyond the over-
simplified binary oppositions of white and black, enslaved and free.
The importance of the tavern within early modern English and colonial
American society has been discussed by a century of scholars, from Alice
Morse Earle to Peter Thompson.34 The alehouse was a crucial site of social
interaction in the seventeenth-century English village; as Keith Wright-
son has written, taverns served as loci of direct face-to-face contact both
between comparative equals and between superiors and inferiors.35 The
regulation of taverns was an issue of pressing concern within individual
localities, where ministers, magistrates, and landowners alike attempted
33Philip C. Yorke, ed., The Diary of John Baker Barrister of the Middle Temple, Solicitor-
General of the Leeward Islands (London: Hutchinson and Co., Ltd., 1931), 89, 90.
34See Alice Morse Earle, Stage-Coach and Tavern Days (New York: Macmillan, 1900);
Peter Clark, The English Alehouse: A Social History, 12001830 (London: Longman, 1983);
Kym S. Rice, Early American Taverns (New York: Fraunces Tavern Museum, 1983); David
Conroy, In Public Houses: Drink and the Revolution of Authority in Colonial Massachusetts
(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Peter Thompson, Rum Punch
and Revolution: Tavern-Going and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadel-
phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).
35Keith Wrightson, English Society, 15801680 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 1982), 63.
140 natalie zacek
to control the numbers of taverns, their hours of business, and the type of
beverages they sold. The same concern was present throughout Britains
American colonies, both in urban areas such as Philadelphia, where by
1756 there existed over one hundred licensed premises, and in the more
dispersed settlements such as those of the Chesapeake, in which the gen-
try of each county encouraged the establishment of ordinaries at cross-
roads and by riverside ferry docks.36 Some of the earliest acts passed by
the legislatures of the Leeward Islands sought to regulate taverns. In 1669,
for example, the Assembly of Montserrat mandated that all tavern-keep-
ers refrain from being unreasonably exact[ing] in selling their Liquors for
Money, setting maximum prices for various beverages, from the cheapest
(beer at a shilling per gallon) to the most costly (French brandy and right
Canary, a sweet Iberian white wine, at six shillings). It further decreed
that anyone proven to have retailed these liquors at higher prices would
have to pay the hefty fine of a thousand pounds of sugar.37 The moral
character of tavern licensees was similarly considered to require legal
regulation. An act of the Montserrat Assembly in 1693 mandated that all
tavern-keepers:
shall bring yearly Certificates under the Hands of Two of the Council of
this Island...that they hold them sufficiently qualified to keep a Tavern or
House of Entertainment, and have also given good Security in the Secretarys
Office of Five thousand Pounds of Sugar, that he shall suffer no Disorders to
be committed in his said House, or any Thing done contrary to the Laws of
England or of this Island.38
The assemblys concern for maintaining proper behavior was more than
evident here.
Despite this regulatory burden on would-be proprietors, the granting
of tavern licenses was a highly competitive process in the West Indian
colonies. From the applicants standpoint, keeping a tavern was one of
the few avenues by which a person who lacked the capital to become a
planter or merchant might gain a fairly prosperous living for him- or her-
self. The pub landlord would not only control the supply and distribution
36Thompson, Rum Punch, 2; Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 17401790 (Cha-
pel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 30.
37An Act Touching the Merchants Selling of Liquors; And That the Keepers of Tap-
Houses Do Not Exact in Selling of Their Liquors for Money, etc., Acts of Assembly, Passed
in the Island of Montserrat, from 1668, to 1740, Inclusive (London: John Baskett, 1740), 14.
38An Act against Blasphemy, and for Preventing Disorders in Alehouses, Taverns, and
Victualling-houses, Montserrat Acts, 39.
of liquors, but would also gain privileged access to information exchanged

between patrons. For the authorities, as noted, it was essential that all
licensees be people upon whom they could rely to prevent the taverns
entertainment and harbouring of lewd and idle People, such as those
who might engage in unlawful Gaming, immoderate and uncivil Drink-
ing, irreverent and illegal Association, tumultuous Hubbubs, or any other
prophane and illicious Labours.39 How could the motives of profit and
social control be satisfied?
The solution lay in borrowing from practices in the metropole. The
imperatives encouraged the development in the West Indian colonies of
a version of the English pattern of licensing, in which the license was seen
as a form of poor relief, as widows, the disabled, and other distressed but
virtuous inhabitants were the preferred licensees. In theory, at least, these
impoverished subjects would be so grateful to gain a chance to support
themselves that they would do their utmost to uphold all tavern-related
rules. At the same time, the community would benefit by not having
the charge of supporting such individuals through vestry funds or other
forms of relief.40 In 1706, the minutes of the Council of St. Christophers
noted that Robert Pitts, a poor man that was Wounded at Guardeloupe
has Petitioned his Exc[ellenc]ie, to have a Lycence free, to sell Rum &
Rum punch. The council had heretofore refused to Grant free Lycences
for selling Liquors unto any persons (otherwise those such as have been
Super anuated, maimed, or disabled in the Publick service of this Island).
This case, however, was different because Pittss disability and resulting
inability to provide for himself and his family had resulted from his being
wounded in a raid against the French island of Guadeloupe in the course
of the War of the Spanish Succession. Accordingly, the councillors stated
that since they were well satisfied, That Robert Pitts is truly an object
of pitty and within the compass of that Proviso wee are content to allow
him his Lycence free, provided he give in Security.41 Service to the island
could also help those who had vended liquors without being licensed to
do so avoid the large fines associated with unauthorized sales of alco-
holic drinks. In 1707, the same council allowed Martin Nicholls[s]...fine
for selling liquor without a license to be remitted, in appreciation of his
39An Act against Blasphemy and An Act for the Observation of the Lords Day,
Montserrat Acts, 39; 26.
40Conroy, In Public Houses, 109; 113.
41C. O. 241/1, St. Christophers; Council Minutes; Assembly, January 15, 1706.
142 natalie zacek
d iligence in sending powder to the coast.42 Nor were poor white men the
only petitioners for charitable largesse in the Federated Islands.
The legislative records of the English colonies of the West Indies pres-
ent fleeting but evocative images of the many ways in which white women
could fall into poverty. The minutes of the Council and Assembly of the
island of Nevis in the second quarter of the eighteenth century include
references to women such as Elizabeth Evans. Evans described herself as
a poor Widow having four poor children, and being in very low Cir-
cumstances, having but three Dutable [adult] Slaves & Seven Small Ones,
which are scarcely able to furnish herself & Children in Indian provision
[cornmeal], and having no money at present to furnish herself with Coale
to put herself in a Way of getting a Livelihood by her shop, and thus
begged the council to remit her taxes.43 A few months later, Jemima Iles
informed the council that she had fallen in Debt to the publick of this
Island near sixteen pounds Current money, and is not in a Condition to
pay it, being in very Deplorable Circumstances and having four helpless
Children to provide for with but one Negroe that is Dutable, so that with
her utmost industry she barely Can get the Necessarys of Life.44 In 1747,
Ann Choppin, a widow and a member of one of Neviss oldest English set-
tler families, stated that she had lately mett with Uncommon Accidents
first by having a whole Family of Negroes burnt alive in their Houses, then
in having her Boiling House burnt to the Ground, And lastly by the Sever-
ity of the weather has had all her Crop Destroyd, So she must rely intirely
upon the Mercy of her Creditors. In Antigua in 1718, Elizabeth Benson
had petitioned that islands council for a license to beg alms, as all her
property to the value of 200 having been burnt as per certificate. Then,
in 1734, Sarah Long, the widow of the boatswain of a Royal African Com-
pany ship who had died the previous winter after a long illness, begged
the councillors to aid her in her attempt to recover the twenty pounds
owed her late husband. She had sought these funds since November 1726,
and in their absence was so impoverished that she had had to turn to
the vestry of St. Johns parish to grant her a small allowance by which to
provide her and her four sons with the barest necessities.45
42C. O. 241/1, St. Christophers; Council Minutes; Assembly, August 13, 1707.
43C. O. 186/3: Nevis, Minutes of Council in Assembly, 17381752, February 7, 1739.
44C. O. 186/3: Nevis, Minutes of Council in Assembly, 17381752, June 21, 1739.
45Oliver, Antigua, vol. I, xci; petition of Sarah Long, March 1734, Antigua Film Project
http://www.candoo.com/genresources/antiguafilms.htm, p. 8, accessed February 2, 2012.
From these anecdotes, we can see how easy it might have been for
women, whether widowed or single, to slide down the socioeconomic lad-
der. In the absence of a husband, it is also understandable that they could
see no way to climb out of destitution except by throwing themselves
upon the charity of the state. Indeed, these women described themselves
as owning one or more slaves, and of having once possessed a whole Fam-
ily of Negroes, a sugar-boiling house, slave quarters, or property valued at
two hundred pounds. This makes it clear that even women who had once
held a position of a certain degree of prosperity and social standing might
suffer financial reverses to the point that they could not pay their taxes nor
even provide themselves and their children with the most meagre neces-
sities of life. Under such circumstances, the granting of a tavern license
would allow the councillors of an island to portray themselves simulta-
neously as generous, by giving assistance to impoverished and deserving
women, and as hard-headed, by offering these women an opportunity for
self-help rather than outright charity. In at least one instance, a St. Kitts
woman who had been jailed for having retailed Strong Liquors Contrary
to an Act of this Island was freed and the charges against her dropped.
In all likelihood the council took this action because its members real-
ized the depth of her financial distress. They may have been willing to
forgive her flouting of the law because she appeared to have done so in
an attempt to support herself and therefore avoid becoming an object of
public assistance.46
The poverty of female tavern licensees in the English West Indies
is emphasized by the fact that even those women who could pay for
licenses, rather than having them awarded as a sort of workfare program
by the local council, frequently opted to open punch-houses, rather than
taverns.47 Those who retailed only rum punch and beer in almost every
instance paid lower licensing fees than tavern-keepers who sold wine,
which was imported mostly from the Iberian Atlantic islands and was the
drink of choice of a wealthier and more sophisticated clientele through-
out the Anglo-Atlantic world.48 At a 1723 sitting of the Council of Nevis,
both Rebecca White and Mary Hulburd requested that they be excused
46C. O. 241/7: St. Christophers, Minutes of Council and Assembly, March 21, 1758.
47Eighteenth-century Virginian authorities also issued tavern licenses to poor women
in order to prevent the colony from having to support the impoverished; see Hand,
Keeping the Trade, 143. The same pattern can be seen in colonial Massachusetts; see
Conroy, In Public Houses, 100109.
48Hancock, Commerce and Conversation, passim.
144 natalie zacek
from paying the fee for a tavern license, as both sold only beer and punch.
The council approved both requests, agreeing that those who sold only
the cheaper forms of alcohol, and likely attracted less affluent patrons,
should not be liable for the substantial tavern-keeping fees. In response
councillor John Dasent suggested to the lieutenant governor that in future
punch-sellers should pay only 6.5 for their licenses, rather than the 25
assessed on all persons in this Island who keep public Houses and sell
wine.49 Of the forty-three people who applied to the Council of St. Chris-
tophers for liquor licenses in the late 1730s, only six, or approximately
15 percent, were women, and of those six, three requested punch-house
rather than tavern licenses, the latter being almost four times as expensive
as the former. The three female tavern licensees, Barbara Denniston, Anne
Browne, and Anne Brin, each renewed their licenses during this session
of the council, and Browne appears to have held licenses for two separate
premises, whereas none of the punch-sellers, Anne Rossiter, Mary Duff,
and Maryanne Favey, renewed theirs. From this evidence, it appears likely
that punch-sellers were disproportionately female, and that their estab-
lishments were undercapitalized and thus had a high and brisk rate of
failure. It is unlikely that many of the Leewards female tavern-keepers
could offer premises comparable to those of John Fahy, whose establish-
ment in St. Christophers boasted a vast stock of liquors, billiard table,
[and] furniture, and was described, after the 1772 hurricane in which it
was destroyed, as a very elegant building, three stories high.50 If this
account is accurate, Fahys tavern would have counted itself among the
islands most imposing buildings.
Based on the material explored thus far, it would appear that West
Indian female tavern-keepers and punch-house proprietors possessed
very few prospects for success. The only women who might be granted
licenses in their own right were destitute widows or single women, and
these same attributes militated against their ability to set up and maintain
establishments that could be sustained economically over a long period
of time. It is difficult to imagine these women acquiring any degree of
formal, political influence within their respective colonial communities,
in the way in which a more affluent male tavern host might have hoped
to do. However, the peculiarities of political life in the islands afforded
49C. O. 186/1: Nevis Council and Assembly Minutes, May 7, 1723.

50An Account of the Late Dreadful Hurricane, Which Happened on the 31st of August 1772,
Also the Damage Done on that Day in the Islands of St. Christopher and Nevis (Basseterre,
St.Kitts: Thomas Howe, 1772), 6.
at least some opportunity for non-elite white women to enter the arena
of politics, albeit literally on the margins thereof. Until the final decades
of the eighteenth century, many of the British West Indian colonies,
particularly the Leeward Islands, had not yet erected permanent struc-
tures in which to transact government business. This slow pace of insti-
tutional development stemmed from several sources. For one thing, the
Leewards had been captured, sacked, and re-captured multiple times in
the course of Anglo-French hostilities between 1666 and 1713. As a result,
those residents who committed themselves to remaining in these colo-
nies were more concerned with rebuilding their estates than they were
with erecting meeting places for the council and assembly, or habitations
for the royal governor. The threat of invasion waned after the conclusion
of the Treaty of Utrecht. Nevertheless, throughout the eighteenth century
the Leewards were, more so than the other British colonies in the West
Indies, subject to natural disasters, hurricanes, and earthquakes, which
devastated town and country alike, and which were particularly destruc-
tive of the more ambitious public and private buildings. Moreover, Brit-
ish settlers in these islands retained a deeply rooted skepticism about the
nature of state power until well into the second half of the eighteenth
century. Not surprisingly, they remained reluctant to tax themselves in
order to invest in what Francis Dodsworth has described as the fabrica-
tion of the administrative state in a prominent, permanent and symboli-
cally significant form.51
If the wealthier residents of the Leeward Islands were unwilling to
tax themselves in order to erect permanent structures dedicated to local
administration, it was still incumbent upon the local elites who made up
the ranks of this administration to find some space in which to meet. In
many instances the council, assembly, and courts chose to hold their ses-
sions in a tavern or private home in the islands capital. These venues
were unlikely to include such accoutrements as 2 dozen cane or leather
chairs, 2 oval tables each big enough for 16 people, [and] 2 green carpets
51Francis Dodsworth, Virtus on Whitehall: The Politics of Palladianism in William

Kents Treasury Building, 17336, Journal of Historical Sociology 18, no. 4 (2005): 199. Even
in Massachusetts, a colony which historians generally consider to have been far more com-
mitted than those of the West Indies to following metropolitan precedents in terms of
institutional development, it was not until some decades into the eighteenth century that
colonial justices ceased to hold court sessions in taverns and meeting-houses, and relo-
cated these activities to purpose-built administrative buildings. See Martha J. McNamara,
From Tavern to Courthouse: Architecture and Ritual in American Law, 16581860 (Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 21.
146 natalie zacek
for tables, as requested by the Council of St. Christophers at the begin-

ning of the eighteenth century. But taverns might be fitted with special
furnishings, such as platforms (for trials) or might include a separate room
decorated with symbols of royal authority, such as the Kings arms.52 The
minutes of a 1722 sitting of the Assembly of Nevis include a request that
Mrs. Olivia Williams be paid and allowed by the Publick for the Use of her
house for a Court Hall for One Year...Twenty five pounds. Later on, in
1739, that islands council noted that a local man, Robert Thompson, had
kept a tavern in his house for many years past...for the Entertainment
of the Council and Assembly and the several Courts of Law.53 A decade
later, the island government still lacked a permanent home, and the coun-
cil decided to rent two rooms in the house of one John Canty to be used
for council and assembly meetings and court sessions.54 Across the strait
on St. Christophers, the situation was similar. In 1758, the assembly remit-
ted Alexander McCabees tavern license fee with the understanding that
he shall furnish the Council and Assembly with Two Convenient Rooms
to Sitt in and provide proper entertainment for both houses, and that he
would also provide dinner for the Judges of the Courts of Law and the
Officers and Gentlemen that attend them.55 Another contender for the
governments patronage was a woman named Ann Titley, who requested
exemption from license fees for retailing strong liquors provided she do
furnish the Council and Assembly with Two Convenient Rooms...[and]
proper Entertainment.56 Two years later, the assembly formed a commit-
tee to hire for one year only a proper and Convenient House in the Town
of Basseterre in which the Council and Assembly may hereafter meet and
the Courts of Justice be held. By the end of the following month they
had agreed with William Smith that they might rent his house to this
purpose for 125 a year.57 By the summer of 1760, the public of St. Chris-
tophers had finally agreed to finance a new public building in Basseterre,
but in the course of its construction the island government relocated to
the smaller town of Old Road. Here, there not being a proper place...for
52C. O. 241/4: St. Christophers; Council Minutes, September 19, 1704; McNamara, From
Tavern to Courthouse, 22.
53C. O. 186/1: Minutes of Nevis Council in Assembly, April 25, 1722; C.O. 186/3: Minutes
of Nevis Council in Assembly, March 8, 1739.
54Ibid., May 30, 1749.
57C. O. 241/8: St. Christophers, Minutes of Council and Assembly, January 4, 1760, Feb-
ruary 20, 1760.
the Meeting of the Council and Assembly, a Mrs. Elizabeth Franks pro-
posed to this Board to open a Tavern there and provide such a place for
the meeting of both Houses provided she can have a Licence granted her
and the Tax imposed on Tavern keepers remitted. To these requests the
council agreed.58 Even in St. Johns, the administrative and commercial
center not only of Antigua, but of the whole Leeward colony, as late as
1764, at a time when the islands assembly was beginning to challenge
parliamentary privilege by protesting aggressively against newly levied
revenue acts, buildings for local institutions were not a priority. The island
still lacked a Publick Court House, and met
in such a House or Building as now is or can be rented by the Publick of
this Island for those Purposes; and the same Inconveniencies always did and
must follow the holding such Meetings in private Buildings, none of which
are contrived properly for such Purposes, being generally much too small; so
that all Persons, who are obliged to attend on such Occasions, suffer great
Overheatings and Expence of Spirits, which there is good Reason to think
has occasioned much Sickness, and even to have caused the Death of many
Persons; and besides there are no Conveniencies in such private Buildings
for the Grand Juries and Petty Juries to be in or withdraw to separately, but
they have been forced often to retire to Taverns, and other Houses adjacent,
while the Courts have been sitting.59
At the very least one can say that if the inhabitants were loath to pay for
amenities for the rest of the First British empire, they were equally parsi-
monious with themselves.
From these scattered but suggestive pieces of evidence, it is possible to
theorise that, for at least a few non-elite white women of the eighteenth
century Leeward Islands, domestic work and public business coincided.60
Some taverns were run by women, and some taverns hosted legislative
and court sessions, and although it is not possible to construct a Venn
diagram to show the interface between taverns with female proprietors
and those that played host to government business, it seems reason-
able to concur with Kristi Rutz-Robbinss study of female entrepreneurs
58C. O. 241/8: St. Christophers, Minutes of Council and Assembly, July 29, 1760.
59An Act for Erecting a Publick Court House upon the Place Commonly Called the Mar-
ket Place, in the Town of Saint John in Antigua, and Appropriating the Same Court-House,
When Built, to Certain Publick Uses, Acts of Antigua (London: John Baskerr, 1764), 49.
60Kristi Rutz-Robbins, By Her Bill: Women and the Local Economy in Albemarle,
North Carolina, 16501729, paper presented to the conference on Womens Economies
in Early America, McNeil Center for Early American Studies Program in Early American
Economy and Society, October 2004.
148 natalie zacek
in colonial North Carolina that women who kept ordinaries...acted in

the public realm...[and] had greater access to economic relationships
and opportunities forged during court sessions.61 In 1753, when the attor-
ney John Barbot was tried at St. Christophers for the murder of another
white man, a crucial piece of evidence was presented by a female tavern
employee. The witness was Mrs. Patience Dorset, who had been hired by
the tavern-keeper Alexander McCabees wife to assist her with provid[ing]
an entertainment for the lieutenant-general and a great deal of company
in celebration of King George IIs birthday. It was she who had observed
Barbot conversing with companions on the taverns porch, and had heard
him utter the fateful statement that there was a certain gentleman in this
island, that within a fortnight he would either kill or be killed by.62 This
piece of hearsay evidence was one of the prosecutions most potent weap-
ons against Barbot. It helped influence the jurors to find the defendant
guilty and encouraged the judge to pass a sentence of execution upon a
man who had committed a cold-blooded, premeditated murder of a fel-
low white colonist. We can only wonder at what other pieces of informa-
tion women such as Mrs. Dorset might have overheard as they passed the
right Canary.63 We are left to ponder with equal fascination what Lucy
Manning, who was paid 56 later in the 1750s to provide a dessert for an
entertainment for the Leewards governor, might have been able to dis-
cover and, perhaps, turn to her advantage.64 Whatever they were able to
conjure with, it should not surprise us that each of these women would
do what she could in order to increase her options in a plantation society
which offered so few possibilities for members of its non-elite class, and
still fewer should these workers be women. Like Brechts worker, we are
left to muse: Every page a victory/Who cooked the feast for the victors?/
Every ten years a great man/Who paid the bill?/So many reports./So many
questions.65
***
Due to the fragmentary nature of the evidence regarding the lives of white
women of the Leeward Islands colony throughout the eighteenth century,
61Rutz-Robbins, By Her Bill, 9.

62The Trial of John Barbot, Attorney at Law, for the Murder of Matthew Mills, Esq. (Lon-
don: John Whiston and Benjamin White, 1753), 13.
63C. O. 241/7, January 1754.
64C. O. 241/7, January 1754.
65http://www.msu.edu/user/sullivan/BrechtWorker.html, accessed February 12, 2012.
particularly those of the popular class, it is difficult to propose any sort of

grand overarching theory about their experiences. Yet the very existence
of these women, and the brief glimpses we catch of them from legisla-
tive records, travelogues, diaries, and vestry minutes, contribute to a more
nuanced understanding of these small but economically and strategically
crucial British colonies at the peak of their development as plantation soci-
eties. Although the eighteenth-century Leewards were a male-dominated
world in which most white women remained at home, taking charge of
the house and bringing up the children, they were more than that. We
have seen that at least some white women asserted themselves in spheres
beyond that of the stereotypical white lady, whom contemporary writers
and modern scholars alike have characterized either as a passive spectator
of or as a cruel participant in the expropriatory violence of West Indian
plantation slavery.66 The earlier census records of these islands, epito-
mized by that made for Nevis in 1708, were quick to lump widows and
singlewomen with boys & girls. 67 Both groups were seen as people who
were contributing neither to the communitys wealth and security, as did
adult white men, or to the increase of its population, as did these mens
wives. In contrast to this contemporary portrait, we have observed that,
in reality, women without men filled a variety of social and occupational
niches. We can also speculate about the continued importance of women,
even those who lacked husbands or fortunes, to the sociocultural develop-
ment of these economically vital island communities. It seems plausible,
for example, that the very presence of a white female population might
have made these societies more identifiably British, since, as Ann Laura
Stoler, Hilary Beckles, and Catherine Hall, among others, have observed,
women of European descent were cast as the custodians of morality
in the colonies.68 Women could provide a veneer of gentility to what
might otherwise have been a rather rough-and-ready social life, encour-
age the natural increase of the white population, and place at least some
66Hamilton, Scotland, 45.

67A List of the Inhabitants of Nevis, with the Number of Their Slaves, 13 March
1707/8, in Caribbeana, ed. Vere Langford Oliver (London: Mitchell, Hughes and Clarke,
1911), vol.III, 17379.
68Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucaults History of Sexuality
and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 135; Stoler,
Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2010), 5657; Hilary MacDonald Beckles, Centering Woman:
Gender Discourses in Caribbean Slave Society (Kingston, Jam.: Ian Randle Publishers, 1999),
79; Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination,
18301867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 18.
150 natalie zacek
l imitations on sexual contact between white men and black women. Per-
haps these influences allowed Antigua and Montserrat, Nevis and St. Kitts
to portray themselves to their inhabitants and to metropolitan authorities
as functioning British colonial societies. At the very least it would seem
that they might undermine notions of these islands as nothing more than
armed camps of aggressive men, or machines for the making of fortunes
quickly dissipated by the lavish lifestyles of absentee planters. Examined
from the standpoint of class and gender, the experiences of these women
complicate the overly schematic picture of the lives of white West Indian
colonists, and illuminate the persistence of poverty within some of the
richest colonies in the eighteenth-century British imperium. Expand-
ing our understanding of the existence of a white laboring class within
these islands can simultaneously enrich our sense of these places both as
part of a particular Caribbean plantation system and as a node within a
colonial British American world. By moving on from a conception of the
West Indies as inhabited exclusively by masters and slaves, and by white
ladies, coloured favourites, and black wenches, we can better compre-
hend the lives of those whom we can assign to these categories, as well as
those who occupied the spaces between.
SECTION two
TRADERS AND TRAVELERS
The essays in this section address women who, more in keeping with the
Atlantic stereotype of masculine adventurers, left their home communi-
ties to pursue the new economic and social opportunities afforded by
Atlantic connections. In these examples, movement, both geographical
and social, is the key theme. These women, generally wealthy and well-
connected, consciously took advantage of the new circumstances of the
Atlantic world, often stepping outside of the traditional roles ascribed to
them by their dominant culture.
Gayle Brunelle examines the experiences of female Spanish and Portu-
guese immigrants to France in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
reminding us that although France did not have substantial settled colo-
nies in the New World, it did engage in the Atlantic commercial system,
albeit in part via the links provided by Iberian merchants. These mer-
chant women were drawn to the port cities of Nantes and Rouen pre-
cisely because of the new possibilities provided by Atlantic trade. Like
their husbands, they joined commercial associations, were active in mer-
chants courts, invested in real estate, and became important sources of
public and private credit. By doing so, they became the principal con-
duits of Atlantic-world products and business connections. While these
activities were to some degree outside the range of activities expected of
most Iberian women, they did fit within the tradition of the New Chris-
tian background of most of the women in question, which exhibited a
greater tolerance of womens commercial activity. Cultural background
was also a factor in determining the differences between the experiences
of Spanish and Portuguese women, since the former seem to have assimi-
lated to a much greater degree into French society than the latter due to
their greater wealth, language skills, and cultural knowledge. For Spanish
merchant women in particular, the Atlantic trade context provided a new
path towards upward social mobility and incorporation into elite French
society, as it also ensured the incorporation of these French cities into the
Atlantic commercial network.
If women could help bring the Atlantic to Europe, they could also, to
borrow from the problematic with which the essays of section 1 engaged,
participate in exporting the metropole. In Kim Todt and Martha Shattucks
152 section two
study, the women in the Dutch colonial province of New Netherland in

the 1650s maintained the same kinds of roles and activities they would
have in the metropolis. In this case, however, the cultural and legal
framework of the Dutch Republic was much more conducive to giving
women an active and prosperous economic role. The women featured in
this essay belonged to a relatively new nation that relied extensively on
commerce and provided women with the education and training to be
dynamic partners in the colonial economic system. Women of Dutch ori-
gin in New Netherland participated at every level from local weekly mar-
kets to long-distance trade with other Dutch colonies and the metropolis,
and their economic roles did not greatly differ from those of men engaged
in the same activities (though they were substantially different from those
of women in other regions of the Atlantic world). Here the role of the
port city gave colonial women of relatively comfortable status the same
kinds of opportunities they would have had in their home society, and the
importance of the Dutch legal framework in this context is underlined by
the fact that the numbers of female traders sharply declined in the years
following the colonys transfer to English rule.
Jeanne dEntremeuse, the entrepreneurial woman featured in Ernst
Pijnings essay, was a person who seemed to be remarkably at home in
a variety of Atlantic ports in the eighteenth-century Spanish, Portuguese,
and French colonies. She was certainly more adventurous than the aver-
age woman of her era, but her experience demonstrates that women
with talent and initiative faced few concrete limitations in spite of the
prescriptive norms against womens travel and engagement in indepen-
dent commercial activity. Mme. dEntremeuse does not seem to have had
the advantage of a commercial background or training, but her success
was due to her astute negotiation of social norms and local official net-
works. She developed personal networks and commercial ties in much
the same way her male contemporaries did, as well as manipulating the
advantage of her widowhood and the stereotype of weak femininity to
buy leeway when she found herself in sticky legal situations. As in the
case of Brunelles Iberian merchant women, the Atlantic context provided
opportunities for her that would not otherwise have existed. Pijning uses
Mme. dEntremeuses experience to demonstrate that the reality of colo-
nial economic networks was probably a great deal more flexible in prac-
tice, in terms of both gender norms and mercantilist trade regulations,
than what was expected in principle.
Jnia Furtados study of women in the Portuguese empire from the
sixteenth through the eighteenth century provides even more examples
traders and travelers 153
of the unique opportunities afforded by the Atlantic context. While the

previous essays deal with European women who stepped into tradition-
ally masculine territory as merchants, Furtado demonstrates that the
imperial context created possibilities for social and economic mobility
for women of mixed lineage as well. An important ingredient here is the
role of the Crown, which gave women greater control over resources in
the form of property rights, dowries, and land grants. Wealthy and well-
connected widows could clearly take the most advantage of this context,
but even poorer and mixed-lineage women were able to play an active
role in improving their socioeconomic status. Furtado argues that the very
nature of port cities created this greater flexibility in social and gender
roles. While the Portuguese empire, in the process of creating a service
nobility in the interest of the empire, seems especially to have generated
these more flexible circumstances, it is also important to note that women
could only take advantage of these to the degree that they were willing
to adopt Portuguese social and cultural values. While traditional gender
expectations were important, the women in Furtados study show that
their defiance of these expectationsparticipating in trade, travel, schol-
arship, and even the militarywas accepted as long as they supported
the crowns imperial interests.
In each of these essays, women defied or at least stepped outside of
the expectations of cultural norms, which framed the feminine role as
largely domestic, and their actions were accepted to the extent that oth-
ers perceived them to be serving established interests. In contrast to many
of the women considered in section 1, all of the women in these essays
actively chose and shaped their economic participation in the Atlantic
commercial context, and all were able to step into positions more often
ascribed to men. These authors demonstrate that womens real activities
could spring from an imperial context, but that they were much more var-
ied than the roles presented to us by cultural commonplace and prescrip-
tive literature. In short, we need to see their actions as having unfolded in
Atlantic and imperial space.
THE PRICE OF ASSIMILATION: SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE WOMEN
IN FRENCH CITIES, 15001650
Gayle Brunelle
Introduction
Between 1480 and 1575 several waves of Spanish immigrants, most of them
merchants and many of them of converso (converted Jewish) heritage,
settled in France, especially in cities engaged in Atlantic trade such as
Rouen and Nantes. Many of these Spanish merchants began their careers
in France as factors of the great wool trading families of Castile. Within
a generation or two, these merchants branched out to many other areas
of commerce, including trade with the Low Countries, Africa, and the
New World.1 Scholars of the Spanish immigrants in France during the six-
teenth century such as Michel Mollat and Henri Lapeyre tend to assert
that the Spaniards crossed the boundaries of community with ease and
were absorbed into Northern French society relatively quickly, within a
generation or two.2
Between 1560 and 1660, meanwhile, a new wave of Iberian migrants
began to arrive in France in significant numbers. These too were mostly
merchants, the great majority from converso families. They were known
as Portuguese in France even though only a minority of these mer-
chants were actually of Portuguese ancestry, the rest being descendants
of Sephardic Jews forcibly converted in Portugal between 1495 and 1530,
or Spanish Jews who fled to Portugal for refuge after the 1492 expulsion
1Gayle K. Brunelle, Immigration, Assimilation and Success: Three Families of Spanish

Origin in Sixteenth-Century Rouen, Sixteenth Century Journal 20, no. 2 (Summer, 1989):
20319; Connie Mathers, Family Partnerships and International Trade in Early Modern
Europe: Merchants from Burgos in England and France, 14701570, Business History Review
62, no. 3 (Autumn 1988): 36797.
2Michel Mollat, Le commerce maritime normand la fin du moyen age (Paris: Librai-
rie Plon, 1952), 50922; Henri Lapeyre, Une famille de marchands les Ruiz (Paris: Librairie
Armand Colin, 1955), esp. 46, 93, 103. Only Jules Mathorez has made an effort to link or
compare the experiences of the Spanish and Portuguese in France: Jules Mathorez, Notes
sur les espagnols en France, Bulletin Historique 16 (1914): 33741; Mathorez, Notes sur les
espagnols et les portugais Nantes, Extrait du Bulletin Hispanique 14 (1912): 3, 14 (1912):
4, 15 (1913): 1, 2 and 3 (Bordeaux: Feret et Fils, s.d.); Mathorez, Notes sur lhistoire de la
colonie portugaise de Nantes, (Bordeaux: Feret et Fils, 1922).
156 gayle brunelle
from Spain. (In fact the term Portuguese became, and still is, synony-
mous with Jewish for many people in France.) Because many of them
were crypto-Jewsand in the eyes of the French, the religious orthodoxy
of the entire community was suspectmost of the Portuguese remained
on the margins of French society and culture. After 1650, historians have
claimed, they gradually deserted most of France except for the southwest,
seeking greener, or at least safer, pastures in Bordeaux if they remained
in France, or in Amsterdam, Hamburg, or London. French scholars have
tended to focus on the religion of the Portuguese rather than on their
commercial activities and contributions to the French economy.3 The
suspicion of crypto-Judaism did not, by contrast, dog the Spaniards in
France in the same way. From the beginning, therefore, these two immi-
grant communities in France, while having much in common in terms of
culture and heritage, followed different trajectories in their relationship
with their French host society.
Both groups of Iberians in France played a central role in catalyzing
French access to early modern Atlantic world trade networks. Indeed,
despite private- and crown-sponsored French efforts to establish a colo-
nial presence or a foothold in Atlantic trade in the Americas during the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they were the least connected to the
more lucrative Atlantic trade networks and opportunities.4 Spanish and
Portuguese merchants in France, by contrast, retained the right to par-
ticipate in the Iberian Atlantic trade networks, and even if they became
French citizens, were able, via their kin and business connections within
the Iberian world, to funnel French products into the Iberian colonies, and
the goods, and silver, from those colonies back to France. As a result, they
became prominent players in the commerce of the cities in which they
3Most of the scholars who have studied the Portuguese communities in France have
tended to be Jewish, and the extent of the judaizing of the Portuguese has, not surpris-
ingly, been their main focus. See, for example, Frances Malino, The Sephardic Jews of Bor-
deaux: Assimilation and Emancipation in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France (Tuscaloosa,
AL: The University of Alabama Press, 1978).
4There are numerous studies on French efforts to break into the Atlantic world. See
inter alia the essays in Frank Lestringant, ed., La France-Amrique (XVIeXVIIIe sicles):
Actes du XXXVe colloque international dtudes humanistes runis par Frank Lestringant
(Paris: Honor Champion, 1998); Philippe Bonnichon, Des cannibals aux castors: Les dcou-
vertes franaises de lAmrique (15031788) (Paris: ditions France-Empire, 1994); Philip P.
Boucher, France and the American Tropics to 1700: Tropics of Discontent? (Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Pierre Chaunu, Conqute et exploitation des nou-
veaux mondes, XVIe sicle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1969); Gilles Havard and
Ccile Vidal, Histoire de lAmrque franaise (Paris: Flammarion, 2003).
the price of assimilation 157
settled precisely because of their unparalleled access to these networks,

which otherwise would have remained closed to the French.5 The finan-
cial incentive, therefore, for Iberians to settle in France was significant.
Especially for the Spanish, most of whom were better integrated into Ibe-
rian Catholic society than were the more recently converted Portuguese,
economics played a more significant role than religion in their decision
to settle in France. Even so, all the Iberians had to contend with compet-
ing pressures to integrate and yet retain their vital commercial ties to the
Iberian world once they migrated.
Iberian women in France, like their spouses, fathers, and brothers, faced
the difficulties of migration and adjustment to a new language and cul-
ture. In families of New Christians with crypto-Jewish tendenciesmost
of which were Portuguese rather than Spanishthere was the added
problem of finding ways to observe Jewish religious practices in the home
without alerting their Catholic French neighbors, and the responsibility
for this duty tended to fall upon the shoulders of women.6 Although the
absence of the Inquisition meant that such women had less to fear in
France than they did in Spain or Portugal, the religious atmosphere was
by no means as relaxed as it was in Amsterdam, as the arrest for alleged
judaizing of members of Rouens Portuguese community in 1633 attests.7
Moreover, like wives of merchants everywhere in Europe, they assisted
their husbands and male kin in running the family business, which
required knowledge of a wide variety of business practices, and at least
rudimentary literacy. Iberian widows could find themselves attempting
5I discuss this issue in Gayle K. Brunelle, The New World Merchants of Rouen, 15591630,
Volume XVI, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Jour-
nal Press, 1991), 30ff.; Brunelle, Immigration, Assimilation and Success, 203219.
6See Rene Levine Melammed, Heretics or Daughters of Israel? The Crypto-Jewish
Women of Castile (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), although Melammed says little
about the economic activities of these women or their families.
7For further discussion of this incident, see Gayle K. Brunelle, Migration and Reli-
gious Identity: The Portuguese of Seventeenth-Century Rouen, Journal of Early Modern
History 7, nos. 34 (2003): 283311; Michael Alpert, Crypto-Judaism and the Spanish Inquisi-
tion (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2001), 6468; Haim Beinart, The Expulsion of the
Jews from Spain, trans. Jeffery M. Green (Oxford and Portland, OR: The Littman Library
of Jewish Civilization, 2002), 27274; Jacques Blamont, Le Lion et le Moucheron: Histoire
de Marranes de Toulouse (Paris: ditions Odile Jacob, 2000), 5460; David L. Graizbord,
Souls in Dispute: Converso Identities in Iberia and Jewish Diaspora, 15801700 (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Jonathan Israel, Diasporas Within a Diaspora: Jews,
Crypto-Jews, and the World Maritime Empires (15401740) (Leiden, Boston, Kln: Brill, 2002);
Cecil Roth, Les Marranes Rouen: Un chapitre ignor de lhistoire des Juifs de France,
Revue des tudes Juives, 88 (1929): 11355.
158 gayle brunelle
to direct a family business with commercial transactions that stretched

across Europe and beyond by themselves or with the assistance of sons,
other male kin, or family friends. At the same time they had to run the
household, which would include provisioning the larder, directing ser-
vants, overseeing other tasks the domestic economy required and raising
young children, and all in a strange land where they might have only a
rudimentary grasp of the language.
While we do not have access to a great deal of information about the
domestic lives of Iberian women in France, we do have some data about
their roles as helpmates of their spouses in business and, by extension,
their education and literacy. Spanish women tended to be more aggres-
sive in commerce than their French and Portuguese peers during the first
generation or two after their arrival in France. We find this both among
those still ensconced in the Spanish community, with male kin and
spouses still living, and those married to or widows of French spouses.
As is the case for French women involved in commerce, only a fraction
of the Spanish (and Portuguese) women active in commerce emerge in
the documents. Those whose spouses were still living usually operated
under their husbands direction and are much less likely to appear in the
notarized contracts and commercial court cases that provide the bulk of
evidence for early modern commercial activity.8 Therefore the sample
examined here is small, fewer than a dozen women, all of them Span-
ish, though it is likely that most of the rest of the Spanish women liv-
ing in France were equally active in commercial activities, but, as wives,
do not surface in our sources as independent actors. The investments of
wealthy French women, as elsewhere in Europe, became an important
source of public and private credit, and the same was true for the Span-
ish women living in France. When they were widowed, Spanish women
showed themselves to be quite capable, even more willing than French
women, to assume control of the family business and keep it solvent and
even prosperous until their sons came of age. What especially tends to dis-
tinguish them from French women was that even when they were single,
they invested actively in commercial enterprises and, like their male kin
in France, they particularly favored the cloth trade within Atlantic world
8See Gayle K. Brunelle, Policing the Monopolizing Women of Early Modern Nantes,
Journal of Womens History 19, no. 2 (June 2007): 1035; Brunelle, To Beggar Thy Neighbor
or Not? Cooperation and Rivalry within the Merchants Tribunal of Early Modern Rouen,
in Institutional Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. Anne Goldgar (Leiden: Brill, 2004),
6183.
networkswool from Spain sent to France, and French linen cloths sent
to Spanish America.
This essay explores the commercial activities of such women in Rouen
and Nantes in the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth
century, cities that were more important nodes in the Atlantic trade net-
works even than Bordeaux. It shows that Spanish women engaged in
long-distance commerce in a manner and on a scale similar to that of
their male counterparts, albeit in fewer numbers. In Nantes they were
members of Spanish commercial associations based in France and Spain.
In Rouen they took part in the creation of the merchant tribunal called
the juridiction consulaire. As was the case in French households, Spanish
women were their husbands de facto (and often de jure as well) prox-
ies and business partners. They were responsible for the family company
as well as the domestic economy, when the head of the household was
absent or indisposed, and always active in the day-to-day running of the
family enterprise. Some Spanish women, again like their French counter-
parts, even ran their own businesses, apart from their husbands. As a rule,
Spanish women in France seem to have been more knowledgeable about
commercial techniques than French women. More of them, in any case,
were able to climb into the ranks of wholesale merchants, or maintain
the reach and prosperity of the family company as widows. Their suc-
cess also may have derived from the New Christian background of many
of these Iberian families, which quite possibly fostered a greater toler-
ance on the part of their male kin toward female commercial activity,
and a greater willingness to trust women to manage large sums of money
and to instruct them in commercial techniques. Even after they mar-
ried French husbands, a common step in their assimilation into French
Catholic society, Spanish women still demonstrated a surprising acuity
in handling money. Upon becoming widows, they continued to run their
husbands businesses. Typically they parlayed the commercial wealth they
and their husbands generated into sizeable real estate holdings, sufficient
to finance their daughters dowries, endow several sons with large estates,
and finance the purchase of royal offices as well.
Portuguese women, or at least the wives, daughters, and widows of
male Portuguese merchants settled in Rouen and Nantes, appear to have
been less aggressive in commerce than either their Spanish or French-
born peers in France. The assistance they rendered their male kin indi-
cates that they possessed a level of business and financial expertise similar
to that of Spanish women. Nevertheless, despite what seems to have been
an equivalent level of commercial expertise, there are fewer instances of
160 gayle brunelle
Portuguese women in France venturing on their own into the commercial

world, either in manufacturing or in large-scale commerce. It is always
difficult to argue from a negative, and the paucity of data in the archives
of Rouen and Nantes regarding the economic activities of Portuguese
women makes it very difficult to assess the true extent of their behind-
the-scenes commercial activities in support of their spouses. Research on
marrano (converted Sephardic Jewish) women in the Iberian world indi-
cates, however, that they were at least as active in commerce as Spanish
or French women.9 Vagaries in the documents that have been preserved
may account for some of this difference. However, it is just as likely that
they really were less willing to go it alone, even as widows in the cities
of northern France, where their communities were smaller and more vul-
nerable than in Amsterdam, or even Bordeaux or Bayonne in southwest-
ern France. Another reason for this discrepancy might be the problem
of language. Like their husbands, Portuguese women seem to have had
less mastery of French than did the Spanish. Evidence from the commer-
cial courts, including complaints from their judges and their adversaries,
indicates that the Portuguese were more reliant on interpreters. Language
barriers may have inclined Portuguese women to focus more heavily, and
sooner when they were widowed, on passive investments in tax farms and
public and private loans, which would have required less knowledge of
French language and commercial law, especially as most of these invest-
ments were not in France but in Spain, Portugal, or Amsterdam where
they also had kin.10 Indeed, they showed little inclination to invest in
9Research on this topic is very sparse, but see the following: Marianna D. Birbaum,
The Long Journey of Gracia Mendes (Budapest and New York: Central European University
Press, 2003), esp. 1532; Dean Phillip Bell, Jews in the Early Modern World (New York: Row-
man and Littlefield, 2008), 121f.; Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, A Nation Upon the Ocean Sea:
Portugals Atlantic Diaspora and the Crisis of the Spanish Empire, 14921640 (Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 202, n. 69.
10Archives Dpartementales de Seine-Maritime (ADSM), Talbellionage de Rouen, 2E
1/801, April 2, 1620; 2E 1/801, May 18, 1620; 2E 1/804, June 26, 1620; 2E 1/808, November3,
1620; 2E 1/808, December 15, 1620; 2E 1/852, November 21, 1621; 2E 1/1069, February 4, 1625;
2E 1/840, June 17, 1625; 2E 1/1072, March 27, 1626; 2E 1/849, February 3, 1627; 2E 1/859, Feb-
ruary 29, 1628; 2E 1/1105, March 3, 1632; 2E 1/1106, May 3, 1632; 2E 1/1107, July 24, 1632; 2E
1/1107, August 21, 1632; 2E 1/1153, April 24, 1640. Unfortunately the much sparser archives of
Nantes do not yield the wealth of commercial documents, such as the sample cited above,
that can be found in Rouen. But given the close commercial and kinship ties between the
Iberians of the two cities, it is likely that the patterns of investment are quite similar.
French real estate or public debt beyond the minimum required to obtain
letters of naturalization.11
Spanish women also made use of passive investments, but usually
after more active commercial careers, and for very different reasons. Like
French widows, Spanish widows of French husbands with means tended
to gravitate over time toward investments in such passive investments
as rentes (credit), public and private credit, and land. In fact, most Span-
ish women who rose in society and established firmer roots in France
eventually focused their financial and real estate investment strategies on
France, in and around the French cities in which they settled. Landed
income in particular brought security and status that were vital for the
upward social mobility they coveted for their childrens futures in French
society, a goal Portuguese women did not share. Thus, Spanish womens
movement away from commerce indicated their assimilation into, not
their isolation from, French society. Following the pattern their male kin
had established, after a few generations, daughters of immigrant Span-
ish merchants would often marry into French office-holding families and
confine their economic activities entirely to investing in land and public
and private loans, much as their French counterparts did.12 Part of the
reason for this transition in their economic strategies may have been that
as Spanish women married French husbands, they found that French
inheritance laws and cultural attitudes discouraged women, even wid-
ows, from risking family capital in commerce. By contrast, women of the
Portuguese community not only evinced little inclination to assimilate,
but also struggled against their communitys perceived religious hetero-
doxy, which cut them off from mainstream culture and intensified their
preference for endogamy, which proved to be the rule even into a third
marriage. Of course, prior to turning French, some Spanish women in
France found ways to pursue active careers in commerce and/or invest-
ment that their Portuguese peers could not due to the different attitudes
11For the history of naturalization in France, see Peter Sahlins, Unnaturally French:
Foreign Citizens in the Old Regime and After (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,
2004); Charlotte C. Wells, Law and Citizenship in Early Modern France (Baltimore and Lon-
don: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
12For the kinds of investments wealthy French women made, see Andr Courtemanche,
La richesse des femmes: Patrimoines et gestion Mansoque au XIVe sicle, Cahiers dtudes
mdivales 11, (Paris and Montral: Bellarmin, 1993); William Chester Jordan, Women and
Credit in Pre-Industrial and Developing Societies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1993).
162 gayle brunelle
toward assimilation in the two communities.13 It is to these careers that

this chapter now turns.
The Range of Commercial Activities of Spanish Women
Characteristic of Spanish women in France was that, while still a part of the
Spanish community, they, like their husbands, focused their investments
on the import-export trade and wholesale, rather than retail, commerce.
This is to be expected as sixteenth-century Spanish immigrants to France,
whether of New Christian background or not, were seldom refugees. They
usually came to France voluntarily seeking commercial opportunities.
Often of New Christian descent, most belonged to wealthy commercial
families like the Ruiz of Medina del Campo or the Saldaa and Quintana-
dueas of Burgos whom they served as factors in charge of the French arm
of the family business, which allowed them to maintain strong business
and familial contacts with kin and associates in the Spanish world. Travel-
ing freely between Spain and France as cross-cultural brokers, they carved
out a special and lucrative commercial niche for themselves. Unsurpris-
ingly, the Spanish communities in France possessed significant wealth and
had fewer impoverished members than did the Portuguese. Due to their
greater wealth and the lower level of hostility toward them on the part of
the French, the Spanish were able to assimilate into French society if they
chose to. Consequently, Spanish women in France had better access to
commercial capital than most French women, and were better prepared
to assimilate into French society than female Portuguese immigrants.14
There is even evidence that Iberian women, especially those of Jewish
or converso background, were more interested than French women in
13The phrase turning French results from an adaptation of the following works title:
Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Turning Swiss: Cities and Empire, 14501550 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985).
14In Spain, the range of female labor, including that of conversas, seems to have been
similar to that in France, wherein the majority of women were employed in small scale
household manufacturing and retail commerce, which could accommodate domestic
responsibilities, complement or supplement the labor of the male head of the household,
and correspond to the lower class status of most urban families in early modern Europe.
See Melammed, Heretics or Daughters of Israel, cited above. Although much work remains
to be done, anecdotal evidence suggests that Jewish women and conversas enjoyed more
latitude for their economic activities than did Christian women. See for example Natalie
Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1995), 1115; Birnbaum, The Long Journey of Gracia Mendes.
all sorts of commercial activities15 as well as moneylending.16 Moreover,

there seems to have been a window of opportunity for Spanish women
in France during which they were freer to take part in large-scale com-
merce, as they would have done in Spain. Upon arriving in France, their
families were still firmly ensconced in trade, and needed to remain there
for at least a generation or two in order to produce the wealth necessary
to leaving commerce. It was during this Spanish phase that the wives,
sisters, and daughters of Spanish merchants in France played a very active
role in commerce.
Six women merchants trading on their own account appear frequently
in the account books of Andre Ruiz, the most famous Spanish merchant in
sixteenth-century Nantes, and will serve as the prototypes for sixteenth-
century Spanish female immigrants to France. Ysabel de Santo Domingo,
who seems to have been loosely associated with the Cardera company
of Spanish merchants, regularly imported azure dye, fish oil, and other
commodities on a scale comparable with that of male merchants listed.
In 1553 alone she had merchandise on no fewer than nine ships unload-
ing at the quays of Nantes.17 The wife of Andre Ruiz de Santo Domingo
often worked in association with her sister-in-law, Maria Ruiz, particularly
in the export of Breton cloth. The two women also handled shipments
of goods as factors for their male relatives, such as Simon Ruiz, Andres
brother, who was based in Medina del Campo.18 Ysabel de la Presa in 1554
15Lapeyre, in Une famille de marchands, discusses these records extensively in his

opening chapter, 9f. Some of this vast collection of letters have been published in F. Ruiz
Martin, ed., Lettres marchandes echanges entre Florence et Medina del Campo (Paris:
S.E.V.P.E.N., 1965); Valentin Vzquez de Prada, ed., Lettres marchandes dAnvers (Paris:
S.E.V.P.E.N., 1960).
16Birnbaum, The Long Journey of Gracia Mendes 27f; Eleazar Gutwirth, Widows, Arti-
sans, and the Issues of Life: Hispano-Jewish Bourgeois Ideology, in In Iberia and Beyond:
Hispanic Jews Between Cultures: Proceedings of a Symposium to Mark the 500th Anniversary
of the Expulsion of Spanish Jewry, ed. Bernard Dov Cooperman (Newark, DE: University of
Delaware Press, 1998), 14373; Rene Levine Melammed, Castilian Conversas at Work, in
Women at Work in Spain, 81100.
17Archives Municipales de Nantes (AMN), HH 190, Comptes Ruiz, f. 16r, May 30, 1553,
Por la conpania Cardera...por quenta de Ysabel de Santo Domingo una bala de hilo azul
de Renes [Rennes] que tiene 55 maco de hilo y de la marca de fueras; HH 190, f. 17v, June6,
1553; HH 190, f. 18v, June 19, 1553, seven ships.
18AMN, HH 192, Comptes Ruiz, f. 8r, 8v, 9r, November 8, 1558; f. 6v, 7r, 7v, Novem-
ber 9, 1558; f. 10v, 11r, 11v, 1559; f. 17r, 17v, 1559; f. 18r, 18v, 1559; f. 27r, September 25, 1559;
Jules Mathorez, Notes sur les espagnols en France, Bulletin Historique 16 (1914): 33741;
Mathorez, Notes sur les espagnols et les portugais Nantes, Extrait du Bulletin Hispan-
ique 14 (1912): 3, 14 (1912): 4, 15 (1913): 1, 2, 3, (Bordeaux: Feret et Fils, s.d.); Mathorez, Notes
sur lhistoire de la colonie portugaise de Nantes, (Bordeaux: Feret et Fils, 1922).
164 gayle brunelle
exported paper and books on four of Ruizs ships. She also received quite
a bit of cargo in 1550.19 Juana de Miranda, whom Andre Ruiz respectfully
called mi seora, seems to have shared a business with a Frenchman,
Andre Dubois, and was another frequent exporter of Breton merchandise.20
Two other women who figure prominently in the fragment of the Ruiz
accounts preserved in the municipal archives of Nantes are Margarita de
Villadiego and Yez de Lerma, widow of Nicolas de Astudillo, who, when
her husband died, carried on the family enterprise with her son.21 Unsur-
prisingly, given the nature of the source, all these women were related by
blood or marriage to the Ruiz family or its close associates, the Miranda,
De la Presa, and Santo Domingo clans.22 No doubt many other women
merchants could be found in the bulk of the Ruiz papers conserved in
Valladolid.23
The Ruiz papers reveal that some women operated in conjunction with
a man, like the widow Lerma and her son, some for their own account,
and that many women did both. For example, on May 5, 1551, Margarita
de Villadiego sent out a shipment of merchandise from Nantes to Bil-
bao on consignment for Juan de Vialar. Yet on the same day, and on the
same ship, she also loaded cargo for sale in Spain belonging solely to her
(a ella pertenecientes). She often worked together with Juan de Annun-
cibai, but each consigned goods on Ruizs ships on their own account.24
Nor should connection with a male merchant always be taken to denote
a subordinate status for the woman. Many men employed women such as
Margarita de Villadiego as factors handling their affairs precisely because
they knew that these women were accomplished merchants in their own
right. Most of the cargo Spanish women in Nantes imported and exported
in the mid-sixteenth century seems to have belonged to them, however,
and was destined for their own commercial activities. Moreover, some
19AMN, HH 189, f. 16, March 30, 1550; f. 17, January 30, 1550; f. 18, March 7, 1550; f. 19,
Janaury 30, 1550; f. 20, June 10, 1550; HH 190, f. 32r, 1554.
20AMN, HH 189, f. 10, August 1549; HH 189, f. 3, 11, August 6, 1549; HH 189, f. 12, August17,
1549.
21AMN, HH 189, f. 20, May 20, 1550; f. 30, October 12, 1550; f. 31, October 12, 1550; f. 36,
1551; f. 38, 1551; f. 39, June 18, 1551; HH 190, f. 35r, March 30, 1554; HH 192, f. 6v, November9,
1558; HH 192, f. 8r, November 8, 1558; HH 192, f. 23v, July 26, 1559; HH 192, f. 66v, April 30,
1561.
22Lapeyre, Une famille de marchands: Les Ruiz, 48ff.
23Henri Lapeyres work remains the most thorough study of the Archives Ruiz, located
in Valladolid. Lapeyre, Une famille de marchands: Les Ruiz, 910.
24AMN, HH 189, f. 38, May 5, 1551; f. 39, June 18, 1551; f. 46, 10, July 22, 1551.
of these women had their own seals with which their merchandise was
marked (marcados de la marca de fuera).25
Rouen also had its complement of female Spanish merchants, who, like
their compatriots in Nantes, did business on a large scale. Marie de Quin-
tanadoines/Quintanadueas, widow of a well-known former alderman
of Rouen, Robert Le Hanyvel, remained active in commerce some years
after the death of her husband. Her aim seems to have been to generate
capital she could then sink into more honorable investments in land and
offices to promote the career of her son. In 1572 she sold her portion of a
ship called Le Bon Esprit to a merchant from Jumiges. In 1580, she sold
3,658 cus worth of cloth to Florentine merchant Fabio de Catia, factor
for the Bendini company of Lyon. In 1583 Quintanadoines appointed two
merchants of Seville as her proxies to collect 1,851 cus remaining from
over 4,000 cus that a Rouennais merchant owed her for white cloth she
had sold him.26 By any measure Marie de Quintanadoines was a major
player in the Rouennais cloth market. Her emphasis on cloth is unsurpris-
ing, not only because it was the most significant manufactured product
exported from Rouen, but also because the rolls of the Rouennais cloth
tax show that women made up just over a third of cloth merchants in
Rouen.27 Rouen was one of the primary Atlantic ports in early modern
France, and one of Rouens primary exports, within Europe and to the
New World, was cloth. Many of Rouens female cloth merchants, French
or Iberian, were thus exporting directly or indirectly to markets in Spain,
the Spanish colonies in the New World, and Africa.28
25AMN, HH 189, f. 68v, 1554, f. 70v, 1554.

26ADSM, tabellionage, 2 meubles, 1/893, August 4, 1571; 1/894, January 30, 1572; 1/915,
f. 280r, February 18, 1580; 1/916, f. 405r, May 27, 1580; 1/919, f. 486r, September 24, 1583.
27These figures actually hide enormous variations in wealth. Some women cloth mer-
chants in fact operated on a scale similar to that of their male counterparts, whereas oth-
ers produced much less cloth, most likely because they were engaged in part-time and
small-scale domestic production. ADSM, 201 BP 694, Comptes relatifs limpt sur les
toilles, 15911594.
28See Brunelle, The New World Merchants of Rouen, 88ff.; see also Philip Benedict,
Rouens Trade during the Era of the Religious Wars, 15601600, The Journal of European
Economic History 13 no. 1 (Spring 1984): 2974; scar Lucas, Le commerce entre la France
et lEspagne dans la seconde moiti du seizime sicle travers les archives Ruiz, in Le
commerce atlantique franco-espagnol: Acteurs, ngoces et ports (XVe au XVIII sicles), eds.
Jean-Philippe Priotti and Guy Saupin (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2008),
10112; Clara Uriarte Melo, Les contrats de compagnies de Burgos dans les changes entre
Rouen, Nantes et lEspagne dans la seconde moiti du XVIe sicle, in Le commerce atlan-
tique franco-espagnol, 113129.
166 gayle brunelle
Probably the most wealthy and powerful woman merchant in mid-

s ixteenth-century Rouen was Marie Sandelin, the widow of Spanish mer-
chant Jehan de Aranda. Appointed both her husbands heir and principal
guardian of their children, Sandelin took over the family business, which
she renamed after herself (Marye Sandelin et les heritiers Jehan Daranda).
Because the company was based not in Rouen, where she resided, but in
Antwerp, she was heavily dependent on factors, and eventually her son, to
administer the Spanish and Flemish ends of the business. Sandelin, how-
ever, kept a tight rein on her sons and a close watch on the accounts. She
knew how to read, write, and do at least basic math, and demonstrated
repeatedly a solid understanding of the workings of international busi-
ness, including bills of exchange and other credit mechanisms. Her male
employees and business associates clearly deferred to her authority, and
one document even describes her as general director of the company.29
This was one widow who was prepared and willing to exercise power in
the business world when the opportunity arose. In 1579, for example, she
forced Francisco de Ontaneda, a Spanish merchant in Rouen, to withhold
payment of a bill of exchange for 5,724 cus which Alonce Diez de Aguilar
had drawn on him. It seems that Aguilar owed Sandelins company 6,600
ducats which she intended to obtain by distraining all of Aguilars assets,
making it impossible for him to pay any of his creditors before her.30
The pattern of active commercial careers among Iberian women was
not confined to the Spanish. Wives and widows in the seventeenth-century
Portuguese community in Rouen similarly displayed a strong foundation of
commercial acumen, and worked closely with their male kin, who seemed
willing to trust them with significant responsibility. In 1626, Edouart Hen-
riques granted his wife full authority to act as his proxy (recouvrir tous
et tels deniers, debts, marchandises et [autres] choses).31 The same year
Jacques Garcia de Cherez authorized his wife, Marie Fernandes de Vil-
lanova, to accept payment of a sizable sum, 6,819 livres, remaining from
her dowry, and which her mother, Franoise de Palma, had only with great
difficulty forced Villanovas brother to pay.32 Women frequently stood in
for their husbands when creditors bearing bills of exchange called, and
29ADSM, tabellionage, 2 meubles, 2E 1/894, January 16, 1572; 2E 1/911, f. 324r, February
7, 1578; 2E 1/912, f. 322r, June 14, 1578; 1/914, f. 440r, December 9, 1579; 2E 1/916, f. 279r,
May18, 1580.
30ADSM, 2E 913, f. 468r, September 9, 1579.
31ADSM, 2E 1/851, August 26, 1626.
32ADSM, 2E 1/851, September 22, 1626.
sometimes collected debts or argued cases before the commercial courts

for them as well.33 Moreover, in some cases they themselves made use of
bills of exchange. In 1632 Martin Rodrigues demanded that Richard Lim-
brey pay a bill drawn in Amsterdam for 522 cus that was payable at dou-
ble interest to Rodrigues wife, Isabel Mendes.34 A few Portuguese women
also appear to have been in business for themselves. Genevieve Machado
got involved in a dispute with a merchant draper in Rouen that ended up
before the Parlement of Rouen. The judges of the court ruled against her
in 1582, and in January of 1583, when further delay was no longer possible,
she empowered her husband, Vincent Brandon, to pay the fine for her.35
Rachel Gelee purchased fifty-six bales of linen from local Rouennais mer-
chants in 1633, which she then consigned on a ship headed to Portugal.36
If this record is thinner and perhaps less illustrious than that of Spanish
women immigrants, there were unquestionably mitigating circumstances.
Some of the Portuguese came to cities such as Rouen, Nantes, and Bor-
deaux in poverty and depended on the charity of friends and relatives
to get a fresh start. Indeed, much of the difference in these two groups
profiles can be traced to how these two populations left the Iberian pen-
insula. When the Spanish Crown expelled the Jews in 1492, many fled to
neighboring Portugal, then still more tolerant than Spain, rather than
accept baptism, and maintained closer ties to Judaism. Jews remaining in
Spain, by contrast, were forcibly converted, and many appeared to assimi-
late well into Christian Spanish society. Thus, primarily converso Portu-
guese immigrants to France in the later sixteenth and the seventeenth
centuries tended to count among their numbers more crypto-Jews than
did the earlier waves of Spanish emigrants to France, despite their con-
verso heritage. Moreover, because at least some Portuguese were refugees
from the resurgent Inquisition in Portugal and Spain, the wealth distribu-
tion among these immigrants was quite uneven.37
33ADSM, 2E 1/1073, June 20, 1626; 1/1104, February 12, 1632; 1/1111, March 12, 1633
(3 acts on that date); 1/1111, March 14, 1633; 1/1111, March 16, 1633; 1/1111, March 21, 1633; 1/1111,
March30, 1633; 1/1111, April 1, 1633; 1/1111, April 22, 1633; 1/1112, May 6, 1633; 1/1113, July 2, 1633;
1/1113, August 8, 1633; 1/1115, November 10, 1633; ADSM, Juridiction Consulaire, 201 BP 331,
January 19, 1639.
34ADSM, 2E 1/1108, September 9, 1632; 1/1108, October 5, 1632.
35ADSM, 2E 1/919, August 11, 1583.
36ADSM, 2E 1/1115, November 18, 1633.
37Many of the Portuguese were sufficiently strapped when they arrived in France that
they were obliged to stay with friends and relatives already established in French cities
who not infrequently demanded they legally renounce any possible claims on their estates.
Moreover, refugees usually had to establish proxies to help them extract whatever wealth
168 gayle brunelle
Factors in the Economic Success of Iberian Women
In one thing, however, women like Isabel Mendes, Genevieve Machado,

Marie Sandelin, and Marie de Quintanadoines were the same. They owed
their commercial success to a combination of factors whose benefits many
women in early modern Europe did not enjoy. They clearly had gained a
great deal of commercial experience, most likely through their position
as daughters and wives of merchants operating in bustling port cities tied
into long distance trade networks spanning Europe and the Atlantic world.
Moreover, they did not have to contend with the institutionalized restric-
tions on womens economic agency that some of their Christian peers did.
Although my research in France indicates that many merchants wives
played a significant role in the family business, Martha Howell suggests
that in Douai such close partnerships between spouses were becoming
more rare in the early modern period. As a consequence fewer widows
were prepared to take over a business after their husbands died. She sees
this as one reason why more widows were choosing to divest themselves
of their husbands commercial assets, or remarry someone who could run
the business for them.38 This does not seem to have been the case for
Spanish widows.
Perhaps the most significant factor working in favor of Spanish women
merchants was the enormous confidence their husbands demonstrated in
their abilities and loyalty, while the men were alive and after their death.
Spanish and Portuguese husbands living in France seem to have been
more willing than Frenchmen married to French women to grant in their
wills sole or primary custody of the children and the family assets to their
widows. Before his death Marie Sandelins spouse appointed her his heir,
the administrator of his estate, including his company, and primary guard-
ian of their children. Consequently, she possessed latitude in disposing of
the familys commercial and private capital far surpassing that of most
they still possessed in Spanish territory. See, for example, the case of Jaspar de Lucena, his
wife Marguerite Rodrigues, and their daughter Catherine Dias: ADSM, 2E 1/1080, February
29, 1628. ADSM, tabellionage, 2E 1/1073, April 20, 1626; 1/1075, November 3, 1626; 1/1075,
December 5, 1626; 1/1076, February 23, 1627; 1/856, July 14, 1628; 1/858, March 28, 1628; 1/1110;
January 1, 1633; 1/1107, August 23, 1632; 1/1110, January 1, 1633; 1/1106, June 8, 1632; 1/1115,
November 29, 1633.
38Martha Howell, The Marriage Exchange: Property, Social Place, and Gender in the Cit-
ies of the Low Countries, 13001550 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 18, 140143,
144f.
widows.39 It is quite possible that husbands of Spanish women, whether

Spanish or French, had greater confidence in their Iberian wives than they
had in French women, as Marie Sandelin was by no means the only Span-
ish widow whose commercial and financial investments derived from her
unfettered control over the family wealth. Claire de Ayalla, widow of Loys
de Quesada, for example, had complete control of the person and assets of
her ill son, who permitted her to engage in commerce and collect debts on
his behalf.40 There were also more than a few assimilated Spanish widows
with the same kind of authority and agency.41 French men were willing to
leave their business in their wives hands for brief periods while they were
away on business, indisposed, or unwilling to face a creditor. The ability
of many French women to argue complicated cases regarding the family
business before the commercial court of Rouen attests to their familiarity
with business matters.42 But French husbands proved reluctant to allow
their French wives full power to manage their estates for the benefit of
their children, which constrained French widows investment strategies.43
Unfettered by such restrictions, Marie Sandelin and Marie de Quintana-
doines pursued active commercial careers and benefited their families
fortunes.
The difficulty in these cases was usually distance, given the restrictions
on female travel in the early modern period. Before Andre de Maluenda
traveled to Burgos he wrote a will naming his wife, Ysabel de la Tor, exec-
utrix and guardian of their children. When their eldest son, Pierre, came
of age, there were debts in Spain pertaining to his fathers estate still to
be settled, which obliged Pierre to name a paternal and a maternal uncle,
the latter regidor of the city of Burgos, as his representative in the ongo-
ing disputes.44 Portuguese men shared the confidence in their female kin
39ADSM, 2E 913, f. 279r, May 18, 1580.

40ADSM, 2E 913, f. 539r, September 19, 1579.
41See below for examples.
42Gayle Brunelle, Fishwives and Fish Merchants: The Role of Women in the Fish
Trade in the Ports of Northern France, unpublished conference paper, American Histori-
cal Association, January 36, 2008.
43Barbara B. Diefendorf, Widowhood and Remarriage in Sixteenth-Century Paris,
Journal of Family History 7, no. 4 (Winter, 1982): 37994; Diefendorf, Paris City Councillors
in the Sixteenth Century: The Politics of Patrimony (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1983), 288ff.; Sarah Hanley, Engendering the State: Family Formation and State Building
in Early Modern France, French Historical Studies 16, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 427; Howell, The
Marriage Exchange, 165f., 223f. Janine Lanza, From Wives to Widows in Early Modern Paris:
Gender, Economy, and Law, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 8ff., 136ff., also discusses this issue,
although Lanza offers a different interpretation from that of Hanley and Howell.
44ADSM, 2E, 1/898, February 5, 1573.
170 gayle brunelle
which their Spanish fellow immigrants displayed, perhaps in part because

even more than the Spanish they were commercially, as well as culturally,
dependent upon far-flung family networks. They too entrusted adminis-
tration of the family estate and guardianship of their children primarily
to their wives, who in turn often had to empower representatives in Spain
and Portugal to settle disputed estates located abroad.45
These cases point to the strength of the networks to which Iberian
women had access, but also to a daunting obstacle that confronted them
the near impossibility of the regular travel, often over great distances, that
was usually required of successful male merchants. Travel was especially
dangerous for women in the early modern period because it risked their
reputations as well as their welfare. Thus, much more than their spouses,
they depended upon trusted employees and representatives to carry out
tasks and watch over their interests abroad, usually relying on family
members (sons, sons-in-law, or, if they were widows with young children,
a husbands associates). In this too Iberian widows were at least better
placed than French widows, because as Iberian merchants their husbands
would already have cultivated a network of trusted kin and friends abroad
in order to manage their far-flung interests, on which their widows could
depend. This was especially true for women, who, more than men, relied
on kin, and in particular male kin, located in the port cities with which
these women traded, to ensure that the goods they shipped were received
and, if necessary, transshipped to their final destinations, and that debts
were paid and the profits remitted to them.
From Commerce to Credit
If Spanish and Portuguese women shared certain cultural advantages

when it came to commercial activities, however, they parted ways in how
they made use of them. For, while Portuguese women did not eschew the
apparent advantages of their cultural background, ironically, many Span-
ish businesswomen did on marrying into French families. They employed
their commercial profits in exactly the same manner as their French kin
and associates, whose cultural values they had come to share.
In French society, commerce ideally constituted a phase through which
a family passed in its struggle to achieve upward social mobility. Although
45ADSM, 2E 1/1069, February 20, 1625; 1/1069, March 29, 1625; 1/1073, April 6, 1626.
the majority of mercantile families never were able to amass wealth suf-
ficient to exit the world of trade, such an ascent remained the goal of the
French commercial bourgeoisie. The French Crown pandered to this dream
with its lucrative expansion of venal offices, which fed the royal coffers
and provided a growing army of bureaucrats willing to finance coveted
offices repeatedly to ensure that their families retained them. Nor were
offices a bad investment, despite the constant risk that they would have
to be paid for over and over again. Cultural capital in the form of honor
and respectability, as well as very real profits from pices (fees and bribes)
surpassing in value the initial outlay, could be derived from offices, which
also opened the way to the ultimate goal, nobility. Family strategies thus
focused on purchasing offices and estates or amassing land that could
comprise one or more seignuries to provide each son with his own small
manor and some sort of office. Alternatively, one fortunate son would be
designated to carry the family name into the world of office-holding, and
the others would enter commerce. French mothers and fathers shared an
equal determination to convert commercial wealth into nobility for their
children.46
Most Spanish women in France, especially if they were second genera-
tion and married to a French husband, behaved like their French coun-
terparts. The histories of three of the most assimilated Spanish families
in sixteenth-century Rouenthe Civille, Quintanadoines (Quintanadue-
as), and Saldaigne (Saldaa) familiesdemonstrate this. Pedro/Pierre
de Saldaigne arrived in Rouen in 1487, and was naturalized in 1497. He
and Alonce I de Civille, who came to Rouen in 1484 and was naturalized
in 1487, were deeply involved in importing alum for the Norman cloth
trade. Jean I de Quintanadoines came to Rouen in 1519 as a wool mer-
chant. The Rouennais branches of all of these families came from Bur-
gos, where their kin were prominent in the wool and alum trades. Each
prospered and played a significant role in launching Rouen into interna-
tional trade before turning French. The Saldaigne and Civille males left
commerce early. None of Alonce de Civilles sons entered commerce, and
his namesake, Alonce II de Civille, became Viscount of Rouen. Only one
46See above, note 2, and Brunelle, The New World Merchants of Rouen, as well as, inter
alia, James B. Collins, Classes, Estates, and Order in Early Modern Brittany (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994), esp. ch. 3; Jonathan Dewald, The Formation of a Pro-
vincial Nobility: The Magistrates of the Parlement of Rouen, 14991610 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1980); Diefendorf, Paris City Councillors in the Sixteenth Century: The Poli-
tics of Patrimony.
172 gayle brunelle
of his eight children who survived to adulthood, his daughter Isabeau,

married into a Spanish family (she married Jean de Quintanadoines son).
Pierre de Saldaignes two sons entered commerce, and his daughter mar-
ried AlonceII de Civille, but by the third generation one branch of the
family was entirely out of commerce. By the end of the century only two
of the now extensive Saldaigne clan in Rouen, Charles de Saldaigne, Sieur
dIncarville, and his cousin, Thomas de Saldaigne, remained in commerce.
Charles used his extensive commercial connections to supply Henry IVs
army on credit during the Wars of the League. In gratitude, Henry made
him a knight and Intendant of Normandy. By the seventeenth century,
none of the family remained in commerce. The Quintanadoines were
closer to their kin in Spain than the Saldaigne, and the main branches of
the family remained active in commerce until the early seventeenth cen-
tury, in part because some family members were attracted to the Reform,
even converting briefly in the 1560s.47
All three families began marrying some sons and most daughters into
French families within one generation of their arrival in Rouen. Thanks to
the preservation of extensive copies of notarial contracts in Rouens tabel-
lionage, it is possible to reconstruct the investment patterns of two widows
from these families, and obtain fragmentary indications from eight others.
What is interesting to note is that even when these womens spouses had
died while still active in commerce, their financial strategies were very dif-
ferent from those of less assimilated women such as Marie Sandelin. They
focused their investment on land and rentes, not commerce. All of their
sons, the third generation of the Saldaigne and Quintanadoines families
on the maternal side, left commerce in favor of office-holding or the life of
a bourgeois rentier who lived, like the famous Sieur de Gouberville, from
the income his land and financial investments generated.
Marie de Quintandoines, widow of merchant Thomas Guiffard, Sieur
des Nonnettes, was the most prolific of the widowed investors. When her
husband died, she was the primary guardian of their children, although
a merchant of Rouen and their neighbor in the decidedly commercial
parish of Saint-tienne-des-Tonnelliers, Henri Le Mazier, was appointed
to offer her counsel. Marie retired with the children to the estate of Les
Nonnettes, in the Normandy countryside outside Rouen.48 From that
time she invested continuously in the land and loan markets in Rouen,
47Brunelle, Immigration, Assimilation and Success, 20319.

48ADSM, 2EP 1/327, November 27, 1563.
eschewing the life of commerce that her cousin, the widow of Robert Le
Hanyvel, embraced. Between 1563 and her death around 1586, the widow
Guiffard notarized no fewer than 98 contracts in the heritages series of
the tabellionage alone, and another 15 in the meubles, which was possibly
only half of her investments.49 Moreover, even though the documents for
these loans prove that she was investing with her childrens estate, with a
couple of exceptions, no male co-signed the loans and nowhere is it stated
she acted with the authority or permission of a man.50 Her co-guardian,
Le Mazier, generally shows up in the contracts only as her substitute and
most of the time she was present at the signing in person.51
Marie followed an aggressive strategy of investment in land and rentes
outside of Rouen. Her ultimate goal seems to have been amassing enough
land in one area to consolidate estates for each of her sons that would
generate sufficient income to allow them to live as landed gentlemen.
The rentes played an intrinsic part in this plan, as they not only provided
fairly reliable income, but in the case of default she could confiscate the
land that was invariably the collateral for the loans as well. In 1563, for
example, she acquired in her childrens names a small chunk of arable
land in Canteleu-le-Boscage that just happened to border other land she
and her children owned. Such incremental purchases were a normal
means of accumulating consolidated land holdings among early modern
Rouennais bourgeoisie, male and female alike.52 Soon she had acquired
properties for herself and her children and was leasing some of them. Her
lending business, which embraced a range of clients from the Baron of
Couceulles of Caen to a Rouennais tailor, was successful as well.53 More-
over, like all Rouennais of both genders with any financial affairs, Marie
was no stranger to the courts. Investments meant lawsuits in the sixteenth
century, and Marie navigated her way through her share with her usual
intelligence. Usually these suits focused on debt collection.54 Maries com-
petence inspired confidence in the men in her life. In 1575, her son-in-law,
49There were many private contracts and the tabellionages records were incomplete.
50ADSM, 2EP 1/327, December 23, 1563; 1/328, August 14, 1564; 1/330, August 25, 1565;
1/331, November 3, 1565.
51ADSM, 2EP 1/327, November 27, 1563; 1/328, August 14, 1564; 1/334, January 6, 1567;
1/347, July 16, 1573.
52ADSM, 2EP, 1/327, December 23, 1563; Brunelle, The New World Merchants of Rouen,
99f.
53ADSM, 2E 1/467, January 16, 1570; 2E, 1/896, September 3, 1572; ADSM, 2EP, 1/356,
May12, 1578; 1/356, June 2, 1578.
54ADSM, 2E, 1/906, October 22, 1575; 2E, 1/913, August 19, 1579.
174 gayle brunelle
Jacques Jubert, a councilor in the Parlement of Rouen, gave her his proxy
to handle a financial obligation in his place.55
The widow of Robert le Hanyvel, Sieur de la Chevallerie, also named
Marie de Quintanadoines, and a cousin of Marie, widow of Thomas Guif-
fard, was an executrix of her husbands estate and guardian of their chil-
dren. She too was an active investor in loans and real estate, although at
fifty-three contracts between 1563 and her death in 1608, the pace of her
investments was mostly likely slower than that of her cousin. And as we
have seen, unlike her cousin, she was a prominent businesswoman in the
cloth trade as well. She and her children rose higher in society than did
her cousin and the Guiffard children, as Marie became a lady-in-waiting
of Catherine de Medici, Queen Mother of France, and at least one of her
sons became a knight. One reason for the familys extraordinary suc-
cess was most likely the extra capital, beyond her spouses estate, that
Maries cloth trade generated. Moreover, her husband, as a former alder-
man of Rouen as well as a merchant, was of slightly higher social standing
than her cousins spouse, Thomas Guiffard.56 Like her cousin, the widow
Hanyvel invested the proceeds of her husbands estate, both her own and
her childrens portions, on her own, without explicit counsel and benefit
from any male, although she, again like her cousin, clearly had informal
male advisors.57
Both women began their careers as investing widows a little uncertainly,
with a tendency to rely on some male advice and to invest in the same
types of commodities as their spouses. Unlike many other widows, Span-
ish and French alike, they continued their commercial investments for
some years after their husbands death. Marie de Quintanadoines, widow
of Robert Le Hanyvel, ran a large-scale and quite lucrative cloth business,
which she continued for decades after her husbands death. In 1580 she
settled accounts with the firms of Fabio de Catia, of Florence, and the
Bondini of Lyon, which together owed her almost 4,000 cus. In 1583, she
employed two merchants of Seville to track down over 1,851 cus (5,553
livres) that a Rouennais merchant residing in Seville owed her, again for
cloth. These actions suggest that she was liquidating her commercial capi-
tal, which was probably destined for safer investments, and seeking to
55ADSM, 2E, 1/906, November 24, 1575.

56ADSM, 1/324, December 11, 1563; 1/884, August 1, 1567; 1/450, February 28, 1568; 1/2083,
February 16, 1608; 1/2084, April 8, 1608.
57In 1567 she gave her proxy to a lawyer, Jehan Cotteret. Most of the time she showed
up in person and assumed full responsibility for the investments she made. ADSM, 1/884,
August 1, 1567; 1/349, November 5, 1574; 1/351, November 10, 1575.
rid herself of any commercial taint before she entered the retinue of the
Queen Mother.58
The Spanish widows also faced the pressing need to iron out any lin-
gering familial disputes about the disposition of their deceased spouses
estate, and to render an account of their management of it when their
children reached the age of majority. In 1563, Marie de Quintandoines
and Robert Le Hanyvel had married their daughter Ysabeau (named after
her Spanish maternal aunt) to Nicollas Puchot, Sieur de Bellebeuf, the son
of a former Viscount of Rouen. The dowry was enormous, 15,000 livres,
which gives an indication of the size of the estate of which Marie was
in charge when Le Hanyvel senior died.59 Around 1573 her son Robert
came of age, which required extensive, albeit largely amicable, account-
ing for and rearrangement of the family finances, especially as daughter
Franoise married a counselor in the Parlement of Rouen the following
year, and received a dowry equal to her sisters. Marie held her own in
all of these transactions, and even after her children had largely removed
their portions from the family estate, she controlled sufficient assets to
continue over the following decades to invest heavily, mostly in rentes. By
the 1580s she had won a place in Catherine de Medicis entourage. Over
those same years she fought a legal battle in the courts of Amiens over her
own inheritance from her mother, of which her nephew, Pierre de Quin-
tanadoines of Bruges, demanded a share.60 And still she found the time to
invest heavily and consistently in land and rentes, and to pursue doggedly
unpaid debts. She was, without a doubt, a hands-on micro-manager.61
Although the data is sparser, the records of five different Saldaigne wid-
ows show similar investment patterns to the women discussed above.62
What is striking in the case of both the Quintanadoines and Saldaigne
58ADSM, 2E 1/894, January 30, 1572; 1/915, February 18, 1580; 1/916, May 27, 1580; 1/919,
September 24, 1583.
59ADSM, 1/324, December 18, 1563.
60ADSM, 1/346, June 23, 1573; 1/348, May 8, 1574; 1/348, June 18, 1574; 1/349, Novem-
ber5, 1574; 1/351, November 10, 1575; 1/351, December 31, 1575; 1/907, February 1, 1576; 1/352,
February 10, 1576; 1/353, August 8, 1576; 1/355, October 1, 1577; 1/1984, May 14, 1584; 1/2015,
October 20, 1590.
61ADSM, 2EP 1/352, February 10, 1576; 2EP 1/356, August 8, 1577; 2EP 1/355, October1,
1577; 2EP 1/355, December 13, 1577; 2EP 1/356, January 20, 1578; 2EP 1/357, December 11,
1578; 2EP 1/358, March 7, 1579; 2EP 1/358, March 18, 1579; 2EP 1/359, September 17, 1579; 2EP
1/359, October 24, 1579; 2EP 1/359, October 27, 1579; 2EP 1/360, February 20, 1580; 2EP 1/361,
July 24, 1580. I could add many more examples.
62ADSM, 2EP, 1/346, January 14, 1573; 2E 1/915, February 10, 1580; 2E 1/2024, April 29,
1594; ADSM, 2E, 1/865, April 25, 1553; 2EP, 1/329, August 27, 1563; 2EP, 1/332, May 6, 1566;
2EP 1/350, May 4, 1575; ADSM, 2EP, 1/348, March 23, 1574; 2E, 1/913, July 15, 1579; 2EP, 360,
176 gayle brunelle
families is the confidence their French husbands had in the financial

acumen of their Spanish wives, whom they in each case made principal
guardians of their children.63 In an era when, according to Martha How-
ell, Barbara Diefendorf, and Sarah Hanley, husbands were less and less
willing to entrust the family business and estate to their wives, and wives
were less competent and willing to accept such a responsibility, French
husbands seem to have been quite content to put their Spanish wives in
charge, and they to take charge.64 Spanish wives inspired confidence in
Spanish husbands as well, who also frequently appointed them executrix
and guardian of their children. Andre de Maluenda, a resident of Burgos,
in his will appointed his wife, Ysabel de la Tor, executrix and guardian of
their children. Claire Dayalla, widow of Loys de Quesada, of Rouen, was
given the government and administration of the person, possessions, and
revenue of her adult son, Jacques de Quesada, when he became severely
ill. This was done even though Jacques had an adult brother, Diego, who
was also a merchant in Rouen. And as we have seen, Marie Sandelin had
charge of her dead husbands estate, and took over the business as well
as guardianship of the children.65 The main difference, however, was that
most Spanish widows of French husbands adopted a more French pat-
tern of investment, abandoning commerce in favor of land and rentes.
Unlike the offspring of most Spanish couples, the children of Spanish
women and French men rarely became merchants, or married them.
The pattern seems to have been much the same in Nantes. Although
no tabellionage has survived for Nantes, and few notarized contracts are
extant for the sixteenth century either, a list of rentes for the Htel-Dieu
(public hospital) for the sixteenth century shows that substantial numbers
of Spanish women married French husbands, often Frenchmen who had
been connected through commerce to their male kin, and lent money
May 3, 1580; 2EP, 1/365, May 1, 1582; 2EP, 2EP, 1/365, May 1, 1582; 2EP, 1/365, May 4, 1582;
2EP, 1/365, April 28, 1584.
63ADSM, 2E 1/915, February 10, 1580; 2E 1/2038, January 10, 1597; 1/2083, February 13,
1608; 2EP 1/327, July 27, 1563; 2EP 1/329, August 27, 1563; 2EP 1/342, February 1, 1571; 2E
1/995, August 3, 1605.
64Diefendorf, Widowhood and Remarriage, 37994; Diefendorf, Paris City Councillors
in the Sixteenth Century: The Politics of Patrimony, 288ff.; Hanley, Engendering the State,
427; Howell, The Marriage Exchange 165f., 223f. But cf. Lanza, From Wives to Widows in
Early Modern Paris, 3334, which suggests that husbands at less elite levels of society, the
Parisian corporations, did entrust their wives with managing inheritances.
65ADSM, 2E, 1/894, January 16, 1572; 2E, 1/898, February 5, 1573; 2E, 1/913, September19,
1579.
to the Htel.66 Moreover, certain families, at least, such as the Astudillo,

Ruiz, and the Rocaz, clearly assimilated into French society in Nantes, and
abandoned commerce in favor of office-holding or living on their landed
estates. Franoise dAstudillo, Dame de Livernire, in 1559 was emissary to
the French king on behalf of the municipal officials of Nantes. She played
an instrumental role in lobbying him to reduce the citys taxes.67
The Economic Activities of Portuguese Women
Due to poor record survival, we know little about the economic activities
of Portuguese women in Nantes, but based on the pattern for Portuguese
women in Rouen, it would seem Portuguese womens economic profile
resembled that of French women, with one major difference. Unlike
French women, or those Spanish turning French, Portuguese women
rarely invested in either land or the public debt (rentes sur lhotel de ville).
Like their male kin, and unlike the Spanish, Portuguese women kept their
focus squarely centered on the Iberian world. As a number of studies have
shown, for most members of the Portuguese merchant diaspora, whether
openly Jewish, crypto-Jewish, or sincerely Christian, the Iberian world
remained the center of gravity, and the Iberian Peninsula the homeland
to which many hoped one day to return, and to which some in fact did
return, often at great personal risk.68 Long after the Portuguese merchants
and their immediate families had left Spain and Portugal, they retained
their primary investments there or within the greater Iberian world. In
addition, they, far more than the Spanish in Rouen, married exclusively
among themselves and relied heavily on other Portuguese as business
partners. They also maintained close relationships with kin in Spain and
Portugal, as well as elsewhere in Europe and the New World, upon whom
66Archives Dpartementales de la Loire-Atlantique, Srie H, Htel-Dieu, f. 70r, June 5,

1564; f. 72v, 73r, June 16, 1620; f. 74v. 1586; f. 82r, April 13, 1556; f. 83r, June 15, 1575; f. 86v,
December 27, 1556; f. 90r, December 25, 1555; f. 99v, July 30, 1594; f. 187v, June 21, 1611.
67AMN, CC 119, Comptes des frais faits par demoiselle Francoise de Astoudille, dame
de Liverniere, pour labolition du droit de france fiefs et quittance dicelle. May 1, 1559.
68A number of scholars have examined this phenomenon, among them: Benjamin R.
Gampel, The Identity of Sephardim of Medieval Christian Iberia, Jewish Social Studies
8, nos. 23 (2002): 121; David L. Graizbord, Souls in Dispute; Yosef Kaplan, An Alternative
Path to Modernity: The Sephardi Diaspora in Western Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 16ff; Rich-
ardH. Popkin, Introduction, in Jewish Christians and Christian Jews, from the Renaissance
to the Enlightenment, ed. Richard H. Popkin (Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic
Publishers, 1994), 110.
178 gayle brunelle
they relied to help oversee their landholdings and investments abroad.69

Hence it is unsurprising that Portuguese women, whether single, wives, or
widows, invested very little money in French property or offices and made
few loans to French men or women.
As was true in French and Spanish households, Portuguese women
seem normally to have been present at and often acted as formal wit-
nesses of commercial and financial transactions their spouses or other
male kin concluded. Moreover, they signed these contracts in many cases,
rather than simply making a mark, which attests to a high level of literacy
among them. These families married among themselves far more than did
the Spanish, no doubt largely in order to preserve their ties to New Chris-
tian kinship and business networks, but in some cases also to more easily
keep secret crypto-Jewish practices. Women were present at, and frequent
signatories to, marriage contracts and testaments. They were also equally
responsible, along with their male kin, for ensuring that the provisions
of the agreements were carried out. Family networks that stretched from
France throughout the Iberian Peninsula were of extreme importance to
the Portuguese, because in their plight as refugees they often depended
heavily on kin both to manage and recover their assets in Portugal and
Spain, and to offer them asylum in France. Thus they issued many prox-
ies to their relatives abroad. They also notarized unusual declarations in
which they acknowledged that their initial residence in the households of
family or friends in France was purely through the charity of their hosts
69The desire of many of these Portuguese descendants of conversos, whether they were
crypto-Jews or not, to return to the Iberian Peninsula is well established. For family ties in
Spain and Portugal, see ADSM, 1 meubles, 2E 1/801, February 17, 1620; 2E 1/801, April2, 1620;
2E 1/801, May 18, 1620; 2E 1/804, June 26, 1620; 2E 1/808, November 3, 1620; 2E 1/849, July 9,
1626; 2E 1/849, February 3, 1627; 2E 1/850, July 21, 1626; 2E 1/859, February29, 1628; 2 meu-
bles, 2E 1/1069, February 4, 1625; 2E 1/1070, June 13, 1625; 2E 1/1072, March 27, 1626; 2E 1/1078,
August 25, 1627; 2E 1/1079, December 7, 1627; 2E 1/1081, April 27, 1628; 2E 1/1083, August2,
1628; 2E 1085, December 1, 1628; 2E 1/1104, January 17, 1632; 2E 1/1105, March 3, 1632; 2E
1/1110, February 14, 1633. For marriages among the Portuguese, see ADSM, tabellionage de
Rouen, 1 meubles, 2E 1/805, July 13, 1620; 2E 1/806, July 13, 1620; 2E 1/854, November 15, 1627;
2 meubles, 2E 1/1071, October 25, 1625; 2E 1/1074, September 22, 1626; 2E 1/1076, March3,
1627; 2E 1078, August 4, 1627; 2E 1/1078, September 18, 1627; 2E 1/1079, October 13, 1627;
2E 1/1080, January 26, 1628; 2E 1/1084, September 26, 1628; 2E 1/1104, February 6, 1632; 2E
1/1107, July10, 1632; 2E 1/1107, July 10, 1632; 2E 1/1109, December 16, 1632; 2E 1/1110, January 30,
1633. For pensions and rents, see ADSM, 1 meubles, 2E 1/808, December 15, 1620; 2E 1/840,
June 17, 1625; 2E 1/846, Janaury 2, 1626; 2E 1/849, July 1, 1626; 2E 1/852, November 21, 1621;
2 meubles, 2E 1/1076, February 27, 1627; 2E 1/1085, November 17, 1628; 2E 1/1105, March1,
1632; 2E 1/1106, May 3, 1632; 2E 1/1106, May 28, 1632; 2E 1/1106, June 23, 1623; 2E 1/1107, July24,
1632; 2E 1/1107, August 21, 1632; 2E 1/1109, November 13, 1629; 2E 1/1109, December 14, 1632;
2E 1/1113, March10, 1633; 2E 1/1153, April 24, 1640.
and in no way implied a claim to the assets of those kin generous enough
to take them in until they could find their own residence. In all of these
documents, commercial and private, women figured prominently among
the participants and witnesses.70 As these transaction records show, it was
not for lack of business knowledge as compared to French or Spanish
women, nor an inability to handle money, or even lack of trust on the part
of their husbands, that Portuguese women were not the aggressive players
in the credit and real estate markets that French and Spanish women of
means were. Nor does lack of expertise explain why Portuguese women
appear to have been less likely than either French or Spanish women to
invest in commerce on their own in France.
Rather, it is more probable that, as was so often the case with women
seeking to bridge the gap between small-scale commerce and wholesale or
international trade, distance was the primary barrier Portuguese women
faced, both geographical and cultural. Portuguese women in France were
less firmly rooted in French society, in terms of disposable assets, lan-
guage skills, kinship networks, and cultural knowledge.71 They were thus
less able to marshal assets on their own, or from their husbands estates,
into the kind of locally rooted commerce that formed the primary locus
of economic activities for all but a small portion of Spanish and French
women in Rouen. Moreover, even women such as Marguerita de Villadi-
ego, Marie Sandelin, and both Marie de Quintanadoines, who did engage
in international commerce, the core of their businesses remained local in
that they primarily exported French goods, especially cloth, manufactured
in Rouen or Normandy, to the larger trade networks centered in Spain
and Amsterdam. Portuguese women may have lacked the linguistic skills
of the French and Spanish women in Rouen, and even the cloth-making
know-how that many French women cloth merchants possessed, to com-
pete with French and Spanish cloth merchants. Moreover, although cloth
exportation was also important for Portuguese merchants in Rouen, sugar
was a very important secondary commodity, as the Portuguese pioneered
a sugar-refining industry in Rouen. This reality may also have meant
additional hindrances for Portuguese women. It is possible, for example,
70ADSM, 2E 1/1074, September 22, 1626; 1/1075, November 3, 1626; 1/1075, December 5,
1626; 1/1076, February 27, 1627; 1/1076, March 3, 1627; 1/1078, August 4, 1627; 1/1078, Septem-
ber 18, 1627; 1/1080, February 29, 1628; 1/1084, September 26, 1628; 1/1086, January 14, 1629;
1/1104, February 6, 1632; 1/1107, August 23, 1632; 1/1110, January 1, 1633; 1/1110, January 30, 1633;
1/1111, March 10, 1633; 1/1111, March 15, 1633.
71See Brunelle, Migration and Religious Identity, 292305.
180 gayle brunelle
that there were technical barriers making it more difficult for Portuguese
women to run these refineries on their own. The problems of conduct-
ing commerce over long distances likely posed challenges in obtaining
the raw molasses for the sugar with which men, much freer to travel and
negotiate deals over long distances, may not have had to contend.72
The most significant hurdle for would-be Portuguese women entrepre-
neurs in France, however, was the placement of family assets that the
determination of the Portuguese to maintain an Iberian identity and resist
assimilation militated. Most of the capital a Portuguese woman, even a
widow, would have needed to strike out in business on her own or sim-
ply to continue her husbands enterprise, was less accessible to her. The
capital their husbands acquired seems to have been locked up in non-
moveable forms, such as real property and investments in the public
debt in Spain and Portugal, forcing them to rely on kin and other proxies
even to collect the earnings. Nor is there any evidence that they or their
kin attempted to repatriate the capital from these investments.73 Thus,
the focus of the Portuguese on the Iberian world, and the problems of
distance this posed for Portuguese widows desiring to be economically
active, likely obliged these widows to adopt a rentier lifestyle based on
distant, passive investments, even if they were not so inclined, so long as
they remained widowed.
As a result, the primary economic role of Portuguese women beyond
the household economy and whatever assistance in business they ren-
dered their husbands, seems to have been as transmitters of wealth and
sources of credit. They brought dowries and helped to cement commercial
ties through marriage. When widowed, Portuguese women did assume
primary guardianship of their children, although often with male advi-
sors. Through their dowries, they transmitted substantial wealth to their
72Numerous documents in Rouens archives attest to the importance to Portuguese

trade in Rouen of both the importation of sugar from Portugal and Brazil to Rouen and
the development of Portuguese-run sugar refineries in the city. See for example ADSM,
tabellionage, 1 meubles, 2E 1/807, November 19, 1620; 2 meubles, 2E 1/1076, January 9, 1627;
2E 1/1076, February 1, 1627; 2E 1/1078, July 3, 1627; 2E 1/1106, June 18, 1632; 2E 1/1108, Septem-
ber2, 1632; 2E 1/1108, October 21, 1632; 2E 1/1110, January 30, 1633; 2E 1/1113, August 30, 1633;
2E 1/1114, September 2, 1633; ADSM, Juridiction Consulaire, 201 BP 329, June 10, 1637; 201 BP
330, October 5, 1637; 201 BP 332, February 27, 1640.
73ADSM, tabellionage, 1 meubles, 2E 1/856, July 14, 1628; 2 meubles, 2E 1/1070, July 21,
1625; 2E 1/1073, April 20, 1626; 2E 1/1075, November 3, 1626; 2E 1/1075, December 5, 1626; 2E
1/1106, June 8, 1632; 2E 1/1107, August 23, 1632 for additional examples of widows attempting
to get control of money their husbands invested abroad.
husbands and their heirs. It is in these capacities that they appear most
often in the commercial contracts and court cases preserved in Rouen
and Nantes.74 Like Spanish and French women, they also acted as dep-
uty husbands who spoke for their husbands to creditors, especially those
bearing bills of exchange, and bore their husbands proxy to fulfill the
terms of contracts when he was away on business.75 They clearly were
literate, and also were familiar with commercial techniques and customs,
in some cases enough even to argue disputes before Rouens commercial
court, although this happened rarely compared to French women. They
could sign their names to contracts, for example, and read at least some of
them. They could countDiego Henriques Cardoso had his daughter pay,
by counting out the coins herself, Rouennais merchant Daniel Tresel 201
pistolles. The coins she handled for this transaction without doubt con-
sisted of a wide variety of different coins with different values, and from
different parts of Europe, that a merchant like Cardoso typically stored in
his money cache at home. Traces of larger-scale commercial activity on
the part of Portuguese women can be found in the records also, as the
two sizeable bills of exchange drawn on a merchant from Amsterdam and
payable to damoiselle Isabel Mendes attest, although they are far more
rare than similar documents relating to Spanish or French women. Isabel
sent her husband, Martin Rodrigues, to collect the money from English
merchant Richard Limbrey, and it is possible that the transfer of money
derived from a purely financial rather than a commercial transaction.76
But Portuguese women in France do not seem to have engaged in the kind
of extensive and large-scale commerce or investments in land or credit in
their own right that absorbed the talents of wealthier Spanish and French
women.
74ADSM, 1 meubles, 2E, 1/839, March 27, 1625; 2E 1/847, June 3, 1626; 2E 1/856, July 14,
1628; 2 meubles, 2E 1/1071, October 25, 1625; 2E 1/1073, April 20, 1626; 2E 1/1074, September
22, 1626; 2E 1/1075, November 3, 1626; 2E 1/1075, December 5, 1626; 2E 1/1078, August 4, 1627;
2E 1/1106, June 18, 1632; 2E 1107, July 8, 1632; 2E 1/1111, March 15, 1633.
75ADSM, tabellionage, 2 meubles, 1/1104, February 12, 1632; 2E 1/1105, March 31, 1632; 2E
1/1106, June 18, 1632; 2E 1/1111, March 12, 1633; 2E 1/1111, March 12, 1633; 2E 1/1111, March 14,
1633; 2E 1/1111, March 16, 1633; 2E 1/1111, March 10, 1633; 2E 1/1111, March 21, 1633; 2E 1/1111,
March 30, 1633; 2E 1/1111, April 1, 1633; 2E 1/1111, April 22, 1633; 2E 1/1112, May 6, 1633; 2E 1/1112,
May 14, 1633; 2E 1/1113, July 2, 1633; 2E 1/1113, August 8, 1633; 2E 1/1113, August 9, 1633; 2E
1/1115, November 10, 1633; Juridiction Consulaire, 201 BP 331, January 19, 1639.
76ADSM, tabellionage, 2 meubles, 2E 1/1108, September 9 and October 5, 1632; 2E 1/1110,
January 1, 1633; Juridiction Consulaire, 201 BP 332, November 16, 1639.
182 gayle brunelle
Conclusion
In both Rouen and Nantes, then, the sixteenth-century Spanish immi-

grants evinced a pattern of integration that is strikingly different from
the trajectory of the later Portuguese immigrants. The latter faced greater
linguistic and cultural barriers and a more hostile reception in France.
This was especially so for refugees among them, who could not safely
return to Iberian territory. These women usually did not intermarry with
the Rouennais nor did they make efforts to assimilate into French society
even after two or three generations in France. Rather they and their hus-
bands married almost exclusively within their own community and did
not integrate into French society as the Spanish had.
Spanish women faced fewer obstacles as immigrants and religious out-
siders than did Portuguese women, but the price of these benefits was
having to contend with the same sorts of hurdles and legal disabilities as
French women when it came to commerce. Because assimilation for Span-
ish women usually coincided with upward social mobility and/or marriage
to a French husband who often aspired to lift his family into the ranks of
ennobled office-holders, assimilation often entailed a contraction rather
than an expansion of economic opportunities for the enterprising Span-
ish woman. Thus, while they had more opportunities to manage family
affairs than French women, most second- and all third-generation Spanish
women in France under consideration here rarely pursued commercial
activities as Spanish women married to Spanish husbands in France did.
Because most French royal offices either themselves brought a form of
nobility or were viewed as stepping stones to higher, ennobling offices,
office-holding was incompatible with commerce. Ambitious families who
wished their sons to accede to royal office, therefore, had to move the
familial capital out of commerce, and into land and rentes, and eventually
into the purchase of one or more offices. Second- and third-generation
Spanish widows shared the values of their French husbands, and managed
their husbands estates (and their economic behavior) accordingly. Their
focus was circumscribed, not to the stereotyped domestic household, to
be sure, but trained on their children in France, their adopted city, and
the land. It is hard to say if they sacrificed more than their Portuguese
counterparts, but the stories of both of these groups of women do demon-
strate that there was more than one way for women to leave the Iberian
world.
CAPABLE ENTREPRENEURS:
THE WOMEN MERCHANTS AND TRADERS OF NEW NETHERLAND
Introduction
Sometime in the 1650s, Margaret Hardenbroeck, who would become

arguably the wealthiest, most prominent, and accomplished merchant
and businesswoman of New Netherland, arrived in the colony. As factor
for her cousin, Wolter Valck, an Amsterdam trader, Margaret began by
trading items such as cooking oil, vinegar, and pins for furs.1 In 1659, she
married Pieter Rudolphus, a wealthy merchant and landowner.2 Upon his
death in 1661, Margaret inherited his businesses and lands, adding them
to her own prospering enterprises. With her second husband, Frederick
Philipse, Margarets business activities would continue to grow, eventually
encompassing trade in slaves, rum, wine, tobacco, grain, and salted beef.
Her ships sailed across the Atlantic and to the West Indies. Only after the
English takeover of the colony in 1664 did Margaret alter her activities in
order to conform to the demands of English law.
Although she proved one of the colonys most successful merchants,
Margaret Hardenbroeck was not the only woman merchant or trader in
New Netherland, nor the only one engaged in active trading under English
law; her experiences are representative of the legal and cultural context
that allowed and encouraged women to be participants in local, inter-
colonial, and transatlantic trade. Commerce and trade were a known
1Linda Briggs Biemer, Women and Property in Colonial New York: The Transition from
Dutch to English Law, 16431727 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1983), 3334. Marga-
ret also acted as her cousins agent in collecting debts. On September 19, 1659, she wrote,
Cousin Wolter Valck, I inform you herewith that I could not get payment from Hendrick
Jansz. Van der Vin. After your return, he will pay you the interest due on it and he will not
fail to pay the total sum. Letter from Margaret Hardenbroeck to Wolter Valck, September
19, 1659, Amsterdam Notarial Archives, 2735.
2The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record, vol. 6 (Marriage Records of the Dutch
Reformed Church), (New York: New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, 18711875),
88, 144 (October 10, 1659). According to the Marriage Records of the Dutch Reformed Church
in New York, Margariet and Pieter Rudolphus were married on October 10, 1659. She married
Frederick Philipszen on October 28, 1662. Hardenbroecks first name appears in the New
Netherland Records in various spellings from Margaret to Margariet and Margriet.
184 kim todt and martha dickinson shattuck
and accepted activity for womenmarried, widowed, or spinstersin

the Dutch Republic.3 Along with everything else that the Dutch brought
to New Netherland, they firmly transplanted the Dutch legal system and
its cultures acceptance of womens activity in trade and business.4 Thus,
women operated often on their own, as well as in place of their husbands,
in a variety of enterprises. Their frequent appearances in the court and
notarial records attest to womens active participation in the colonys
economyand in the business components of their marriages.
While historians have acknowledged the role of the Dutch in trans-
atlantic trade, they have disregarded womens participation in this trade, at
any level.5 In this article, we discuss the various aspects of commerce that
women engaged in as they traveled between New Netherland and patria
and the increased contacts with diverse regional Atlantic areas including
the English colonies of Maryland and Virginia. Good trade transcended
gender issues as men from New England and the Chesapeake traded with
women from New Netherland. Indeed, as we make clear, whether trading
abroad, intra- or inter-colonially, or at home in New Netherland, gender did
3The English traveler and writer, Fynes Moryson, asserted the masculine women of
the Low Countries use to make voyages for trafficke, not only to their owne Cities, but
even to Hamburg in Germany, and more remote places... In 1617, Moryson published a
narrative of his travels throughout Europe in the early 1590s in which he commented on
the customs and laws of various countries. In the early seventeenth century, the word traf-
ficke meant trade or commerce. Fynes Moryson, An Itinerary Containing His Ten Yeeres
Travell through the Twelve Dominions of Germany, Bohmerland, Sweitzerland, Netherland,
Denmarke, Poland, Italy, Turky, France, England, Scotland and Ireland (1617; repr., Glasgow:
J. MacLehose and Sons, 1908), Part III, Booke I, ch. 1, 350.
4Not all the provinces of the Netherlands had the same laws. The Dutch West India
Company mandated the colonys laws in their instructions to Director Willem Verhulst in
1625. Article 20 stated that In the administration of justice, in matters concerning mar-
riages, the settlement of estates, and contracts, the ordinances and customs of Holland and
Zeeland and the common written law qualifying them shall be observed and obeyed in
the first place; also, namely in cases of intestate estates, the placard issued by their Great
Mightinesses the States of Holland in the year 1587, some copies of which are sent to him
herewith. A. J. F. van Laer, trans. and ed., Documents Relating to New Netherland, 16241626
in the Henry E. Huntington Library (San Marino, CA: The Henry E. Huntington Library and
Art Gallery, 1924), 11314. Later, when the Amsterdam chamber of the West India Company
received oversight of New Netherland, the laws of that city became the laws of New Neth-
erland as well. The West India Company also required the colonial council to submit any
new laws it might make to the Company for approval.
5See, for example, C. R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 16001800 (New York: Knopf,
1965); Oliver Rink, Holland on the Hudson: An Economic and Social History of Dutch New
York (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986); Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of
Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1988); Jonathan I. Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 15851740 (Oxford: The
Clarendon Press, 1989).
capable entrepreneurs 185
not determine participation. Thus, women moved freely about in transact-

ing their business. Facilitated by travel on the Hudson River, women also
actively engaged in intra-colonial trade at both of New Netherlands ports,
New Amsterdam and Beverwijck, the latter situated at the northern end
of the colony. This article will discuss the geographical and commercial
nature of these two ports, underline the importance of the Dutch cultural
and legal frameworks that supported womens commercial activities, and
describe the various occupations and enterprises in which women were
engaged, illustrating each of these through the individual experiences of
New Netherland women.
New Netherlands Ports
In 1662, five men living in Beverwijck petitioned Director General Stuyve-

sant and the council to allow them to start a new town near Wiltwijck.6
Their petition summed up the residents understanding of what made the
colonys economy work. The prosperity of this Province of New Nether-
land, they entreated, rests principally on agriculture and commerce.7
And so it did.
The West India Company undertook to pursue commercial aims and
profits in New Netherland, particularly in the fur trade, from the begin-
ning. During the years 16241629, the Company primarily focused on
maximizing trading opportunities, rather than the transference of socio-
economic institutions from the Netherlands. To that end, the permanent
peopling of New Netherland related to the aggrandizement of trade and
the prospect of increased profits as a result. The Company contemplated
an extended trading network and to sustain these people, it agreed that
more substantial agricultural efforts were necessary. The colonys agricul-
tural self-reliance would make the venture more profitable and less depen-
dent on provisioning from patria. Further, the Company surmised that
the requisite increase in population to sustain agricultural efforts would
avert English encroachment from New England and the Chesapeake.8
6Wiltwijck is present day Kingston, New York.

7E. B. OCallaghan, ed., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New
York; Procured in Holland, England, and France by John Romeyn Brodhead, vol. 13, Docu-
ments Relating to the History and Settlements of the Towns along the Hudson River (with the
Exception of Albany), from 1630 to 1684 (Albany, NY: Weed Parsons and Company, 185387),
21920 (hereafter cited as NYCD).
8Rink, Holland on the Hudson, 6993. Rink provides a thorough history of the found-
ing of the West India Company, its internal operations and disputes, and the Companys
commitment to trade and settlement in New Netherland.
These efforts proved, in their own way, problematic. For instance, during
the first half of the seventeenth century the Dutch Republics economy
experienced steady growth and, therefore, Dutch citizens did not have an
economic incentive to leave and seek opportunities in New Netherland.9
Nevertheless, because of the Companys scheme to make the colony more
self-sustaining, greater numbers of women came to New Netherland, thus
increasing womens participation in trade.
Womens trading activities were particularly notable at the colonys
two significant ports, New Amsterdam and Beverwijckone an oceanic
port, the other a river port.10 Located at the mouth of the Hudson River,
New Amsterdam linked the economies of the river and ocean transport.11
While New Netherland participated in the expansion of global trade,
the participation of its major ports varied. Despite differences between
the two communities, both had the unique characteristics of port cities
including trade, defense, and government.12
New Amsterdam was a minor, but increasingly profitable, participant
in the trading networks of the Dutch Republic.13 The Dutch East and West
9Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and
Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 15001815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997), 507668.
10Other locations on the Connecticut River, on the Hudson River, and in the Delaware
had less established infrastructure to handle significant trade and thus could be character-
ized as places to off-load goods onto a dock or beach in order to conduct minor trading
rather than as ports.
11The Dutch originally called the Hudson River the North River. The Dutch named
the river that headed south to the Delaware Bay the South River and todays Connecticut
River the Fresh River, as it contained less salt from tidal flows than the colonys other riv-
ers. Adriaen van der Donck, A Description of New Netherland, eds. Charles T. Gehring and
William A. Starna, trans. Diederik Willem Goedhuys (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska
Press, 2008), 914.
12Jacob Price suggested preindustrial towns of the eighteenth century had to have four
characteristics in order to be labeled a town: 1) civil and ecclesiastical administration;
2) maritime transport and external commercial exchange; 3) industrial production; and
4) internal services. Both New Amsterdam and Beverwijck satisfied three out of four of
Prices characteristics quite early in their existence in the seventeenth century. Although
New Amsterdam developed as a shipbuilding center for the region, both towns lacked sig-
nificant industrial production. Jacob Price, Economic Function and the Growth of Ameri-
can Port Towns in the 18th Century, in Perspectives in American History (Cambridge, MA:
Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, 1974), 12388.
13In 1624 the West India Company made a decision to colonize New Netherland and
thus accepted the petition of thirty Walloon families who had requested permission to
settle in the chartered territories; Rink, Holland on the Hudson, 73. The families swore
obedience to the West India Company in that year before leaving for New Netherland.
Upon landing, the families were disbursed to three trading posts. For a discussion about
the settlement of the Walloon families see Rink, Holland on the Hudson, 7480.
India Companies founded 157 overseas settlements between 1600 and

1800, including New Amsterdam. Jan de Vries argues that New Amster-
dam in the years preceding its first conquest was growing into the sort of
city the rest of the New World did not yet know.14 Despite its location
in North America, residents traded with the Dutch overseas settlements
in the West Indies, Brazil, and West Africa. Like many nations, the Dutch
designated a specific port as a staple port, that is, the only place where
enumerated goods could be exported or imported. New Amsterdam had
the ideal geography to act as a staple porta deep harbor and physical
access to the Hudson River, the South River, and the exporting regions
beyond. As a result, mercantile functions developed in New Amsterdam
that enhanced the ports development.15 As the colonys staple port, New
Amsterdam engaged in shipping to and from a variety of regions includ-
ing New England, the Chesapeake, the West Indies, Africa, and Europe
such commodities as bricks, lumber, agricultural products, and tobacco.
Merchants shipped furs, an important aspect of the profitability of trade,
from Beverwijcks port down to New Amsterdam and from there they
were shipped abroad.
From the start, New Amsterdam contained the ingredients for a city not
unlike those in Holland. Situated as New Netherlands capital, the director
and council governed the colony from this administrative center.16 Despite
14Jan de Vries, Keynote Address, in Power and the City in the Netherlandic World, eds.
Wayne te Brake and Wim Klooster (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 21. De Vriess remarks should per-
haps be qualified to the eastern seaboard of North America, as, arguably, Latin American
cities existed on a level equal to, if not greater than, New Amsterdam.
15The Charter of Freedoms and Exemptions of 1629, provisionally designated Man-
hattes [New Amsterdam] as the staple port for the colony. Inasmuch as it is the intention
of the Company to people the island of Manhattes first, this island shall provisionally also
be the staple port for all products and wares that are found on the North River and lands
thereabouts...; A. J. F. van Laer, trans. and ed., The Van Rensselaer Bowier Manuscripts
(Albany, NY: University of the State of New York, 1908), 143. See also, Rink, Holland on the
Hudson, 97102, 1047.
16The director and council were appointed by the West India Company and given
executive, legislative, and judicial rights for governing. The Company included other offi-
cials to oversee the administrative issues such as the secretary to the council, who also
acted as a notary, and the fiscael. The latter official oversaw such things as the collec-
tion of taxes and, perhaps more important, prosecuted any infringement of the laws and
ordinances mandated by the West India Company and which were the same as those in
the Dutch Republic. Charter of the West India Company of 1621 Provided that when
they have chosen a governor general and prepared instructions for him, the same must be
approved, and the commission given by us...; see The Van Rensselaer Bowier Manuscripts,
91. Once villages were established and given an inferior court of justice, their magistrates
were nominated in double numbers and submitted yearly to the director and council for
its commercial growth and increasing population,17 New Amsterdam

remained economically dependent on Amsterdam for a range of services
required for its continued success as a trading center: capital, banking ser-
vices, insurance, reinsurance, and access to the larger commercial houses
that re-exported commodities elsewhere in Europe.18 Beverwijck served
as the fur trading entrept of the colony. The trading season, the commu-
nitys major activity, usually started in June and ran through August. Every-
one, rich or poor, participated either by directly trading with the Indians or
by providing food and housing for the out-of-town merchants and others of
various trades who arrived in town hoping to acquire a few beavers.
The relationship between New Amsterdam and Beverwijck was most
apparent in commercial exchanges and the movement of people. Maria
van Rensselaer wrote to her brother, Stephanus van Cortlandt, in 1683 As
soon as you come up the river, let us execute a deed... In addition, later
in the year, she again wrote to Stephanus, I have spoken to Albert Ryck-
man about brewing for you. He says that you gave him orders to brew one
hogshead and he has already shipped that in Locks [yacht].19 Further-
more, Beverwijck did not have a one-way dependency on New Amster-
dam. Rather, a mutual interdependency existedNew Amsterdam relied
upon Beverwijck for furs, particularly beaver, and grains, while Bever-
wijck depended upon New Amsterdam for a variety of manufactured and
imported goods. To facilitate the trade, sloops arrived twice weekly from
selection. See Martha Dickinson Shattuck, A Civil Society: Court and Community in Bev-
erwijck, New Netherland, 16521664 (PhD diss., Boston University, 1993), 4448.
17New Netherland had a population of approximately 9,000 persons in 1664. On Feb-
ruary 19, 1664, New Amsterdams Burgomasters, concerned about safety, wrote to Petrus
Stuyvesant and the council about the need to secure the rivers East and North, making
them safe for help to come, as a road to retreat or go to the assistance of so many villages,
hundred[s] of farms, with houses, grain, lands, cattle and nearly ten thousand souls, mostly
Dutchmen and some Frenchmen, who in the course of years and with Gods blessing may
grow into a great people in this so favourably situated Province... Minutes of the Execu-
tive Boards of the Burgomaster of New Amsterdam, in Minutes of the Orphan Masters
Court of New Amsterdam 16611664, trans. and ed. Berthold Fernow (New York: Francis P.
Harper, 1907), 2: 186 (hereafter referred to as Executive Minutes).
18For instance, Rink considers four Amsterdam merchant houses active in the trans-
atlantic trade with New Netherland: the Verbrugges, the De Wolffs, the Van Rensselaers,
and the Van Hoornbeecks. Rink asserts that these merchant houses, along with the West
India Company, essentially deprived New Netherland of developing a colony-based mer-
chant community. Rink, Holland on the Hudson, 172213.
19A. J. F. van Laer, trans. and ed., Correspondence of Maria van Rensselaer, 16691689
(Albany, NY: The University of the State of New York, 1935), 138 (hereafter cited as CMVR).
A constant flow of river traffic, including both private yachts and commercial yachts, facili-
tated the movement of information, goods, and people along the Hudson River, excluding
the winter months when the river was frozen.
New Amsterdam.20 Indeed, the colonys survival depended upon the inter-
connected nature of the economic relationship between New Amsterdam
and Beverwijck.
Women, Marriage, and the Law
Evidence from several sources indicates that husbands, fathers, friends,

and other relatives trusted women to carry out trading and other financial
activities for them in the Dutch Republic, and made sure that they were
appropriately prepared to do so. Maria van Rensselaers letters to her in-
laws in the Netherlands and Alida Schuyler Livingstons business letters
records left by two women prominent in New Netherlands economic
affairsprovide us with the most detailed and immediate information
about their worlds. Like letters from their male counterparts, the corre-
spondence of the two women conveyed information about the general
economy and the commercial reputations of trading partners, illustrating
the possibilities that New Netherlands legal structure afforded women.
Both women imparted personal information as well to an array of persons
within the colony and in patria.21
However, it is primarily through court appearances and notarial records
that historians encounter information about the activities of women in New
20Janny Venema, Beverwijck: A Dutch Village on the American Frontier, 16521664

(Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2003), 200. Marias brother Stephanus
wrote to her from New Amsterdam in April 1683: Herewith goes a saddle for Kiliaen
[Marias son].... Herewith go also 40 lbs of candles. Writing later in the year, Stephanus
inquires about Kiliaens silversmith shop: If he lacks anything, only let me know and I
shall procure it for him, either here [New Amsterdam] or from England. And, a month
later, Stephanus wrote Herewith go 4 lbs of alum, at 30 stivers a pound, in a little bag
marked KVR. If he needs more, let me know; CMVR, 106, 109, 112.
21As well as reports on both her health and her children, Marias correspondence
contains detailed communication with her brother in New Amsterdam and her Holland
in-laws regarding sales, purchases, crop yields, changing weather patterns, trading mat-
ters, and political news. See, for example, CMVR, 9, 10, 2730, 3739, 8790. Alidas letters
reflect the commercial and domestic decisions she made in Albany and while managing
their substantial household Livingston Manor, as well as advising her husband, Robert
Livingston, on political and economic matters. Her letters address all facets of the admin-
istration of the estate and Alidas concern for both her children and her husband. Linda
Briggs Biemer, Business Letters of Alida Schuyler Livingston, 16801720, New York History
63, no. 2 (April, 1982): 182207. A dictionary published in Antwerp in 1562 defined patria as
everybodys country, fatherland, the town, village, hamlet or any other place where one is
born. Simon Groenveld, Natie en nationaal gevoel in de zestiende-eeuwse Nederlanden,
Nederlands Archievenblad, 84 (1980): 376. Our usage of patria in this article generally refers
to the Dutch Republic.
Netherland and the degree of support that its legal system offered them.22
The notarial records, in particular, illuminate the extraordinary responsi-
bilities given women by their husbands, fathers, and others that indicated
their knowledge of and trust in womens commercial acumen and their
right to act. For example, in 1662, the merchant Johannes de Wit appeared
before notary Salomon LaChaire to constitute and empower his lawful
wife Mdme. Janneke de Wit, about to leave for patria, to represent him
everywhere in his absence, and validly to perform all matters and negotia-
tions of what nature soever they may be, and to do and permit all whatever
shall be deemed by her to be best and most expedient according to the
circumstances of time and place, especially in the name and on the behalf
of him the constituent.23
The document stated the long list of things Janneke was legally empow-
ered to do in a manner that reveals both the couples knowledge and use
of Dutch law and its broad application from collecting all debts, monies,
and merchandise by all legal means to being able to:
negotiate, treat, contract and administer all and every his things, matters, and
affairs; also with power to cease, desist, deliver over, or even to receive all
and every goods, wares and merchandise bought or sold on time or for ready
money...to sell real estate and to guarantee the purchase therein...to give or
take up all and every sum of money on exchange, bottomry, interest or other-
wise to and from all such persons...and all things else to negotiate, trade and
barter; and to make and close all and every contract and convention and all
other things to do which shall be considered profitable and good to her...and
respecting all questions, differences and difficulties to be able to agree, order,
transact and compromise whether with arbitrators legally appointed or with
friendly arbitrators and umpires...to be able to appear before all courts, tribu-
nals and judges...to institute defend, prosecute, adjourn and resist...24
The list goes on, but, in essence, Johanness document gave full legal power
to his wife, which granted her the right to do anything that he could do in
business transactions so that no possible question of Jannekes right to act
could arise. And, clearly, she had the background and training to handle
such detailed and multiple business needs.
22See, for instance, Berthold Fernow, ed., The Records of New Amsterdam from 1653 to
1674 Anno Domini, 7 vols. (Baltimore: Genealogical Pub. Co., 1976) (hereafter cited as RNA);
Charles T. Gehring, trans. and ed., Fort Orange Court Minutes, 16521660 (Syracuse, NY:
Syracuse University Press, 1990) (hereafter cited as FOCM).
23Kenneth Scott and Kenn Stryker-Rodda, eds., The Register of Salomon Lachaire,
Notary Public of New Amsterdam, 16611662, trans. E. B. OCallaghan (Baltimore: Genealogi-
cal Publishing Co., Inc., 1978), 18081.
24The Register of Salomon Lachaire, Notary Public of New Amsterdam, 16611662, 18081.
It is difficult to estimate how many women like Janneke de Wit were

active in New Netherland. The number of women involved in trade is diffi-
cult to estimate as not everyone appeared in the court or notarial records,
the major repositories of New Netherlands activities. As the majority of
the early immigrants were single men, the population of New Netherland
grew slowly over the first thirty years of its existence and more rapidly
after 1657 when the West India Company provided incentives for emigra-
tion.25 Even so, the colonys initial gender imbalance had a shorter dura-
tion than what the English experienced in the Chesapeake.26 Moreover,
given the equivalency of the laws governing womens rights in New Neth-
erland as in the Netherlands, and that parents brought their daughters up
to participate in the commercial and trading society of the Netherlands,
it is not surprising that a vigorous participation by women in commer-
cial enterprises continued throughout New Netherland. Consequently,
women had a significant impact on the colonys general economy, as well
as within their families.
One explanation for more extensive participation by women in trade
was that they received the education and training to do so both in Holland
and in New Netherland.27 Some families trained their daughters at home
25Rink, Holland on the Hudson, 16471. Rink notes that [s]ome hard-hitting propa-
ganda, perhaps written at the Companys request, was effective in turning around the once
poor image of New Netherland; Rink, Holland on the Hudson, 171.
26Lois Green Carr, Russell R. Menard, and Lorena S. Walsh, Robert Coles World: Agri-
culture and Society in Early Maryland (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina
Press, 1991), 157160. The authors assert that Despite high rates of population increase,
early Maryland suffered under a destructive demographic regime. High mortality, a short-
age of women, and late marriages kept Maryland a society of immigrants long after the
initial English invasion... See also Thad W. Tate and David Ammerman, eds., The Chesa-
peake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays on Anglo-American Society and Politics (New York:
Norton, 1979); Lois Green Carr, Philip D. Morgan, and Jean B. Russo, eds., Colonial Chesa-
peake Society (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). New Netherlands
migration patterns, employment structure, and environmental conditions all differed
from those of the Chesapeake and, consequently, its gender imbalance lasted for a shorter
period (approximately thirty years) than the Chesapeakes (approximately fifty to eighty
years depending on the location within the Chesapeake).
27In an examination of New Netherlands schools in the seventeenth century, with
copious references to education in patria as well, William Heard Kilpatrick maintained
that the existence of the Holland custom (dating in the case of Utrecht at latest from
1583), the desirability, if not the necessity, that the girls have their religious training in the
school, the ample corroboration afforded by marriage contracts and wills, and the explicit
reference to girls and boys in the New York school of 1733all these seem to seem to put
it beyond a reasonable doubt that in the ordinary Dutch parochial school girls as well as
boys attended at least until they learned to read. William Heard Kilpatrick, The Dutch
Schools of New Netherland and Colonial New York (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing
Office, 1912), 219.
Johannes Vermeer, 16321675. A Lady Writing, c. 1665. Gift of Harry Waldron

Havemeyer and Horace Havemeyer, Jr., in memory of their father, Horace Have-
meyer. Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
in the familys business. Daughters could also attend a school to learn

reading, writing, and ciphering.28 The Englishman Josiah Child wrote that
one of the things that increased the wealth of the Northern Netherlands,
was the education of their Children, as well Daughters as Sons; all which,
be they of never so great quality or estate, they always take care to bring
28Oscar Gelderblom, Zuid-Nederlandse kooplieden en de opkomst van de Amsterdamse

stapelmarkt (15781630) (Hilversum, 2002), 192, 200202.
up to write perfect good hands, and to have the full knowledge and use
of Arithmetick and Merchants-Accounts. Dutch children grew up to have
an ability for Commerce of all kinds. According to Child, in the Nether-
lands, parents raised both sons and daughters to be able to run a business,
even in the lower strata of society.29 These attitudes concerning train-
ing daughters prevailed in New Netherland society as well. Training may
also have occurred in an informal setting, alongside a parent, relative, or
neighbor.
For instance, as a teenager, Maria van Rensselaer ran a brewing operation
for her father and he may well have trained her in brewing techniques.30
While we are uncertain as to the formal education Maria van Rensselaer
received, we know from the patroonships account books she kept and the
letters she sent that she had literacy and numeracy skills.31 Moreover, her
early practical, or vocational, training provided her with additional skills to
undertake commercial enterprises including running a mill, leasing prop-
erty, directing agricultural operations, and managing fur trading.
More important, however, Marias training provided her with the skills
to assist her future husband, and thus be able to assume his role in the
family businesses should he predecease her.32 Commenting on his wife,
29Josiah Child, A New Discourse of Trade: Wherein Is Recommended Several Weighty

Points Relating to Companies of Merchants, etc. (London: John Everingham, 1693), 4. Ear-
lier, Roger Coke noted that The Dutch generally breed their youth of both Sexes in the
Studies of Geometry and numbers, especially more than the English dothese subjects
being one of the foundational tools, in his opinion, for success in trade. See Roger Coke,
A Discourse of Trade (London: Printed for H. Brome and R. Horne, 1670). See also De Vries
and Van der Woude, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the
Dutch Economy, 15001815, 596603.
30Jeremias van Rensselaer wrote his mother in April, 1665, I have taken up brewing,
and this for the sake of my wife, as in her fathers house she always had the management
thereof, to wit, the disposal of the beer and helping to find customers for it [te weeten
vande Bieren uit te doen en aen de Man te helpe]. A. J. F. van Laer, trans. and ed., Corre-
spondence of Jeremias van Rensselaer, 16511674 (Albany, NY: The University of the State of
New York, 1932), 3778 (hereafter cited as CJVR).
31The bulk of Marias surviving correspondence is found in Van Laers edition. Her
account books are part of the Van Rensselaer Manor papers held in the Manuscript and
Special Collections in the New York State Library. It is not improbable that Maria learned
bookkeeping through practical example and the methods described in David Kocks Kort
begrijp vant gantsche italiaens boeck-houden, published in Amsterdam in 1647 or Nicolaus
Petris Practicqve, om te leeren, rekenen, cypheren ende boeckhouden, published in Amster-
dam in 1605.
32Peter Earle suggests that English womens involvement in international business
enterprises was temporary and accidental. Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle
Class: Business, Society, and Family Life in London, 16601730 (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1989), 164. A new generation of historians has challenged Earle and moved
Anglo-American womens economic life from the margins of society to the center. See, for
example, Linda L. Sturtz, Within Her Power: Propertied Women in Colonial Virginia (New
Jeremias van Rensselaer wrote to his elder brother, Jan Baptist: I shall
not sing the praises of my bride, for that does not become me, but I thank
the good Lord for having granted me such a good partner and we shall
beseech Him that He may let us live together long in peace and health.33
The idea of a partnership was a classic idea of a good marriage in Dutch
society. As David Narrett maintains, A woman was not considered to be
her husbands equal in power or rights. She was however, a partner rather
than a servant within a marriage.34 Unfortunately a long and healthy
life together was not to be for Jeremias and Maria. In October 1674, Jer-
emias died at age 44, leaving the running of the patroonship in Marias
twenty-nine-year-old hands. Even with five children and pregnant with a
sixth to raise, and burdened by a painful and reoccurring condition, quite
likely septic arthritis, Maria dealt firmly with the business of running the
patroonship and keeping the manors books. She also fought for the share
due her and her children from the unsettled estate of the first patroon,
and to keep the manor from Robert Livingstons control. Maria had hoped
that her son Kiliaen would be named the next patroon. Instead, Kiliaen,
the Dutch-born son of Johannes van Rensselaer, and Kiliaen, Maria and
Jeremiass son, jointly received a patent to the colony in 1685 from the
English Crown, which also named Johanness son the lord of the manor.
Not until his death in 1687 did Maria and Jeremiass son become lord of the
manor.35 Maria van Rensselaer died in January 1689, aged forty-three, hav-
ing put her education and business skills to practical, and profitable, use.
York: Routledge, 2002); Sheryllynne Haggerty, The British-Atlantic Trading Community,

17601810 (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2006); Nicola Phillips, Women in Business,
17001850 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2006); Ellen Hartigan-OConnor, The Ties That
Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl-
vania Press, 2009). In the Dutch Republic and New Netherland, neither temporary nor
accidental applied to women and their trading activities.
33CJVR, 29697. Jeremiass mother had earlier admonished him in 1656 to shun the com-
pany of light [women] of whom New Netherland is full...; CJVR, 37.
34David E. Narrett, Inheritance and Family Life in Colonial New York City (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1992), 43. While Jacob Cats in 1625 described the ideal marriage as
a partnership, he also advised, So you, industrious husband, go to earn your living/While
you, O young wife, tend to your household. Jacob Cats, Houwelick. Dat is het gansche
gelegenheyt des echten-staets, Vrouwe (Tot Middleburg: In de druckerye van Jan Pietersz.
vande Venne, 1625), 317. Nevertheless, Shattuck and Narrett assert that economic realities
often required women to both maintain the household and aid their husbands. Shattuck,
A Civil Society, 14091; Narrett, Inheritance and Family Life in Colonial New York City, 44.
See also Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches, 425, in which he notes that for the Dutch
Marriage, in short, had already become a true partnership by the seventeenth century.
35Robert Livingston (16541728) married Alida Schuyler in 1679, the recent widow of
Nicholas van Rensselaer. Livingston pursued his wifes claimed inheritance from the Van
Despite the importance of societal acceptance of women in trade and

sufficient education and training for them to engage in trade in both the
Netherlands and New Netherland, neither of these factors alone would
account for the success and extent to which women involved themselves
in commerce. As with everything else in the society, the Dutch legal sys-
tem governed womens place in New Netherland. Dutch law allowed sin-
gle and widowed women the same rights as menexcept for political
rights. In other words, at the legal age of twenty they could administer
their own property, carry out legal transactions, enter into contracts, and
appear before a court on their own.36
Marriage would seem at first to offer little in the way of rights. Most
common was the marriage of community goods whereby the goods held
by both parties were joined, including properties.37 Since Dutch women
could inherit and will property, such holdings were part of the commu-
nity of goods, as were the debts brought into the marriage or incurred
from both sides and for which both parties were responsible. However,
the law considered women sub tutela and their husbands their guard-
ian or church-guardian. Wives could not institute an action or defend
themselves in court on their own or trade without his authorization.38 As
there is no reference in Grotius regarding a written procedure to follow
Rensselaers much to the dismay of the Van Rensselaer family. Livingston went on to amass
a significant fortune through land and mercantile activities. Cynthia A. Kierner, Traders
and Gentlefolk: The Livingstons of New York, 16751790 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1992). For the most recent and thorough discussion of Maria van Rensselaer, see Peter
Christophs Worthy, Virtuous Juffrouw Maria van Rensselaer, De Halve Maen 70, no. 2
(Summer 1997): 2540.
36For instance, Sherrin Marshall suggests that gentry widows were slow to remarry,
preferring instead to enjoy their autonomy. She asserts that The protection of their rights
by law and custom gave them a great deal of independence...In short, they were individu-
als and not ciphers, and their behavior exemplifies a society where women had consider-
able autonomy. Sherrin Marshall, The Dutch Gentry, 15001650: Family, Faith and Fortune
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987), 164. Shattuck maintains that Since women could
inherit as well as dispose of her goods by will, many women came to their marriages with
real and personal belongings. Furthermore, single women enjoyed considerable freedom
under the law, which allowed them to run their own businesses or be involved in com-
merce and trade, investments that they brought to the marriage. Therefore, if they chose,
women so endowed could keep any or all of their holdings out of the common estate by
an antenuptial contract. Shattuck, A Civil Society, 157. The reference to the legal age
of twenty for women is the age at which a woman could marry without parental permis-
sion. This age of majority opened a world of legal and economic opportunity for women.
See Hugo Grotius, The Jurisprudence of Holland, trans. R. W. Lee (Oxford: The Clarendon
Press, 1926), Chapter I: v, 15.
37Grotius, The Jurisprudence of Holland, Chapter I: v, 21; I, xi, 119.
38Grotius, The Jurisprudence of Holland, Chapter I: v, 1723.
to acknowledge this authorization, it may well have been acceptable for a

husband to provide verbal authority.
Dutch law recognized the needs of a commercial society and the utility of
integrating women into commercial activities. Thus, a wife as the domestic
manager managed not only the household expenses, which included mak-
ing contracts related to the expenses that would bind both her and her hus-
band, but also the buying and selling of material germane to her husbands
business.39 A husband did have the right to sell his wifes property without
her permission. If, however, she suspected that he improperly managed her
property, she could submit her complaint to the court, which, with proof of
improper actions, would remove the husbands right.40
What was important in marriage involving the community of goods was
the fact that women could, and did, appear in court for themselves and
their husbands; write promissory notes; enact bonds and contracts; give and
receive powers of attorney; buy, sell, and lease property; and trade, as long
as they had their husbands consent. With one exception in Beverwijck, and
a few noted in New Amsterdam, the financially astute men of New Nether-
land apparently did give their consent as women appear in the records as
active participants in the commercial society. The only disobedient wife in
Beverwijck was the wife of Claes van den Bergh, unnamed in her husbands
deposition, who sold items in 1659 and 1660 such as stockings, buttons, and
linen that Claes had purchased for sale without her husbands knowledge.
The court ordered the defendants in each case to return the items and for
Van den Bergh to remit the money received.41 In 1658, New Amsterdam
resident Jannetie Meleins demanded payment for a lot from Sibout Clasen.
When asked whether she had her husbands authority to sell the lot, she
answered no. The court determined that as Jannetie Meleins has not any
power from her husband, no disposition can be made in the case.42
Certainly, the lack of more than one instance in Beverwijck, and the
rarity of denial of the right to trade in New Amsterdam, underscores the
fact that granting power in trade occurred more commonly than not in
the society. In addition to these qualifications of what might otherwise
have been a restricting form of marriage, women in the Republic and New
Netherland had recourse to an antenuptial contract in which a woman

40See R. W. Lee, An Introduction to Roman-Dutch Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953),
6371.
41FOCM, 467, 489.
42RNA, 2: 4223.
could exclude her future husband from any oversight of her activities or
holdings.43 Women often had antenuptial contracts prepared to protect
property and inheritances the woman might have, or, on a second mar-
riage, to protect the inheritance of her children from her first marriage.
Finally, Dutch law allowed husbands to grant their wives the rights of a
public trader whereby the wives had all the rights associated with public
economic activity. They had the authority to bind themselves and their hus-
bands in their contracts. A husband did hold the right to cancel his consent,
which he had to communicate to a third person.44 There are no specific
references to women as sole traders in New Netherland, but the activities
of some make it clear that they were involved in selling more than a few
trinkets to the Indians for a beaver. While the count for women engaged as
public traders in New Amsterdam remains undetermined, Martha Shattuck
has identified eighteen women as public traders in Beverwijck.45 Indeed,
Jeremias van Rensselaer pointed to one woman, Tryn Claes, as a great trader
with plenty of money. Van Rensselaer made this observation in 1668, an
indication that even under the early years of English rule, Dutch women,
particularly in Albanythe former Beverwijckstill did things their way.46
Margaret Hardenbroecks cousin would hardly have sent her as a fac-
tor had international trading not existed as an economic opportunity in
Dutch womens lives, or had the law not allowed single women of at least
the legal age of twenty to participate in trading ventures of their own.
Therefore, the colonial context changed nothing legally47 or socially in
terms of womens participation in commerce and trade. Furs just added a
new and profitable dimension.
Women and Trade
As noted, the laws in both New Netherland and in patria supported wom-
ens commercial activities, as did the cultural attitudes and acceptance of
womens place in commercial transactions. Dutch society did not discourage

44Grotius remarks All other women may only make contracts relating to household
affairs, and so far bind themselves and their husbands: a husband cannot prevent this, unless
at the same time he forbids his wife by legal process to exercise this function, and causes the
same to be proclaimed. Grotius, The Jurisprudence of Holland, Chapter I: v, 23.
45See Shattuck, A Civil Society, 14091.
46CJVR, 407.
47And, as a means to reinforce this supposition, the courts would reference the Cus-
tom and written law of the Fatherland. RNA, 1: 273.
trade as an occupation or as a part-time activity for women. As with so

many of early modern womens activities, documentation about women
in trade can prove problematic. The women of New Netherland partici-
pated through the whole stratum of trade practiced by merchants, both in
relation to the nature of goods traded and the geographical boundaries of
trade. Our window into their world is only opened through court records
and personal correspondence.
Exploring womens participation in New Netherlands trade often means
looking at short-term business enterprises operating at modest levels. Even
so, there were women in New Netherland who had extensive commercial
activity over a significant period. Margaret Hardenbroeck and Maria van
Rensselaer are examples of those who traded throughout their adult lives
at various levels of enterprise; Hardenbroeck traded for approximately
thirty-five years and Van Rensselaer for about twenty-two. Their active
participation in trade represents a lifelong career in commerce, similar to
any mans participation. And while these particular women may be char-
acterized as elites in New Netherland society, it is our judgment that they
represent women across the whole range of economic activity.
Occupational Roles
Women involved in trade or commerce could occupy a variety of occupa-

tional roles, many of which were influenced by the local economys struc-
ture. While some of these occupations were closely related to one another,
women frequently worked at two or three occupations and in two or three
sectors of the economy, similar to many men. She may have been a buyer,
seller, retailer, wholesaler, or merchant. Thus, a woman whose primary
occupation was as a licensed tavern-keeper could as well be trading with
the Indians. She could also have been a seamstress with a piece of duffel
laid by to offer a passing Indian. In New Amsterdam, a trader of means
such as the widow Geertje Hendricks, engaged in numerous activities with
a partnerin Geertjes case, one Jacob Coppe. Their partnership included
a half share in a yacht, no doubt used to take goods such as brandy up
to Beverwijck during trading season, the sale of which was credited to
their joint account. She also sent 100 guilders of her own money with
Coppe to buy beavers. Geertjes inventory reflected how the partner-
ship used this money. For example, Coppe purchased three beavers from
the wives of two men (names not mentioned), three and a half beavers
from Arent van Curler, and thirty-six guilders in wampum and a beaver
from the brick maker. Quite likely, the beavers Geertje bought went over
to Holland, as did the bearskins and elk hides she had sent there in part-
nership with Cornelis Aarsen.48 There were the even more affluent women
such as Johanna de Hulter who started and ran the first brick and tile yard
in Beverwijck, and oversaw farms in the Esopus region for cash crops such
as wheat, hops, corn, and peas.49
The variety of occupations held by women (and men) illustrates the
riskiness of economic activity in a seventeenth-century colony. Financial
profits varied widely across economic sectors. However, diversification in
occupational roles reduced the economic impact of a poorly performing
sector of an economy. Therefore, despite the benefits from specialization,
too little diversification posed a risk to personal and colonial economies.50
Kinship Networks
Like their male counterparts, women traders often relied on kinship net-
works that included both family and friends as they provided reliable and
trustworthy trading partners locally, regionally, and internationally. Kin-
ship networks were especially important for women during their repro-
ductive years. Network members could assist a woman with her trading
activities while she was lying in and unable to keep shop, or seek payments
48Berthold Fernow, trans. and ed., Minutes of the Orphanmasters of New Amsterdam
(New York: Francis P. Harper, 1902), 1: 14142.
49De Hulter sold at auction in Beverwijck her brick kiln, pantile kiln (for roof tiles),
a pasture, and her residence in 1657. See Charles T. Gehring, trans. and ed., Fort Orange
Records, 16561678 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 9497. For sales of
lots in the Esopus see Charles T. Gehring, trans. and ed., Fort Orange Records, 16541679
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2009), 15354, 169, 171. Johanna de Laet was the
daughter of the West India Company director, Johan de Laet. Her second husband was
Jeronimus Ebbingh, but she is more often referred to by her first husbands surname of
De Hulter.
50Certainly, women had practiced diversified agriculture and various other arrange-
ments for income production for centuries. In addition, many of a womans income-gen-
erating activities could be associated with her role in provisioning her own household, so
that such activities were perceived and accepted as extensions of [her] natural activity;
Deborah Simonton, A History of European Womens Work (London: Routledge, 1998), 62.
For a discussion of womens labor market participation and new approaches to how his-
torians view this participation, see Ariadne Schmidt, Vrouwenarbeid in de Voegmoderne
Tijd in Nederland, Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis 2, no. 3 (2005):
221. For diversification in Holland generally see A. Th. Van Deursen, Plain Lives in a
Golden Age: Popular Culture, Religion and Society in Seventeenth-Century Holland (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1617. In New Netherland, see Shattuck, A Civil
Society, 72100.
on debts, and produce commodities for sale. They also were particularly
useful for a woman who had just begun her trading operations. Maria van
Rensselaers trading networks, for example, stressed family, religious, and
ethnic links. This network of social relations, often referred to as social
capital, was also important for men.51 However, the existence of kin-
ship ties, and the importance of marriage and a network of friends were
important for all merchants. In addition, it must be emphasized that she
participated in informal merchant networks. Her trading partners were
predominantly Dutch and either members of her immediate or extended
family, or friends of the family. Nevertheless, exceptions existed to the
pattern of her trading partners. An increasingly impersonal trading world
developed during the early modern period and Maria did not know every-
one in her distribution chain in Europe for instance.
In early modern commercial relationships, trust was a significant issue
with respect to the supply of information, decision-making, and general
commercial activities undertaken by trading partners. Maria van Rensselaer
often received various types of informationfrom reference to a particu-
lar transaction to global political news that could affect tradefrom her
family. In one letter from her brother, Stephanus, in 1669, he noted that a
particular ship would be leaving New Amsterdam after Easter, that Virginia
traders had begun their spring arrivals in New Amsterdam, and that Hol-
land had sent a squadron of ships to the Mediterranean to free the Medi-
terranean Sea from piracy by the Turks.52 From this letter, Maria would
have information as to when cargo she consigned was leaving for Europe,
that the winter ice had cleared and commercial activity could begin again
51Social capital refers to connections within and between social networks. Pierre Bour-
dieu introduced this concept in the 1980s in konomisches Kapital, kulturelles Kapital,
soziales Kapital in Soziale Ungleichheiten, ed. Reinhard Krecke (Gottingen: O. Schwartz,
1983). Robert Putnams work brought the concept of social capital to American academic
circles; see Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). The concept has been applied to research
about women and commercial activity suggesting that networks were positive vehicles
for them; see Daniel Rabuzzi, Women as Merchants in Eighteenth-Century Northern
Germany: The Case of Stralsund, 17501830, Central European History 28 (1995): 43556;
Francisca de Haan, Homo ecnomicus of pater familias? Een pleidooi voor meer cultuur in
de bedrijfsgeschiendenis, NEHA-Bulletin 14 (2000): 27683. Nevertheless, some historians
have argued that social capital did not always benefit women; see Kathryn L. Reyerson,
Women in Business in Medieval Montpellier in Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe,
ed. B. A. Hanawalt (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), 11744, and Sheilagh
Ogilvie, How Does Social Capital Affect Women? Guilds and Communities in Early Mod-
ern Germany, The American Historical Review 109 (2004): 32559.
52CMVR, 910.
in New Amsterdams port, and that political events in the Dutch Republic
might influence commercial matters in New Netherland. It would be dif-
ficult to argue that Maria was not a participant in the Atlantic world.
Nor was correspondence limited to global political news. Maria, in turn,
provided information to her correspondents. In December 1675, Maria
wrote to her brother-in-law, Richard, in Amsterdam, that:
trade is carried on as heretofore to Boston and the West Indies and the
trading with the Indians goes on as while you were here. The past summer
there was a lively trade. As to agriculture, it has during the last two years
become so much worse on account of high water and the increase of weeds
that the farmers demand a reduction in the rent. The honorable governor
has prohibited the exportation of wheat flour for six months.53
Maria provided Richard with information about the volume of the beaver
trade and noted that he should not expect to receive any exports of wheat
flour in the near future, thus allowing him to plan his commercial activi-
ties accordingly.
In addition, a traders reputation affected her ability not only to trade,
but also to receive credit for continuing trading enterprises. The use of
credit was vital, particularly as trading networks extended across the
Atlantic and colonial borders. Kinship networks quite likely could provide
some credit to a female participant. Nevertheless, in the end, commercial
conventions held women to the same standards of conforming behavior
regarding trust and reputation as men.54
The Fur Trade
The fur-trading season in Beverwijck was a significant part of its economy.

During this time, everyone, regardless of their place in society, traded
for furs from the Indians.55 How many women engaged in the trade is
impossible to know, but since the fur-trading season provided a means
to supplement the familys income, it is likely that womens participation
was widespread. Since Dutchwomen were not related to the Indians, they
obviously could not rely upon kinship networks with them. Their trans-
actions would have been purely commercial, and profitable to the trader
53CMVR, 17.
54Shattuck, A Civil Society, 11718.
who offered the most wanted goods in exchange.56 This is not to say that
a woman could not establish a continuous trading relationship with one
Indian or group of Indians.57
Unfortunately, the Fort Orange Court Minutes contain little evidence
about womens trade with the Indians. Trading for beaver, arguably,
became essential for the domestic management of a household. As the
standard coin of the time, beavers, along with sewant, helped pay for
goods for more trading or household expenses.58 The Indians resident on
the eastern end of Long Island produced sewant, a money substitute, from
conch and clamshells. As early as 1641, the council regulated the use of
sewant in local commerce, particularly its bead value equivalency to the
Dutch guilder. Stuyvesant underscored the importance of sewant to the
local economy when he wrote the directors of the West India Company in
1660 stating, wampum is the source and the mother of the beaver trade,
and for goods only, without wampum, we cannot obtain beavers from the
savages.59 The price for merchantable beaver pelt fluctuated between six
and eight guilders in Dutch money.60
Whether housewives, tavernkeepers, merchants, or traders, women dealt
knowingly with guilders as well as the money substitutes, as did the widow,
Sophia van Wyckersloot. In 1661, she was indebted to Johanna Ebbingh for
125 guilders in Holland money, forty-eight guilders, two stuivers, and eight
pence in sewant, and thirteen guilders, two stuivers, and eight pence in
beavers or beavers value. A promissory note signed by Van Wyckersloot
56In 1643, Father Isaac Jogues, wrote a narrative of New Netherland. Jogues, a Jesuit
priest and missionary in New France among the Huron and Algonquins, had been cap-
tured and enslaved by the Mohawks, but was subsequently ransomed by Dutch merchants
and observed life in New Netherland as he awaited passage back to France. Trade is free
to all; this gives the Indians all things cheap, each of the Hollanders outbidding his neigh-
bor, and being satisfied provided he can gain some little profit. R. P. Isaac Jogues, de la
Compagnie de Jesus, Novum Belgium, description de Nieuw Netherland et Notice sur Ren
Goupil (New York: J. M. Shea, 1862), 4.
58Ordinance of April 18, 1641, in Laws and Ordinances of New Netherland, 16381674, trans.
E. B. OCallaghan (Albany, NY: Weed, Parson and Company, 1868), 26. The ordinances
regarding the regulation of sewant run from April 16, 1641 through December 28, 1662.
59Letter from Stuyvesant to the Governors in Holland, in Berthold Fernow, trans. and
ed., Documents Relating to the Colonial History of the State of New York, vol. 14, Documents
Relating to the History of the Early Colonial Settlements Principally on Long Island (Albany,
NY: Weed, Parsons and Company, 1883), 46772.
60See, for example, Rink Holland on the Hudson, 90, for one estimate, and also Dennis
Maika, Commerce and Community: Manhattan Merchants in the Seventeenth Century
(PhD diss., New York University, 1995), 272. Wampum is the English corruption of wam-
pumpeag, a New England Algonquian word. Sewant is the Dutch corruption of a Long
Island Algonquian word for what the English called wampum.
stated that she promises to pay it in beavers reckoned at six guilders to

the beaver. Not unexpectedly, the merchant and trader Margaret Hard-
enbroek dealt in larger sums. On July 28, 1663, Carsten Fredericksen, a
master smith in Beverwijck, declared that he had received fifty good
whole beavers from Margaret Hardenbroeck for which he solicited and
charged to have a gunsmith in Holland pay to her the sum of 300 Carolus
guilders of Holland money. If the gunsmith did not pay within six weeks,
Fredericksen promised to pay the same amount in Holland money here
in this country, with exchange and reexchange charges, on demand, with-
out cost or loss.61
In their trade with the Indians, both women and men used the money
substitute, sewant, as well as the goods wanted by Indians. While women
who had either or both undoubtedly did trade with the Indians, the three
instances that we know of are about women who were brought before
the court because of illegal tradingselling liquor to the Indians or giv-
ing an Indian presents in order to convince him, or her, to trade only
with the donor. Interestingly, the women originate from three different
social spheres in the community. The court tried Catelijn Saunders, the
wife of magistrate Sander Leendertsz, in July 1655 for allegedly bribing an
Indian with a piece of cloth to trade first with her. Specifically, the charge
accused Saunders of donating a piece of cloth to a certain Indian, con-
trary to the ordinance issued against the making of presents. Facing a fine
of 300 guilders and a one-years suspension from her business, the magis-
trates ordered Saunders to declare under oath that she received a present
from the Indian of two beavers and a lynx coat and that, in return, she
gave the Indian a piece of cloth. Saunders took the oath.62 On September
12, 1654, several tavern patrons testified that Maria Jans, a licensed tav-
ern keeper, sold brandy in a small pewter bottle to an Indian woman, for
which Maria received some sewant. Maria later admitted to the court that
she had sold brandy to the Indians. She received a sealed memorandum
from the court noting what to pay the officer, and warning her that she
must comport herself according to their good advice, with further warn-
ing not to do so anymore in the future, on pain of arbitrary correction.63
61A. J. F. Van Laer, rev. and ed., Early Records of the City and County of Albany and
Colony of Rensselaerswyck, trans. Jonathan Pearson, vol. 3, Notarial Papers 1 and 2 (Albany,
NY: The University of the State of New York, 1918), 75, 232.
62FOCM, 201202.
63FOCM, 154, 166. Paying the officer meant paying him a fee determined by the
magistrates.
At the far end of the social and economic scale was Susanna Janssen,
wife of Marten de Bierkaecker (beer carrier), who admitted to selling for
a beaver a kettle of three pints of beer, brandy, French and Spanish
wine, mixed together... to an Indian. Susanna maintained that poverty
made her do it since her husband could not work because of a hernia.
She stressed that she had three small children to feed and she could
not buy food unless she had beavers, as people refused to take sewant.
Johannes La Montagne, the courts officer who prosecuted the case, asked
that Susanna pay the fine of 500 guilders as called for in the ordinance,
court costs, and to suffer banishment from the area for six years. Most
of the last sentence in the court record is left blank and no punishment
confirmed, which suggests that the magistrates overruled the officer, who
could specify the penalty, but who could not vote, and allowed Susanna
her freedom and released her from any monetary payment with which she
was obviously unable to comply.64
Financial Capital
What characterized many of the above occupations was the amount of

financial capital required to establish operations. How did women gain
access to capital in New Netherland and did they face impediments in
doing so? A woman who inherited money, or goods that she could easily
sell, had one means by which she could enter trading activities. Perhaps
a woman traded goods for others as an agent and brokered a commis-
sion for herself. Kinship networks may have provided start-up capital to
begin trading. Unfortunately, it is seldom clear, or stated, how a woman
obtained her original capital to buy goods.65 For example, Gideon Schaets,
64FOCM, 328. Susannas actions confirm Jasper Danckaertss later thoughts about
the colonists. He remarked that the people in this city [Albany], who are most all trad-
ers in small articles, whenever they see an Indian enter the house, who they know has
any money, they immediately set about getting hold of him, giving him rum to drink,
whereby he is soon caught and becomes half a fool. Henry C. Murphy, trans. and ed.,
Journal of a Voyage to New York and a Tour in Several of the American Colonies in 167980
by Jasper Danckaerts and Peter Sluyter (Brooklyn, NY: Long Island Historical Society, 1867),
152. The ordinances against selling liquor to the Indians continued well into the English
period when they were re-issued with considerable frequency; see the three volumes of
the Minutes of the Court of Albany, Rensselaerswyck, and Schenectady comprising the years
16681673, 16751680, and 16801685 respectively. A. J. F. van Laer translated and edited all
three volumes, which were published in 1926, 1928, and 1932.
65We have one instance when Jeremias van Rensselaer asked his father-in-law, Oloff
Stevensen van Cortlandt, in 1668 Furthermore, I would ask you very kindly whether it
the minister in Beverwijck, complained that while his wife traded, she did
not trade enough.66 The unanswered question is how did she buy what-
ever goods it was that she traded with the Indians? A woman selling a
piece of linen or a comb would require significantly less capital than a
woman such as Margaret Hardenbroeck undertaking international com-
merce and shipping. Arguably, the lower the investment costs to partake
in trade, the more women participated in a certain type of trade.
If investment costs were low, did this enable women at the lowest eco-
nomic levels to participate in trade? For instance, did free or enslaved
black women share in the culture of trade in New Netherland and define
the meaning of encounters through trade? What about Indian women? Is
it fair to characterize women belonging to these groups as at the lowest
economic levels when they did not subscribe to Western economic notions
of trade? The documentary evidence is almost non-existent with respect to
these groups. Our sense is that given the Dutch penchant for trade and for
the cultural affirmation that accepted women as merchants, women from
these groups participated in some manner. Nevertheless, we may only
draw inferences, at best, as to the extent of trade by these women.
For example, the Dutch West India Company permitted slaves in
New Netherland to earn wages and to own personal property. Further,
the Company allowed slaves to petition the government and employ the
courts to settle disputes.67 Thus, the opportunity existed for black women,
whether enslaved or free, to have redress over commercial disputes. Land
was an important factor in establishing economic sustainability and we
know of twelve free black women who owned property in New Nether-
land. It is possible that they sold surplus agricultural produce at the Satur-
day weekly market as this market was situated near the house of Mr. Hans
Kiersteede neighboring the Negro Lands.68 And while some historians
have noted that many blacks in New Amsterdam had come from trading
would be convenient for you to let us have in Holland the promised money of my wife,
your daughter? My wife would then start to trade with it a little and order some goods for
it. I shall expect your answer to this. CJVR, 401.
66E. T. Corwin, ed., Ecclesiastical Records of the State of New York, 7 vols. (Albany, NY:
James B. Lyon, 190116), 1: 385.
67See, for example, Kenneth Scott and Kenn Stryker-Rodda, eds., New York Historical
Manuscripts: Dutch, trans. A. F. J. van Laer (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company,
Inc., 1974), 1: 23; 4: 35, 53, 60, 62, 208209.
68See below for a discussion of New Amsterdams weekly markets. Richard Dickinson,
Abstracts of Early Black Manhattanites, New York Genealogical and Biographical Record
116 (1985): 100105, 16974; I. N. P. Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan Island (New York:
R. H. Dodd, 191528), 4: 26566.
cultures in Africa, it is perhaps as important that they were transported to

a culture that equally valued trade.69
While the trading activities of Indian men with the Europeans are well
documented in the original Dutch sources, the participation in commer-
cial exchanges by Indian women is far less so. We first become aware
of Indian women trading with other Indians in Harmen Meyndertsz van
den Bogaerts journal kept of his trip to the Mohawks and Oneidas in
16341635. While staying at a Mohawk castle, three Oneida Indian women
arrived carrying some dried and fresh salmon...which they sold for two
hands of sewant. They also brought some green tobacco to sell. Van den
Bogaert wrote that they were to travel with the Indian women when they
returned from selling the salmon at another castle. What is interesting
in this exchange is that neither the Indians nor the Dutchmen found it
unusual for the women to be engaging in trade.70
Our knowledge of Indian women trading with Dutch men and women
is fragmentary, as unless something untoward occurred, there was no
reason for either to appear in court. However, in 1660, an Indian woman
had carried beavers to trade at Volkert Jansz Douws house. Douw had
traded with the Indians for nearly twenty years and was probably well
known to them. Prior to reaching Douws house, an Indian broker, hired
by Adriaen Jansz van Leyden, approached the Indian woman and enticed
her with a string of black sewant and other gifts to trade with Van Ley-
den instead. Once at Van Leydens house, the Indian woman refused
to trade and insisted on going to Douws house to trade instead. In the
skirmish that followed, the Indian womans beavers were taken from her
and she was shoved outdoors. As a participant in inter-cultural trade, the
Indian woman also understood how to seek redress under Dutch law as
she promptly lodged a complaint with the schout regarding the beavers.
When the case came before the court, Van Leydens wife refused to return
the beavers and the Indian woman was forced to trade with her.71
Later account books have also revealed Indian women engaging in
commercial exchanges with Dutch traders. The account book of Evert and
Harmanus Wendell suggests that Indian women traders were not only the
69Graham Russell Hodges, Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East
Jersey, 16131863 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 15.
70Charles T. Gehring and William A. Starna, trans. and eds., A Journey into Mohawk and
Oneida Country, 16341635: The Journal of Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert (Syracuse:
Syracuse University Press, 1988), 6.
71FOCM, 52324.
norm, but also quite likely part of a continuous practice.72 Of the 316 Indi-
ans who traded with the brothers between 1695 and 1726, over half were
women. They came from the five Iroquois nations, as well as from Canada
and the Mahicans on the east side of the Hudson River. These women had
their own accounts, and invariably, both women and men paid in beavers,
with the exception of the Mahicans who usually paid in corn and occasion-
ally in money.73 The Wendells mother and two sisters also traded on their
own with the Indians and kept their own account books.74 Women often
introduced other Indian traders, women and men, to the Wendells. They
also appeared as guarantors for other Indians and some acted as agents for
the Wendells, selling merchandise among people of their own tribe.75
The Wendells account book also suggests that Indians probably traded
with other Dutch traders. A Mahican woman living in Ottawa traded with
Evert Wendell in 1705, having made a pledge to trade with him. Yet,
Wendell recorded that she had traded at old Bleckers, when she visited
Wendells store.76 In essence, then, Indian women were not only active
in trading, but also they did so independently, acting on their own and
for others. It is unclear in what way their trading affected or reflected
the economy of their societies, but it is clear that they were accepted as
trading participants by both the Indians and by Dutch men and women.
Historians may never fully discover the extent of this trade.
Trading within the Atlantic World
In examining trade in New Netherland, the destination of its exports

was as significant as the origins of its imports. Like their male counter-
parts, women did not appear constrained by geographical boundaries of
72Kees-Jan Waterman, trans. and ed., To Do Justice to Him and Myself: Evert Wendells
Account Book of the Fur Trade with Indians in Albany, New York, 16951726 (Philadelphia:
American Philosophical Society, 2008), 1718, 47, 48. Wendell traded in the Albany area
and his family had been in New Netherland from the early 1640s. Although this account
book records transactions subsequent to the English take-over of New Netherland in 1664,
it may reflect established commercial practices developed by the Dutch over decades of
trade with Indians.
73To Do Justice to Him and Myself, 1718.
74To Do Justice to Him and Myself, 74, n12.
75To Do Justice to Him and Myself, 2730.
76To Do Justice to Him and Myself, 107. *1705 August 21* X A female Mahican savege
her name [is] Waelekeiet[.] She traded at old Bleckers. Waterman suggests Waelekeiet
may actually have been the same woman as Malkiet, who lived among the Ottawas. Old
Blecker was Jan Jansen Bleecker, an early settler of Albany.
trade and also developed specialized geographical trading spheres. For

instance, Margaret Hardenbroeck undertook oceanic trading voyages to
the Netherlands. Margaret had whole or partial interests in approximately
fifteen ships that undertook transatlantic voyages from New Netherland
to Amsterdam, and later, after the English takeover in 1664, to England to
comply with the Navigation Acts and pay duties on enumerated articles.77
This type of bilateral trade with the metropolis of Amsterdam provided
opportunities to obtain a wider range of goods and commercial finance
for trading activities.
Trade within the Atlantic world was not limited to women located at
the oceanic port of New Amsterdam. Women in Beverwijck also imported
goods and merchandise from the Netherlands, some in amounts that are
significant for the period. For instance, Sophia van Wickersloot and her
husband, Anthony Tonnel, gave a promissory note for 298 guilders to
Christoffel Hoochlant in July 1661 for diverse goods Sophia had received
to her satisfaction. They agreed to pay Hoochlant in good merchantable
beavers valued at eight guilders apiece.78 In August 1661, Catrina Sanders
gave a bond to Nicolaes de Meyer for 535 guilders, 18 stivers in good,
whole beaver for merchandise received in 1660 and Geertruyt Andriessen
gave a bond for her indebtedness of fl. 213 to Jan Batiaensen van Gutsen-
hoven for the purchase and delivery of diverse wares and merchandise.79
Further, Dirckje Harmens gave a bond to Gerard Swart in May 1663 for
goods received by her from Lodewyck de Roy acknowledging her indebt-
edness for 131 guilders in good merchantable sewant.80 These examples
demonstrate womens involvement in trade with out-of-town merchants
that extended their worlds beyond the kitchen into the wider world of
colonial and foreign commerce.
Interestingly, women in the Netherlands also pursued trading opportu-
nities in New Netherland. One such woman was Jeremias van Rensselaers
mother, Anna van Wely, who was a merchant, as were his two sisters. In
August 1654, Anna provided a list of goods given to Jeremias to trade in
New Netherland which included: fourteen pairs of knives and forks, two
77See, for example, CMVR, 40, 43, 5455, 7374, 76, 8081, 96, 107, 109, 112, 127, 154,
16365. Marias correspondence notes ships owned by Margaret and her commercial part-
ners (including her husband) in which Maria consigns goods.
78Early Records of the City and County of Albany and Colony of Rensselaerswyck,
vol. 3: 79.
vol. 3: 867, 98.
vol. 3: 216.
pieces of white diapered linen, twelve hat clasps and twelve breeches but-
tons, pistols, non-pareil, a leather doublet, a Turkish grosgrain suit, and
a colored satin doublet with cloth breeches. She directed that he receive
beavers cash and send them over at the first opportunity. Later in 1654,
she wrote I am pleased that you traded [some goods] for me and for Jan
van Wely. Your sisters are also longing very much to receive their goods.
And in commenting on consumer preferences in the New Netherland
trading market, she suggested that It seems to me that the finest wares,
whether of silk, gold, or silver, or other things I can not think of, which
one can put in a chest, would be the most profitable, for one need not
enter these so [exactly] as the coarse wares.81 The Van Rensselaer family
servant in patria also desired to become a merchant and Anna advised
Jeremias in 1656 that Talckien sends herewith, from the little she has and
out of what she has now and then scraped together and saved out of her
mouth, in a small box...6 silver spoons, which cost fl. 30, and also a pair
of silk stockings, of fl.10. Do your best to send shortly something in return
for them... Jeremias later replied to his mother that he had sold the silk
stockings and was negotiating for the spoons.82
Inter-colonial Trade
Along with trade to Europe, women engaged in inter-colonial trade from

New Netherland to the English colonies. Cereals, flour, and other provi-
sions were not normally shipped to the Netherlands, but to other North
81CJVR, 1314, 16, 36, 52. Dutch women also invested as shareholders throughout the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. See Paul Frentrop, A History of Corporate Gover-
nance, 16022002 (Brussels: Deminor, 2002). For overseas investment by Dutch women,
see Ann M. Carlos and Larry Neal, Women Investors in Early Capital Markets, 17201725,
Financial History Review 11, no. 2 (2004): 219, in which the authors note that [f]oreign
female shareholders, as were foreign male shareholders, were predominantly Dutch: 155
of the total 205 foreign women lived in the Netherlands. While the authors discussed
investment in the South Sea Bubble and the years immediately following, for our purposes
it demonstrates the broad basis for Dutch womens investment activity.
82CJVR, 52. The correspondence notes Talckiens various overseas trading activities
through 1659. Talckiens trading activities were not especially out of character for servants.
One economic historian describes how [m]erchants, artisans and even servants rushed to
acquire shares when subscription to VOC shares became available in 1602. See Niall Fer-
guson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (New York: The Penguin Press,
2008), 12829. Examining the tulip mania of the seventeenth century, another historian
notes how Nobles, citizens, farmers, mechanics, seamen, footmen, maid-servants, even
chimney-sweeps and old clotheswomen, dabbled in tulips. See Charles Mackay, Extraor-
dinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841; repr., New York: Three Rivers
Press, 1980), 97. Investment was not limited by class, but rather by capital.
American colonies, or to the West Indies. Merchants, men and women,

living in New Amsterdam and Beverwijck were involved in complex
multilateral trading networks, some of which included the use of bills of
exchange.
For example, women traded in Virginia for tobacco, which merchants
considered superior to New Netherland-grown tobacco. Maria Polet quite
likely married her second husband, Mattheus de Vos, with an antenup-
tial agreement as she had a son from her first marriage. A tavern owner,
Maria traded on her own and was probably buying tobacco when she sent
advice from Virginia to Mattheus about an obligation for which she was
security. He, in turn, told the court that he had nothing to do with the
obligation, as he had no community in his wifes property.83 Christina
Capoens was sued for payment of 1,128 pounds of tobacco according to
her note and seventy-five pounds loaned on her account. She said she was
not obligated to pay in New Amsterdam but in Virginia and had not been
able to go there.84 Then there was Aeltje Mareschalck who was active in
several enterprises. At least one was in the tobacco trade as Aeltje was
sued for freight on five hogsheads of tobacco shipped to her from Virginia.
Just how or if she was dealing in ox hides and sewant is not clear, but a
court case in which she was sued for an obligation of 201 guilders to be
paid in ox hides and twenty-four guilders in sewant suggests that these
also may have been items of trade.85
Women also made note in testamentary documents of their trading
activities. Maritie Jans Joncke, widow of Cornelis van Langevelde, engaged
in trade with New Englanders. In childbed and ill with chickenpox in 1663,
she declared before the notary public, Walewyn van der Veen, an inven-
tory of debts owed to her. For instance, Jan Koopal the younger, living in
Stamfort in New England, owed her for half a yacht valued at fifty pounds
sterling payable in New England value on which is paid a tub of butter
of about 56 lbs., English weight, and 5 bushels of maize. From the miller,
Nathaniel Mason, at Narrewack [Norwich] in New England, she was
owed twelve bushels of maize. And in partnership with Albert Albertsen,
she was owed a hogshead of prunes, bushels of maize, and butter, all
located in Stamfort. She also declared her debts payable according to
83RNA, 2: 333, 363.

84RNA, 1: 148.
85RNA, 4: 31416.
the bargains she had struck in either beavers or wampum.86 Fortunately

for Marities family and business, she did not die.
Intra-colonial Trade
Women also took items to Beverwijck to trade for furs or to sell to the
traders who dealt with the Indians during the trading season. One woman
took strung wampum to Beverwijck, which was a useful and needed com-
modity in trade with both Indians and the Dutch. As we have seen, Maritie
Jan Joncke dealt in a variety of agricultural goods such as maize, prunes,
and butter as well as deerskins and rope, for which she was owed money.
Her debtors lived in Fort Orange/Beverwijck as well as in Connecticut.
And, she apparently used several shippers to distribute her goods as the
inventory also lists her indebtedness to them.87 Nor should we see these
transactions as local in nature. Beverwijck achieved a prominence in
regional markets. Bricks made in Beverwijck at Johanna de Hulters brick
kiln, for example, were in high demand at Fort Altena in the Delaware,
as were planks for closing up houses.88 The documentary evidence does
not reveal indications of women distributing goods to New Netherland vil-
lages or communities of Indians that, while located on the Hudson River,
could not be considered ports. Trade of this sort many times bypassed
government scrutiny.
Weekly Markets
Numerous towns in patria provided the opportunity to trade goods at

weekly or daily markets. In the market, women held licenses for their
own stalls, assisted their husbands or other family members at the family
stall, or found employment as wage laborers to a stallholder. In some food
trades, vegetable and fish in particular, significant numbers of women
were stallholders.89
86Executive Minutes, 2: 3436.

87Executive Minutes, 2: 36.
88Charles T. Gehring, trans. and ed., Delaware Papers (Dutch Period): A Collection of
Documents Pertaining to the Regulation of Affairs on the South River of New Netherland,
16481664 (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, Inc., 1981), 11112, 11415, 128.
89Danielle van den Heuvel, Women and Entrepreneurship: Female Traders in the North-
ern Netherlands, c. 15801815. (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2007), 93110.
New Amsterdam established a weekly market day of Monday beginning

in 1648 and at the same time, the council established an annual Free
Market for ten consecutive days, which shall begin on the first Monday
after Bartholemews day [24th of August] New style, corresponding to the
legal Amsterdam Fair.90 Open to both strangers (foreigners) and inhab-
itants, goods could be sold from a booth using Dutch weights and mea-
sures. In 1656, Stuyvesant and the council established a second market in
New Amsterdam held on Saturdays that focused on farm products.91 It
is uncertain whether women held stalls or assisted at New Amsterdams
markets. Nevertheless, it seems probable, given the significant propor-
tions of women who participated in the markets in patria, that women
took part in these markets as well.
1664: The English Arrive in New Netherland
Womens participation in the colonys commerce did not stop with the
English takeover of New Netherland in 1664, as English law was at first
not universally distributed throughout the colony. The English governor,
Richard Nicolls, wisely allowed the continuation of Dutch governmental
forms, particularly in the northern and southern reaches of the colony. In
early 1665, Nicolls placed the English towns on Long Island and the New
York municipal court, both of which had been under Dutch rule, under the
Dukes Laws. Yet, women continued to trade and Margaret Hardenbroeck
still went with her ships abroad, apparently sometimes as the supercargo.
Now, though, she stopped in England on her trips to and from the Dutch
Republic. In Beverwijck, women still traded during the trading season, still
appeared in court on their own in debt, and other cases, and still repre-
sented their husbands businesses in court when needed.92
In July 1686, Albany finally became a city in the English form. The new
English administrators divided the surrounding area into wards, and pro-
scribed that all future records be kept in English. The whole colony was
firmly under English rule and the Dukes Laws.93 Yet, it took a while for
90Laws and Ordinances of New Netherland, 16381674, 8689.

91Laws and Ordinances of New Netherland, 16381674, 251.
92Robert C. Ritchie, The Dukes Province: A Study of New York Politics and Society, 1664
1691 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 946. See also Michael
Kammen, Colonial New York: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 7399.
93Ritchie, The Dukes Province, 946; Kammen, Colonial New York, 7399.
married women to finally be tucked under the coverture of their husbands.

The Dutch inheritance practices that allowed women to receive half of
the estate when widowed, and the children the other half, lasted until
just past the end of the century. Maria van Rensselaer traded until her
death in 1689, as did Margaret Hardenbroeck and probably other women
merchants and traders who are not visible in the records.94 The letters of
Alida Schuyler Livingston from 1680 to 1726 also reveal an independent
woman. Alida was born in 1656 to Beverwijck merchant and landowner
Philip Pieterse Schuyler and Margaretta van Slichtenhorst. For twenty-
eight years after Philip Schuyler died in 1683, Alidas mother managed the
Schuyler estate.95 Perhaps watching her mother engage in commercial
activities and the fact that Alida was born into the Dutch culture, made
management and business acumen second nature to her.
Nevertheless, the declining number of women in trade in the former
New Netherland was inevitable under English rule. Forty-six women
traders were present in Beverwijck/Albany in the years 165464, ten in
166574, thirteen in 167584, six in 168594, and none in 16951700. The
New Amsterdam/ New York figures are for 165363 134 women traders,
and for 166474 forty-three women traders.96 It was not the men, the soci-
ety, or Dutch law that ultimately curtailed womens trading rights. It was
English control of the colony and the restrictive English laws that did.
Conclusion
Trade was a primary component of the commercial society of the Dutch

Republic. Women were an accepted part of that society, supported, as we
have seen, by the legal system that allowed them to participate in trade.
Societys acceptance of their position in trades large and small, and the
underpinning of the Dutch legal system, were transferred to and embed-
ded in the colony of New Netherland. Given these rights, women received
no special treatment, but were treated the same as men in court and
notarial proceedings. When they appeared for their husbands, the courts
and colonial officials treated women the same as their husbands would
94For Margaret Hardenbroecks trading activity, specifically her actions on her own
ship during English rule, see Jasper Dankers and Peter Sluyter, Journal of a Voyage to New
York and a Tour in Several of the American Colonies in 167980, trans. and ed. Henry C.
Murphy (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Gregg Press, 1967), 1, 5, 12, 22, 37, 53, 62, 86, 106.
95Biemer, Business Letters of Alida Schuyler Livingston, 16801720, 184.
96Biemer, Women and Property in Colonial New York, 7.
have been treated. Particularly for large and medium merchants and trad-
ers, a good credit rating, so necessary in obtaining loans or contracting for
services, was as important as would be a mans commercial standing. Also
a familiar part of womens lives in New Netherland were the rivers that
provided the travel for their commercefurs and agricultural products
from Beverwijck to New Amsterdam, and from New Amsterdam down the
South River (Delaware River) to Virginia to purchase prime tobacco which
would be then sent across the ocean to Amsterdam. The processes of trad-
ing in the Dutch Republic were repeated in New Netherland, supported
by the laws, and societys acceptance that enabled women to engage in
trade. These women, even at a modest level, had commercial acumen
and so-called commercial complexities presented few problems for Dutch
women, such capable entrepreneurs, in this age.
CAN SHE BE A WOMAN? GENDER AND CONTRABAND
IN THE REVOLUTIONARY ATLANTIC
Ernst Pijning
Jeanne dEntremeuse was a most unusual prisoner in the Lisbon dungeon

in 1799. The superintendent of police did not know what should be done
with her. He wondered if she should be prosecuted for her illegal com-
mercial activities in Brazil, or as a spy for the French revolutionary gov-
ernment. Her commercial activities had been endorsed by an impressive
array of letters of recommendation from Carioca merchants. Indeed, she
was so successful in her transactions, and she had obtained the support
of so many distinguished merchants in Rio de Janeiro, that the inspector
called Jeanne dEntremeuses gender into question. He therefore ordered
that two women or two medical doctors of esteem declare that she really
is a woman, because it is possible that she is a man in disguise who uses
this mask to get easier access to the colonies.1 The historical record does
not admit of the same uncertainty regarding Jeanne dEntremeuses sex
that exercised Lisbons superintendent of police, but his inquiry invites
consideration of his conceptualization of gender. Such an extraordinary
statement also leads one to ask how dEntremeuse came to be so success-
ful in her commercial ventures, despite the supposed barriers to womens
participation in such activities, that she could meet the superintendents
expectations for masculine behavior.
Answering this question seems all the more important when one con-
siders that, as the work of several Atlantic and Indian Ocean historians
has shown, Mme. dEntremeuses commercial activities between the Por-
tuguese, Spanish, and French colonies in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean
areas were not unusual for long-distance merchants.2 Between 1796 and
1Duas mulheres ou dois cirurgioens de probidade, para declarar se he na realidade

mulher, por quanto pode acontecer que seja hum homem assim disfarado, para com mais
facilidade entrar nas colonias, Dispatch from Diogo Ignacio de Pina Manique to Pedro
Duarte da Silva, October 1, 1799, Arquivo Histrico da Itamaraty [AHI] (Rio de Janeiro),
III-30, Lata 185, mao 2, fl. 50r.
2See for instance Zacarias Moutoukias, Contrabando y control colonial en el siglo XVII
(Buenos Aires: Bibliotecas Universitarias, 1988); Maria Jlia de Oliveira e Silva, Fidalgos-
mercadores no sculo XVIII (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional/Casa da Moeda, 1992); Gedalia
Yogev, Diamonds and Coral: Anglo-Dutch Jews and Eighteenth-Century Trade (Leicester:
216 ernst pijning
1802 she traveled through the Atlantic and Indian Oceans engaging in
commercial activities between French, Portuguese, and Spanish colonies.
These transnational commercial actions were illegal according to Portu-
guese law, since only Portuguese merchants were able to trade directly
to Brazil. Yet in practice, local officials condoned many commercial
transactions, as long as the merchants operated with the consent of the
local authorities.3 Arrests for disobeying Portuguese commercial laws did
occur, but by and large only when merchants transgressed the boundar-
ies defined by the norms and values of local society itself. The imprison-
ment of Jeanne dEntremeuse is important, then, because it identifies the
boundaries of acceptable behavior in late eighteenth-century Brazil and
Portugal and, as will become apparent, the wider Atlantic world.
Why was Jeanne dEntremeuse arrested in Lisbon and not in Rio de
Janeiro? To begin with, being a Frenchwoman made her very unpopular
with Pina Manique, the Portuguese superintendent of police in Lisbon,
ever vigilant as he was for Republican (i.e. French) spies.4 In contrast, she
had been well-received in Brazil. The mercantile and governing elites of
Rio de Janeiro and Salvador, for example, adored her charms, her persis-
tence, and her cultured ways through which she formed her mercantile
networks. The superintendents final decision for Jeanne dEntremeuses
arrest and subsequent strip-search was based on his inability to compre-
hend that colonial officials and merchants could have allowed a Republican
Frenchwoman to negotiate this challenging world of commercial transac-
tions. Indeed, while ostensibly his concern was Jeanne dEntremeuses
possible masculinity, the superintendents order suggested that it was
actually Jeannes femininity that gave her an advantage in her efforts to
prolong her stay in Brazil and gain access to forbidden markets.
Leicester University Press, 1978); James C. Boyajian, Portuguese Trade in Asia under the
Habsburgs, 15801640 (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993);
Fabrcio Pereira Prado, A colnia do Sacramento: O extremo sul da Amrica portuguesa no
sculo XVIII (Porto Alegre: Fumproarte, 2002).
3On this interpretation of contraband trade see Ernst Pijning, The Meaning of Illegal-
ity: Contraband Trade in Eighteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro, Revista do Instituto Histrico
e Geogrfico Brasileiro 164, no. 419 (2003): 89105.
4Maria Fernanda Baptista Bicalho, Joana dEntremeuse: uma contrabandista entre
a insinuao e a circunspeo, in Retratos do Imprio: Trajetrias individuais no mundo
portugus nos sculos XVI a XIX, eds. Ronaldo Vainfas, Georgina Silva dos Santos and Guil-
herme Pereira das Neves (Niteri, RJ: Editora da Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro,
2006), 109111; Joaquim Verssimo Serro, Histria de Portugal 5th ed. (Lisbon: Verbo, 1997)
6:34448; F. A. Oliveira Martins, Histria de Portugal (Lisbon: Guimares & Cia. Editores,
1951), 2: 25558.
can she be a woman? 217
The actions of the superintendent demonstrate how much ideas

about appropriate male and female behavior were changing during the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In this volatile political
and economic world, women like Mme. dEntremeuse had to negotiate
the constraints and opportunities related to their gender in very differ-
ent and rapidly changing societies. In theory, one of the principal con-
straints she faced was the precept that women in the Iberian world had
to be secluded and absent from economic life. Of the few elite women
who did go over to Brazil, many supposedly aspired to enter convents.
Yet the most recent historiography on women in the Lusophone world
contradicts this vision. Darlene Abreu-Ferreira and Ivana Elbl challenge
the notion that Portuguese womens absence from economic life and their
enclosure in convents was caused by male jealousy. Even a cursory look
at archival collections in Portugal and the Lusophone world reveals an
abundance of materials on women working, negotiating, buying, selling,
borrowing, lending, suingwomen who were too busy to live up to any
stereotype.5 While both authors recognize that there were restraints on
female mobility (they point out that most women did not roam far from
their homes), they attribute this to the pre-industrial household econ-
omy rather than cultural practices in the Iberian world.6 Similarly, Allyson
Poska has recently investigated gender roles in early modern Galicia. She
notes that feminist historians have corrected the illusion that women
derived their honour from their chastity and men derived theirs from the
maintenance of the chastity of women in their care as was expressed
in early modern plays and prescriptive literature.7 Indeed, contemporary
literature reflected patriarchal political goals rather than reality. As Mary
Elizabeth Perry explains, this anti-female discourse presented a frame-
work for the implementation of a variety of order-restoring measures that
increased central authority at the expense of individual autonomy and
local culture.8 In short, government officials as well as husbands, fathers,
and men in general attempted to increase their authority by regulation
of gender roles and of womens economic possibilities, but they were not
always successful.
5Darlene Abreu-Ferreira and Ivana Elbl, Women in the Late Medieval and Early Mod-
ern Lusophone World: An Introduction, Portuguese Studies Review 13, nos. 12 (2005, publ.
2007): xxi.
6Abreu-Ferreira and Elbl, Women, xxi.
7Allyson M. Poska, Women and Authority in Early Modern Spain: The Peasants of Galicia
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 8.
8Mary Elizabeth Perry, Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1990), 177, and Poska, Women and Authority, 6.
218 ernst pijning
But Jeanne dEntremeuse had developed her network-building and

mercantile skills long before she met Lisbons superintendent of police in
1799. It was the French Revolution and the collapse of colonial commer-
cial relations in its wake that offered unexpected opportunities to Mme.
dEntremeuse to make use of newly created spaces to outmaneuver men
who used commercial and political regulations to object to a too-public
female presence. Mme. dEntremeuses mobility and ability to engage in
her commercial activities cannot be fully understood, however, without
an examination of her family background in France and the experiences
that took her from France to Mauritius and, finally, to Brazil.
Jeanne dEntremeuse was the daughter of a Muscovite and the
daughter-in-law of a French notable, a background that helped her on
her odyssey between Mauritius and France.9 Status was all-important in
this world. When Jeanne Thomase Jouanin (her family name) married as
a teenager just before the outbreak of the French Revolution, she must
have made a good match for Daniel dEntremeuse, a cavalry officer and a
notables son. Having married this vestige of the ancien rgime at an early
age, she and her husband soon expanded the family with the birth of at
least two daughters, both of whom were born in Alicante, Spain.10
The French Revolution, however, temporarily disrupted Mme. dEntre-
meuses personal network. Indeed, her connections became a burden
rather than an asset. Her father-in-law, initially able to keep his position
and status soon lost them with the advent of the radical phrase ushered in
by Robespierre.11 Worse still, by 1793 Jeanne dEntremeuses husband had
died, and she had to flee the country in the midst of the Reign of Terror.12
9Based on Perguntas judiciaes feitas a Joanna dEntremeuse preza na cadeia do

Castello, October 5, 15, and 18, 1799, AHI, II-30, Lata 185, mao 2, fl. 25v-36r. Unfortu-
nately, little more is known about Jeanne dEntremeuses background other than what she
responded during these interrogations.
10Genealogy of Daniel Entremeuse at http://gw1.geneanet.org/index.php3?b=hmaurel
&lang=en;p=daniel;n=d+entremeuse, accessed September 15, 2011.
11It is possible that Lonard dEntremeuse worked as a member of the legal profession
in some capacity. There was in any case an avocat en Parlement named Lonard Xavier
dEntremeuse: genealogy of Lonard Xavier dEntremeuse at http://geneastar.geneanet.
org/gw/index.php3?b=geneastar&lang=en;m=P;v=Lonard+Xavier;t=A, accessed Septem-
ber 15, 2011; Edmond Snemaud and Paul Larent, eds., Inventaires sommaire des Archives
dpartmentales antrieures 1790: Ardennes (Charleville: F. Devin & A. Anciaux, 1890), 39.
Other sources, however, list him as secrtaire de la Grande Matrise des Eaux et Forts de
Metz: Socit dtudes de la Cambrai, Bulletin 26-27 (1926): 102. This same source indicates
that Lonard dEntremeuse later obtained a position in the dpartment de Ardennes, mak-
ing it uncertain how long dEntremeuse was without an office.
12Relao dos papeis apprehendidos pelo Dezembargador Corregedor de Rosio a Joanna
dEntremeuse, abordo da Galera Confiana, Arquivo Histrico Ultramarino [AHU] (Lis-
bon), Rio de Janeiro, p.a. (papeis avulsos), caixa 200, doc. 35. Her passport is dated 1792.
Contemporary male interpretations of this episode of Jeanne dEntremeuses

life expressed the familiar trope of female weakness and sentimentality. One
Abb Sicard, arrested during the Terror, referred to Mme. dEntremeuse in
an account of his experiences as the mother of two young persons whose
early studies I had directed, and the mother cherished me, as her most
tender brother, and her children as their father.13 According to Father
Sicards story, gender roles stood central in Mme. dEntremeuses decision
to leave the country. He lamented his inability to provide male protection
to compensate for her female weakness, and blamed his own correspon-
dence for Mme. dEntremeuses daughters death:
I ought not forget the effect which the note I had written to her mother
produced on the heart of young Eleonore dEntremeuse. It had given her a
death-blow. Alas! After having languished more than a year, in inexpressible
sufferings, she perished...leaving me eternal regrets.14
A melodramatic and surprising end for a young woman who later jour-
neyed to Mauritius.
Although Abb Sicards account of the dEntremeuses clearly cannot
be taken at face value, his vision about women is telling. The emotion-
ally laden interpretation of events proposed by the priest, that women
were so feeble at heart that they could die as a consequence of their
own emotional suffering, sounds more like a Charles Dickens novel than
something based in reality. Indeed, the editors of Sicards correspondence
later corrected the priests account by alluding to the young widows own
actions to restore her daughters health by leaving behind the unhealthy
environment of revolutionary Paris: Since this relation was penned, we
have learned that the young person is not dead. Her restoration, and the
preservation of her health, have been the result of a long voyage, which
her mother made her take. She is at present in the Isle of France.15 With
13La mre de deux jeunes personnes dont javais dirig les premires tudes, et qui me
chrissaient, lune comme le frre le plus tendre, les autres comme leur pre, Relation
addresse par M. lAbb Sicard, instituteur des sourds et muets, a un de ses amis, sur les
dangers quil a courus les 2 et 3 Setembre 1792, in Mmoires sur les journes de Septembre
1792, par M. Journiac de Saint-Mard, Mme la Marquise de Fausse Lendry, lAbb Sicard, et
M. Gabriel-Aim Jourdan, prsident du district du Petit Augustin; suivis des dlibrations
prises par la Commune de Paris et des proxs-verbaux de la Mairie de Versailles (Paris: Bau-
doins Frres, libraires diteurs, 1823), 123.
14The Reign of Terror: A Collection of Authentic Narratives of the Horrors Committed by
the Revolutionary Government of France under Marat and Robespierre (London: printed for
W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 1826), 1: 146.
15Reign of Terror, 1: 148.
220 ernst pijning
that, the priests story stood corrected; it was the widow who made the
decision to journey far away from Revolutionary France to Mauritius (Isle
of France/le de France). It is quite possible that she had family connec-
tions on this Indian Ocean island, and it had the additional advantage
that the territory was still part of France, but far enough away to serve as
a shelter from the unrest convulsing the metropole.
The poisonous environment of revolutionary Paris, rather than Mme.
dEntremeuses daughters health, was very likely the main reason for the
dEntremeuse familys departure. Later, when Jeanne dEntremeuse was
interrogated in the Lisbon dungeons, she claimed that her father-in-law,
recently dismissed by the Robespierre regime, had left for the Champagne
region with one of her daughters.16 In the meantime the twenty-seven-
year-old Mme. dEntremeuse and her other two daughters had journeyed
far away from France to the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius. This choice
of refuge was logical for two reasons. First, it was relatively safe, since
the local population was not so ardently supportive of the Revolution as
to follow the example of their fellows in revolutionary Paris. Yet, at the
same time, Mauritius was still familiar in that it was part of the Franco-
phone world with ample opportunities for ambitious persons who did not
mind pursuing commercial activities.17 As a plantation island Mauritius
had close commercial connections to the Indian Ocean and the Atlan-
tic world. For Jeanne dEntremeuse it became an ideal place to hide, to
marry off her daughters, and to engage in profitable commercial activities
related to overseas trade as well as privateering.
Mme. dEntremeuse had admittedly taken a calculated risk by fleeing
mainland France, leaving her family and her personal network behind.
She must have evaluated the risks. On the one hand, it was likely that
if she stayed she might have been arrested, as indeed happened with at
least two individuals with the Entremeuse surname.18 On the other hand,
16Perguntas judiciaes feitas a Joanna dEntremeuse preza na cadeia do Castello, Octo-

ber 5, 15, and 18, 1799, AHI, II-30, Lata 185, mao 2, fl. 33v.
17Amde Nagapen, Histoire de la Colonie: Isle de France-le Maurice, 17211768 (Port
Louis: Diocse de Port Louis, 1996), 4547. Jeanne dEntremeuse made sure she was not
considered an emigr. In her interrogation she mentioned specifically when leaving
Mauritius she was doing this no como emigrada mas com Pasaporte do General Gov-
ernador, e com recomendao particular para o Vice Rey de Buenos Aires, Perguntas
judiciaes feitas a Joanna dEntremeuse preza na cadeia do Castello, October 5, 1799, AHI,
II-30, Lata 185, mao 2, fl. 28r.
18It might very well have been that a relative had been arrested as the papers of the
Public Accuser stated Dentremeuse (ou DEntremeuse), secrtaire des Eaux et Forts de
la gnralit de Metz, dtenu la Conciergerie, 8 thermidor [1793/An III], in Dossiers
du Tribunal Rvolutionaire (1793an III): Papiers de laccusateur public Fourquier-Tinville:
the French authorities viewed fleeing the country as unpatriotic, espe-

cially where upper-echelon families were concerned, and Robespierres
revolutionary regime started to confiscate the property of migrs, even
condemning them to civil death in some cases.19 Technically, Mme.
dEntremeuse had not left France, as she had stayed within the French
empire. However, she was walking on a tightrope. Mme. dEntremeuse did
have good reason for fleeing, for by no means were elite women exempt
from the draconian legislation of the revolutionary regime. Thus if the
widow had chosen to remain in revolutionary France, she might have
fallen victim to the Law of the Suspects in the fall of 1793, according to
which anyone could be arrested for being suspected of having committed
an action deemed as counter-revolutionary.20
Interestingly, Jeanne dEntremeuse left just as the French Revolution
had begun to galvanize the issue of womens roles in French society. If
men had demanded equality first, now so too did women. From the sans-
culottes to the upper class, women strove for more political and social
equality. They participated in the political process, even though men tried
to restrict their roles after the fall of 1793 by closing the female politi-
cal societies.21 Among women in France (as elsewhere in early modern
Europe), widows, of course, had always been a special category. Even
during the Old Regime, upper-class women often became empowered
through widowhood or if their husbands were absent. As Janine Marie
Lanza put it in her research concerning guild masters widows, early
modern French society was ready to treat the widow like an honorary
Inventaire analytique des articles W111 154, ed. Denis Habib (Paris: Archives Nationalles,
2000), 125. Leonard dEntremeuse was imprisoned in 1791, and he was a family member
of an administrator of the Directorate in the Ardennes, who made several attempts to
free him from these circumstances and is himself listed as a member of this director-
ate and, as noted, as secrtaire de la Grande Matrise des Eaux et Forts de Metz (see
Bulletin, 102). Gustave Bord, La Conspiration Rvolutionnaire de 1789: Les complicesles
victimes (Paris: Bibliothque dHistoire Moderne, 1909), 42526. And, of course, Jeanne
dEntremeuses father-in-laws name was Lonard dEntremeuse. Perguntas judiciaes fei-
tas a Joanna dEntremeuse preza na cadeia do Castello, October 15, 1799, AHI, II-30, Lata
185, mao 2, fl. 33v.
19Jennifer Ngaire Heuer, The Family and the Nation: Gender and Citizenship in Revo-
lutionary France, 17891830 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 29. According to
Heuer, those proclaimed civilly dead were stripped of all property, rights and titles in
France....But civil death potentially dissolved familial as well as national bonds. The mak-
ers of the new order where thus forced to consider whether civil death ended marriage in
France, and whether heads of households who were declared to be civilly dead retained
rights in France over their wives and children. Heuer, Family and the Nation, 12.
20Heuer, Family and the Nation, 51.
21Heuer, Family and the Nation, 29, 50.
222 ernst pijning
man, in order to ensure the smooth devolution of property as well as the

integrity of the family.22 According to Lanza, widows do not neatly fit
into either gender category, and like historians of early modern Spain,
she contrasts this complex reality with the literary simplifications of wid-
ows such as one finds in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which depicted women
as unstable, irrational, incapable of controlling their sexual urges, in a
word untrustworthy.23 As was apparent from the Portuguese superinten-
dent of polices reaction to her, Jeanne dEntremeuse was to encounter
similar confusion concerning her womanhood on what ultimately became
her long journey home.
Mme. dEntremeuse, on the other hand, suffered from no prescrip-
tive delusions. She considered herself to be the main provider for her
entire family, and she remained in contact with France. Fortunately,
the dEntremeuse family fortunes improved over the next four years. In
Mauritius, Mme. dEntremeuse was able to marry off the two daughters
who had accompanied her there to local merchants and straighten out
her finances. According to the widows story, in Champagne, the political
prospects of her father-in-law, Lonard dEntremeuse, took a turn for the
better. After the Thermidorian Reaction in 1794, talk of appointing the
seventy-seven-year-old magistrate as a district prefect in Mauritius made
the rounds; at least that is what she wanted the Portuguese authorities to
believe later when they interrogated her in Lisbon. If this testimony is to
be believed, Mme. dEntremeuses decision to leave France seemed to be
paying off. However, given Lonard dEntremeuses dire financial circum-
stances and the additional financial responsibilities of the nine-year-old
granddaughter under his care, he called for his daughter-in-laws assis-
tance. The widow decided to return to France to reunite with her remain-
ing daughter, to support her father-in-laws bid to obtain an appointment
as prefect of Mauritius, and to earn some money.24
These were ambitious goals, and they called for her to enter the
seemingly traditionally male sphere of handling money. Yet it was not
uncommon for widows to engage in long-distance commerce. Violet Bar-
bour, for instance, mentions the investments of Dutch widows in the
22Janine Marie Lanza, Family Making and Family Breaking: Widows in Early Modern
France, (PhD diss., Cornell University, 1996), 11.
23Lanza, Family Making and Family Breaking, 11.
24Interrogation of Joanna dEntremeuse, October 5, 1799, AHI, III-30, Lata 185, mao
2, fl. 26v, 30r.
s eventeenth-century Mediterranean trade. 25 Similarly, Allyson Poskas

Galician peasant widows were active heads of households who were used
to this position given the extended absences of men.26 Darlene Abreu-
Ferreira too has demonstrated that Portuguese women had a strong
presence in commercial transactions, including the area of long-distance
trade.27 Jeanne dEntremeuse was perhaps exceptional in that she actually
sailed long distances herself. Gayle Brunelle (among others) has suggested
that in the case of early modern France, at least, mobility presented cer-
tain challenges to women of any station and at any stage in their lifecycle
that men did not ever have to face.28 Mme. dEntremeuse could not, in
the end, escape these obstacles entirely. As her case will show, her long-
distance voyages and her performance in the public sphere were ulti-
mately used by authoritarian male functionaries to restrict her actions.
But she could stretch the boundaries of the acceptable for a time.
What explains Mme. dEntremeuses success up to the time of her
arrest was her ability to resolve the tension between the French and Por-
tuguese authorities idyllic vision of female immobility and the reality of
her mobile existence by staying put for half a year every time she entered
a major port city on her way back to France. She subsequently used male
intermediaries in her commercial transactions, through whom she traded
and who helped her to establish essential relationships with the highest
local authorities. Despite all these precautions, Mme. dEntremeuses high
profile and public life would eventually make her case notorious.
Mme. dEntremeuses stay as a widowed woman in Mauritius had pre-
pared her well for the unexpectedly long and complicated journey that lay
ahead of her, for her arrival in France was ultimately delayed until 1800.
It was not inconceivable that Mme. dEntremeuse had engaged in a wide
variety of commercial activities on this island. Mauritius, or, as it was also
known, le de France, was strategically situated for commerce and priva-
teering in the Indian Ocean. As in the Iberian Atlantic, transnational con-
tacts between French merchants in Mauritius and Portuguese settlers, in
this case in Mozambique, were frequent. These trans-imperial ties operated
chiefly through an illegal trade in slaves. This trade was an essential part of
25Violet Barbour, Capitalism in Amsterdam in the 17th Century, 2nd ed. (Ann Arbor, MI:
University of Michigan Press, 1966), 140.
26Poska, Women and Authority, 163.
27Darlene Abreu-Ferreira, Womens Property, Womens Life: A Look at Early Modern
Portugal, Portuguese Studies Review 13, nos. 12 (2005, publ. 2007): 287303.
28See Gayle K. Brunelles essay in this volume.
224 ernst pijning
Mauritiuss economy, and equally important for Mozambique since resup-

ply of the enslaved Mozambican labor force was needed to provide the local
plantations with the necessary labor force.29 This trade was one of several
in which the island served as a go-between station for various commercial
activities unfolding across the Indian Ocean. Through these involvements
its locally-based French merchants had created multi-national webs of con-
nections tying them to many ports.30 During the wars of the French Revo-
lution many a merchant became a privateer, roaming not only the Asian
seas but also the Southern Atlantic.31 The widow must have cultivated good
relations with this adventurous breed of merchant/privateers. Both daugh-
ters married local merchants.32 Moreover, a confiscated letter from such
a privateer captain on the Angolan coast that came into the hands of the
Brazilian viceroy revealed the close involvement of Jeanne dEntremeuses
daughter Elonore with her husband Louis Frdrique Descroizilless illegal
trading activities.33 This conspicuous epistle would later have dire conse-
quences when Mme. dEntremeuse arrived in Lisbon.
The enterprising widow would likely have been aware of the risks of
her future enterprises in the Atlantic when she embarked on board the
perhaps inaptly named Boa Viagem (Good Journey) on her intended voy-
age from Mauritius to France in October 1796, just after the marriage of
her second daughter.34 The fact that the captain had accepted her as a
29Adelto Gonalves, Gonzaga, um poeta do ilumismo (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova

Fronteira, 1999), 34546; Edward A. Alpers, Ivory and Slaves: Changing Patterns of Interna-
tional Trade in East Central Africa to the Later Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1975), 151; Paul Mazery, Mozambique and the Napoleonic Wars: A Study
of Documentation in the Arquivo Histrico Ultramarino, Studia 37 (December 1973): 387
88. Abdul Sheriff, Slave Trade and Slave Routes of the East African Coast, in Slave Routes
and Oral Traditions in Southeastern Africa, eds. Benigna Zimba, Edward Alpers and Allen
Isaacman (Maputo, Mozambique: Filsom Entertainment Lda, 2005), 26, points out that
the slave trade continued at a decreased level during the wars of the French Revolution.
30Auguste Toussaint, Le Mirage des Iles: Le ngoce franais aux Mascareignes au XVIIIe
sicle (Aix-en-Provence: EDISUD, 1977), 3335.
31H. C. M. Austen, Sea Fights and Corsairs of the Indian Ocean: Being the Naval History
of Mauritius from 1715 to 1810 (Port Louis: R.W. Brooks, 1935).
32Genealogy of Marie Elonore Aurore dEntremeuse at http://gw1.geneanet.org/index
.php3?b=hmaurel&lang=en;p=charlotte+bernarde;n=d+entremeuse,accessedSeptem-
ber15, 2011.
33Letter Mariette to Mr. Descroiselles, May 3, 1799, Arquivo Nacional de Rio de Janeiro
[ANRJ], Colonial [Col.], caixa 502, pc. 1.
34Genealogy of Marie Elonore Aurore dEntremeuse. Marie Elonore Aurore
dEntremeuse married Louis Frdrique Descroizilles on September 11, 1796. I assume
that the letter quoted above was written by Jeanne dEntremeuses eldest daughter to her
husband. For the departure date of the Boa Viagem see interrogations of the crew of the
Boa Viagem, February 1797, ANRJ, Col., caixa 292, pc. 2.
passenger was telling proof of the new network of friends she had been
able to create on the island. The Boa Viagem was bound for Montevideo
(then part of the fairly recently created Spanish Viceroyalty of the Ro
de la Plata), a port used by merchants from Mauritius and a destination
that would have placed Jeanne dEntremeuse at the halfway point on her
journey to Europe. The Boa Viagem risked capture given the belliger-
ent situation during the Napoleonic wars. Any privateer from an oppos-
ing country could easily capture and ransom the nominally Spanish,
Montevideo-bound ship. Other risks were related to Spanish and Portu-
guese mercantile policies that excluded trade by foreigners. Multi-national
vessels tried to circumvent these policies by changing a vessels flag as
deemed appropriate.35 The vessels crew was certainly multi-cultural,
which the crew also used to its advantage in the dangerous zones of the
Atlantic.36 The captain, Eleuterio Tavares, claimed to be Portuguese, but
he lived and was married in the Philippines. Mme. dEntremeuse had at
least five fellow Frenchmen on board, accompanied by a Chinese mer-
chant and an American sailor. There was also a substantial Portuguese
presence on board. They had allegedly been captured by French privateers
in the Indian Ocean and the captain of the Boa Viagem was charitably
taking it upon himself to return them to Portuguese territory. Yet, the cap-
tain, crew, and passengers also carried an impressive amount of trading
goods. Mme. dEntremeuses property alone amounted to 30,000 cruzados
(1.5 years salary for the Brazilian viceroy) in money and trading goods.
Considering its crew were supposedly refugees, the ship carried a surpris-
ingly rich cargo.37
35For a sense for the complexities the following are helpful: Jacques A. Barbier, Pen-
insular Finance and Colonial Trade: The Dilemma of Charles IVs Spain, Journal of Latin
American Studies 12, no. 1 (May 1980): 2137; Jerry W. Cooney, Neutral Vessels and Platine
Slavers: Building a Viceregal Merchant Marine, Journal of Latin American Studies 18, no.1
(May 1986): 2539; A. J. R. Russell-Wood, The Portuguese Empire, 14151808: A World on
the Move 2nd ed. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 13841; Zacharias
Moutoukias, Rseaux personnels et autorit coloniale: Les ngociants de Buenos Aires au
XVIIIe sicle, Annales E.S.C. 47 (1992): 889914; Dauril Alden, Royal Government in Colo-
nial Brazil: With Special Reference to the Administration of Marquis of Lavradio, Viceroy,
17691779 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), 388417; Ernst
Pijning, Regulating Illegal Trade: Foreign Vessels in Brazilian Harbors, Portuguese Studies
Review 15, nos. 12 (2007, publ. 2009): 35365.
36Interrogations of the crew of the Boa Viagem, February 1797, ANRJ, Col., caixa 292,
pc. 2.
37Interrogation of Joanna dEntremeuse, October 18, 1799, AHI, III-30, Lata 185, mao 2,
fl. 35v.
226 ernst pijning
The real test of Mme. dEntremeuses commercial understanding came

after the Boa Viagem had called at the Cape of Good Hope. The Boa Viagem
then sailed with the currents counterclockwise through the South Atlantic
to Salvador in the Brazilian captaincy of Bahia (about 1900 miles north of
the intended destination of Montevideo). Since the vessel was sailing with
a Spanish flag, entry into Brazilian ports was, technically speaking, only
legal in case of distress. In addition, foreigners could be forbidden from
trading, except to cover the costs of the vessels repair, and were supposed
to pay double the normal amount of tax. This being the case, the Boa Via-
gem was admitted to the port, but the captain was not allowed to repair
the vessel under the pretense that he lacked the financial means to cover
the costs.38 So far, the behavior of captain and crew was standard. Quite a
few Spanish vessels had entered Brazilian ports under these pretexts, and
they were usually received without too much ado.39 Captain Tavares did
not, however, appreciate the governors refusal to accept cargo from the
Boa Viagem in payment of the cost of repairing the vessel. Moreover, he
may also have found the governors refusal to bend the rules, as was done
elsewhere in Brazil for a variety of foreigners, less than hospitable. Finally,
Tavares wanted to leave quickly, as rumors had it that a war between
Spain and Portugal was about to break out, which, the captain feared,
would almost certainly mean confiscation of his vessel.40
The superintendent of police in Lisbon seemed to have been correct in
his understanding that gender differences mattered in dealing with the
governor. Mme. dEntremeuse and the other French passengers must have
expected problems at this point, and, perhaps taking advantage of the
governors desire to protect the widow as well as the only family on board,
a French official with his wife and two daughters, they asked and received
permission to disembark after the Boa Viagems arrival on November 30,
1796. Thus, only the female passengers and one male in his capacity as
a family head were allowed to stay in Salvador.41 Once on shore, Mme.
38Carta Regia to viceroy, August 17, 1799, ANRJ, Col., caixa 715, pac. 1.
39Jerry W. Cooney, Oceanic Commerce and Platine Merchants, 17961806: The Chal-
lenge of War, The Americas 45, no. 4 (April 1989): 513, 51517.
40Interrogation of Francis Lang Finley, US sailor and 2nd pilot, April 6, 1797, ANRJ,
Col., caixa 492, pc. 2.
41The French official was a French captain named Antoine Ren Larcher. Since he
and his wife and two daughters disembarked and sailed two months after their arrival
on November 30, 1796, to Lisbon without incident, we can assume that they had little if
anything to do with the illegal trading activities in which Mme. dEntremeuse and other
members of the crew later took part. This is not to say, however, that Larcher had noth-
ing to answer for. In Lisbon the authorities showed some concern regarding his possibly
dEntremeuse petitioned the governor of Bahia, asking if she could store

her goods in the citys warehouses and wait until another vessel showed
up that might take her to her originally intended destination, Montevideo.
The governor graciously consented to this request, although he stipulated
that by storing her goods in the customs house, Mme. dEntremeuse natu-
rally could not trade them in the Brazilian port.42 Apparently, the gover-
nor did not see any problem with the French widows stay on Brazilian
soil, as long as he knew that she would eventually leave with her property
and complete her journey to Spanish Ro de la Plata.
While Mme. dEntremeuse stayed seven months in Salvador establish-
ing positive relationships with the merchant community, the other foreign
passengers on the ill-fated Boa Viagem were to regret that they had been
forced to stay on board the Spanish vessel. Meanwhile, Mme. dEntremeuse
was busy creating a new network of trading partners, and she was allowed
to stay longer than her supposedly more mobile male companions. Later,
the Overseas Council remarked on Jeanne dEntremeuses liberties in Sal-
vador that she was the most fortunate of them all, this woman who was
allowed to move freely through the city.43 Pina Manique, the Superinten-
dent of Police in Lisbon, said of her activities in Salvador and Rio de Janeiro
that because of her industry, her projects, her lively character, ingratiat-
ing and attractive, many inhabitants of these cities [Salvador and Rio de
Janeiro] gave her letters of recommendation to their correspondents at
having influenced Bahian elites with French revolutionary views, not an unfair assump-
tion with the popular political activity in Salvador da Bahia at this time, especially the
Conspiracy of Tailors of August 12, 1798. They would have been even more concerned had
they known that, soon after Larcher arrived in Lisbon, he sent two reports to the Direc-
tory indicating that the Bahian population was ready for a revolution, including a concrete
plan for a French fleet to conquer the former capital of Brazil. For the basics of the case
including Larchers arrival and departure dates see Lus Henrique Dias Tavares, Histria
da sedio intentada na Bahia em 1798 (a conspirao dos alfaiates) (So Paulo: Livraria
Pioneira Editora, 1975), 8182; Lus Henrique Dias Tavares, Histria da Bahia 10th ed. (Sal-
vador: Editora da Universidade Federal da Bahia, 2001), 185; Luiz Viana Filho, A Sabinada
(A Republica baiana de 1837) (Rio de Janeiro: Livraria Joze Olympio Editora, 1938), 25. For
a further discussion of this matter and for a copy of the mmoires see: Istvn Jansc and
Marco Morel, Novas perspectivas sobre a presena francesa na Bahia em torno de 1798,
Topoi 8, no. 14 (2007): 20632. The mmoires are dated April 24, 1797, and June 15, 1797,
with the first mmoire being a copy sent to the Executive Directory in Madrid.
42Minute of reponse to Lannes, w.d. [1802], ANTT, MNE, Legao da Frana, caixa
952.
43Sendo a mais feliz nelles, esta mulher, a quem se franqueou na mesma cidade.
Letter Overseas Council to prince regent, December 16, 1799, AHU, Bahia, p.a., caixa 216,
doc. 38.
228 ernst pijning
court [i.e. Lisbon].44 Not only did Mme. dEntremeuse build up ties to
individuals in Salvador, she later expanded that network all the way to
the Portuguese metropole. Unaware of the ultimate scope of these activi-
ties, the governors visions of the widows innocence and need for male
protection most likely made him decide to condone Mme. dEntremeuses
behavior and give in to her pleas to allow her to stay in Salvador. Mme.
dEntremeuse thereby obtained a rare opportunity that male travelers
did not usually have, to remain in a major Brazilian port city as a foreign
citizen. The governors actions were all the more surprising, since Mme.
dEntremeuse came from Republican France. The potential for a French
subject to spread revolutionary ideas was always regarded with concern
by the Portuguese authorities, a concern which the August 12, 1798 Con-
spiracy of Tailors, a year after Mme. dEntremeuses August 1797 depar-
ture from Salvador da Bahia, bore out.45 The widows fellow male travelers
experienced another fate, as they found that they could only trade beyond
the gaze of official scrutiny, and subsequently had to feel the full force of
the law in their continued voyage along the Brazilian coast when they
were caught in illegal dealings.
The dangers of such illegal commercial activities to male mobility
become clear when one considers the fate of the Boa Viagems crew after
it left the port of Salvador. Even the vessels route became more irregu-
lar once it had left Salvador. This rapid change from officially authorized
commerce to trading without consent first became obvious with the cap-
tains decision to sail to a smaller Brazilian port along the coast, where he
insisted that cheaper repairs could be obtained. Tavares was looking for
a small port lacking the military support of a Salvador, so that he could
intimidate the locals into repairing the vessel in exchange for some cargo.
At first, he tried to negotiate for the necessary repairs in some small har-
bors close to Salvador, where the Boa Viagem made some nighttime calls
to exchange goods with peddlers beyond the Bahian governors sphere of
influence. During one of these visits Tavares also got rid of three French
44Pela sua industria, pelos seos projectos, pela sua viveza character, tao insinuente,
e atrativa que muitos habitantes destas cidades [Salvador and Rio de Janeiro] lhe dero
cartas de recommendao dirigida aos seus correspondentes nesta corte. Dispatch Pina
Manique to Pedro Duarte da Silva, Lisbon, October 10, 1799, ANTT, IGP, 200, fl. 50v.
45Bicalho, Joana dEntremeuse, 102103. A year after Mme. dEntremeuse left, a major
conspiracy against the government in Salvador, the Conspiracy of Tailors, took place.
French ideas were seen as an important aspect of this revolt. The most recent book on
this conspiracy is Istvn Jansc, Na Bahia, contra o Imprio: Histria do ensaio de sedio
de 1798 (So Paulo and Salvador: HUCITEC-EDUFBA, 1996).
traders from Mauritius. The three Frenchmen were put off on the Bahian
coast in a rowboat, after which the Boa Viagem sailed southwards leaving
the three Frenchmen penniless and the captain more affluent as he kept
their goods.46
While the three Mauritius traders were left to shift for themselves,
Captain Tavares and his crew continued on with their illegal cabotage
trade along the Brazilian coast, still hoping to sell their trade goods
along the coast at better prices than they could hope for in Salvador.
Still southward-bound, the crew of the Boa Viagem asked fellow sailors it
encountered along the way for information on those ports with the fewest
defenses so that they would be able to conduct commercial activities on
their terms, and so that the vessel could not be confiscated if war should
break out between Spain and Portugal.47 They sailed to Parat, a small port
town south of Rio de Janeiro (the capital of Brazil and seat of the viceroy,
the Count of Resende). Parat had formerly been a known smugglers den
and was also the port where the oldest road to the gold mines reached the
Atlantic Ocean. The local authorities did not appreciate Captain Tavaress
breach of their jurisdictions, and they called in reinforcements from the
capital. The responding Carioca (i.e. Rio de Janeiro) official decided to
send the captured vessel to Rio de Janeiro, where, after the usual interro-
gations, the ships calling at Parat was judged against the rules. After the
inspectors found the ships cargo list, containing information about all the
illegal activities in which its captain and crew were involved, suspiciously
hidden under a furnace, the vessel was impounded. The Boa Viagem was
not declared a prize because she came from an enemy country. Rather
the issue at stake was the captain and crews illegal commercial dealings,
which they had deliberately conducted beyond the Brazilian viceroys
sphere of direct control.
Meanwhile, the three Frenchmen abandoned by Captain Tavares had
also set out for Rio de Janeiro since they had heard that the Boa Via-
gem was trapped in Parat. Once in the capital, however, the Frenchmen
learned how important good connections were to pursuing their case suc-
cessfully. Tavares was able to turn the tables on them and was free to
46Letter Mouffl, Sauvaget and Bonnafous to dom Rodigo de Sousa Coutinho, Septem-
ber 15, 1799, AHI, Lata 185, mao 1.
47For the case of the Boa Viagem see: Dispatch Count of Resende to Secretary of
State dom Rodrigo de Souza Coutinho, January 22, 1798; Carta regia to Count of Resende,
November 4, 1799; Dispatch Viceroy D. Fernando de Portugal to king, April 28, 1802, and
Consultation Overseas Council, June 28, 1799, AHU, Rio de Janeiro, p.a., caixa 168, doc. 15.
230 ernst pijning
use his local connections to improve his own situation, while the three
Frenchmen were kept as captives outside the city.48 Captain Tavares was
likely already familiar with the local commercial networks, which gave
him a free hand to save his goods and person from legal entanglement. In
addition, since the Napoleonic wars had resumed in Europe, the viceroy
had a good excuse to put the three Frenchmen under house arrest out-
side the city limits. Thus Tavares was able to combine the unassuming
mobility that men at sea enjoyed with a keen understanding of political
damage control to retain the sort of mobility that men typically had, while
the Frenchmen could not. One could say that Tavares had made up for
his failures with the governor of Salvador. He even recovered one of the
passengers he had left in Salvador. He left Rio de Janeiro for Montevideo
in fall of 1797, in the company of none other than Jeanne dEntremeuse,
who had prospered as well and may already at this point have begun to
establish a good working relationship with the viceroys wife and, through
her, the viceroy.49
Only under the viceroys successor, dom Fernando Joze de Portugal, did
the Frenchmen regain their liberty and only then could the royal order
to confiscate the Boa Viagem and Tavaress goods be fully executed, and
Tavares be revealed as the fugitive he was. By then, however, Tavares
had disappeared, leaving the three politically unconnected Frenchmen
he had stranded to petition for financial compensation from the Portu-
guese authorities, in which activity they were engaged until the year of
the French invasion of Portugal.50 All of the Boa Viagems international,
male passengers in fact were affected by its confiscation. The Cantonese
merchant Alon, for instance, had to wait two years for the return of his
goods as part of a royal pardon. The Portuguese Crown argued that Alon
48Petition Sauvaget and Bonnafous to dom Rodrigo de Souza Countinho, Sept. 15, 1799,
AHI, antes 1822, Lata 185, mao 1.
49Count of Resende to dom Rodrigo de Souza Countinho, Rio de Janeiro, June 5, 1799,
ANRJ, Colonial, cdice 69, vol. 9, fl. 57r-58v. in Histria Luso-Brasileira: Os franceses na
colnia, http://www.historiacolonial.arquivonacional.gov.br, accessed August 11, 2011. The
relationship between the vicereine and dEntremeuse is hinted at in the following: Per-
sonal letter to Entremeuse, letters confiscated from Joanna dEntremeuse, no. 12, AHU, Rio
de Janeiro, p.a., caixa 179, doc. 48.
50In 1802, the new viceroy investigated the affair. Captain Tavares, according to him,
was a fugitive, and his vessel and goods were auctioned off in Rio de Janeiro. Dispatch dom
Fernando Joze de Portugal to prince regent, April 28, 1802, AHU, Rio de Janeiro, p.a., caixa
168, doc. 15. Dispatch French envoy Rayneval to Portuguese secretary of state, May 24,
1807, Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo [ANTT], Ministrio dos Negcios Estrangeiros
[MNE], Legao de Frana, caixa 476.
should not be punished for his ignorance of the local rules and customs.51
Mme. dEntremeuse seemed to be the only person who fared well nego-
tiating with the Brazilian authorities, and as has been shown, the super-
intendent of police believed that in part her femininity seems to have
given her some leeway. Just how important a role gendered expectations
played in her success becomes apparent in the letters from merchants and
persons in authority that the Portuguese authorities confiscated in Lisbon
and which come under scrutiny below. Still in the end, she too fell into
disgrace, especially when her link with French privateers became clear.
Before resuming her story, however, it is important to consider those
aspects of her activities examined up to this point in more detail in order
to place those actions in the cultural context of late eighteenth-century
Brazil. Above all it is necessary to see Mme. dEntremeuse from the per-
spective of the Brazilian male officials whom she so ably deceived. In order
to understand local reactions towards the adventurous widow, it is impor-
tant to comprehend how male Brazilians perceived elite women. Accord-
ing to Susan Socolow, honor was the main concern for elite women:
Honor, on both the personal and family levels, was of central concern to the
elite and those who hoped to join its ranks. In the eyes of the elite, honor
was linked to social standing and to virtue. To be honorable, the Hispanic
social code called for women to be pure and sexually beyond reproach, pub-
licly discreet, and timid in their behavior.52
Prior to Socolow, A. J. R. Russell-Wood had observed that the standard of
behavior to which elite women were expected to adhere demanded that
they not be active or educated.53 With this prescriptive norm in mind, he
warned that the commonly accepted image of elite women in this period
has often been colored by foreign travel accounts, which typically stated
that Brazilian (and Portuguese) women were indolent and uncultured. But
when elite visitors like Maria Graham, a well-known British diarist with
ties to the Portuguese imperial family, spoke with elite women privately,
51Dispatch Baron of Mossamedes to D. Fernando Jos de Portugal, April 30, 1801, AHU,
Rio de Janeiro, p.a., caixa 191, doc. 111. Alon is not a family name, but most likely a Can-
tonese nickname. I would like to thank Joanne Ma for this insight.
52Susan M. Socolow, The Women of Colonial Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), 78.
53A. J. R. Russell-Wood, Female and Family in the Economy and Society of Colonial
Brazil, in Latin American Women: Colonial Perspectives, ed. Asuncin Lavrin (Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press, 1978), 6668.
232 ernst pijning
they seemed to be more cultured than they had at first thought.54 Indeed,
the secluded lives elite women led in Brazil had another origin. Accord-
ing to Russell-Woods analysis of male visions of women, seclusion of the
female was generally held to be an ideal state for womanhood and derived
not from any desire to humiliate the female, but rather to isolate her from
the harshness and the potential temptations of everyday life.55 There
were examples of elite women who actively participated in commercial
activities. However, this was considered to be an exception and usually
involved women who had fallen on hard times such as widows who no
longer had a male protector. Even then, when such women did engage in
commercial activities, they did so as discreetly and privately as possible
with men acting as their liaisons with the public world.56
Yet, as stated before, historians need to be very careful with this public
discourse of proper female behavior. These ideas can be encountered in
criminal and civil records, as well as in travel accounts, but they do not
reflect womens active participation in the Atlantic economy and society,
as is apparent from notarial records. Of crucial importance is that male
authorities often attempted to use this imagery to control female behav-
ior, just as they censured the behavior of the foreign passengers of the Boa
Viagem. In practice, the public discourse on gender roles helped officials
to regulate female behavior, just like laws helped to control contraband
trade, but it never wholly restricted womens agency.
These kinds of attempts to regulate gender roles were also present
in the case of Jeanne dEntremeuse. Once the full extent of her trad-
ing became known, leading to formal charges against her in Lisbon, the
gender norms that Mme. dEntremeuse had manipulated came back to
haunt her. When male officials obstructed her case, they used a discourse
of female weakness and helplessness.57 The Portuguese superintendent
of police, Pina Manique, who was instrumental in her arrest in Lisbon,
suspected that this vision of innocent, cloistered femininity had provided
Mme. dEntremeuse with the opportunity of remaining longer in Brazilian
54Maria Graham visited Brazil in the 1820s twice and was in close contact with the
imperial family. She observed the Brazilian elites very closely, including the women. Her
travel accounts were published in Britain and translated into Portuguese. Maria Graham,
Dirio de uma viagem ao Brasil (Belo Horizonte: Editora Itatiara, 1990).
55Russell-Wood, Female and Family, 69.
56Socolow, Women of Colonial Latin America 114. For another example see the second
case study in Sandra Lauderdale Graham, Caetana Says No: Womens Stories from a Brazil-
ian Slave Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 83158.
57See below for detailed discussion on this.
port cities than male merchants were able to do.58 Arguably, the super-
intendent was not wrong. From the continuation of her narrative it will
become clear that Mme. dEntremeuse used her long stays in Atlantic sea
ports to her advantage by building up personal networks, and that these
connections provided the basis for her survival and blossoming during her
transatlantic travels in a revolutionary era.
What, however, explained the long delay between this unmasking and
Mme. dEntremeuses arrival in Salvador, a period of nearly three years?
The outline of her conduct presented so far is suggestive. For one thing,
Mme. dEntremeuses behavior bordered on the acceptable for colonial
Brazilian officials. As a widow from an elite family, she had some leeway
for the economic activities in which she desired to engage, as long as they
did not become too public. Moving as she did in the highest echelons
of Brazilian society while in Salvador and Rio de Janeiro, she looked for
female sponsors to plead for leniency towards what she wanted to portray
as her personal need to earn a living. Initially, she was successful in creat-
ing a welcoming atmosphere and was able to recruit women such as the
wife of the viceroy of Brazil.59
Establishing good connections to those in the highest circles of soci-
ety in the Brazilian colony such as Viceroy Resende through this kind
of informal networking was one key to her success. Like Tavares, Mme.
dEntremeuse also proved adept at playing the games of local politics, and
this was another tool that she used. The French widow forged excellent
relations with the governor of Bahia at first, as she would do later with
the viceroy in Rio de Janeiro, easily obtaining his permission to store her
goods in Salvadors warehouses and opportunities to build her connec-
tions in the city.60 This allowed the widow to ensure that her commercial
transactions were condoned by the local authorities, and that the viceroy
and governor would not fully apply the laws. Her strategy was to collect
letters of reference in order to foster friendships with local administrators
and merchants in order not only to reach France but to do so with a con-
siderable sum of money in hand. Though she ultimately failed, through
58Dispatch from Diogo Ignacio de Pina Manique to Pedro Duarte da Silva, October 1,
1799, Arquivo Histrico da Itamaraty [AHI] (Rio de Janeiro), III-30, Lata 185, mao 2, fl. 50r.
59Personal letter to Entremeuse, letters confiscated from Joanna dEntremeuse, no. 12,
AHU, Rio de Janeiro, p.a., caixa 179, doc. 48.
60Minute of response to Lannes, w.d. [1802], ANTT, MNE, Legao da Frana, caixa
952; Letter Overseas Council to prince regent, December 16, 1799, AHU, Bahia, p.a., caixa
216, doc. 38.
234 ernst pijning
her nuanced understanding of local customs, Mme. dEntremeuse came

remarkably close to achieving her goals.
Perhaps the ambitiousness of her goals caused her downfall. Having
abandoned the Boa Viagem before its troubles started, Mme. dEntremeuse
waited seven months until she finally sailed for Montevideo. During this
time she earned a considerable amount of money trading between Ro
de la Plata and Brazil and, by the time of her departure, she was ready to
return triumphantly home to France. Unfortunately, disaster struck as the
vessel she was on sank near Maldonado at the entrance of the Ro de la
Plata estuary. The widow survived, and so did part of her cargo, but she
was financially ruined and her dire circumstances meant she needed to
improve her financial position. To restore her fortunes, therefore, Mme.
dEntremeuse resumed her lucrative country trade between Ro de la
Plata and Brazil.61
As it turned out, Mme. dEntremeuse had for some time been part of
an active French merchant community from Mauritius that had settled
in nearby Buenos Aires and engaged in privateering and other maritime
enterprises in the Indian Ocean and the South Atlantic. Buenos Airess
French community made clever use of the wartime situation in Europe
and the Atlantic by sponsoring French vessels that legally captured hostile
(i.e. British) vessels, and subsequently changing their flags to the colors
of Spain or Portugal to avoid capture. Officially, the Iberian authorities
forbade French vessels to sail to the Portuguese possessions in the South
Atlantic, but the French in Buenos Aires avoided that regulation by obtain-
ing passports to Cayenne (French Guyana) for their privateering vessels
and sailing in distress into the Brazilian portsthe same practice that
Tavares used when he sought repairs for the Boa Viagem.62
Fortunately for Mme. dEntremeuse, official policy and local practices
in the Southern Atlantic stimulated coastal trade between Ro de la Plata
and Brazil so long as would-be traders, unlike Captain Tavares and his
crew, showed care in offering respect towards officialdom. Spanish coastal
vessels followed the same practices as the French in Buenos Aires, and
they were, in general, warmly received by Brazilian authorities. Most sailed
61Interrogation of Jeanne dEntremeuse, October 5, 1799, AHI, III-30, Lata 185, mao 2,
fl. 28r29r, fl. 30r.
62Jerry W. Cooney, Silver, Slaves, and Food: The Ro de la Plata and the Indian Ocean,
17961806, Tijdschrift voor Zeegeschiedenis 5, no. 1 (1986): 3545; Marcelina Tejerina, Luso-
Brasileos en el Buenos Aires virreinal: Trabajo, negocios e intereses en la plaza naviera y
commercial (Bahia Blanca: Universidad Nacional del Sur, Depatamento de Humanidades,
2004).
to the port towns of Salvador, Rio de Janeiro, and Santa Catherina. This
practice was even formalized in Article V of the Treaty of San Ildefonso
(1777), which stipulated that Spanish vessels were to be well-received in
Brazilian harbors.63 Both governments sought to exclude some products
from this cabotage, but without much success. Brazilian merchants were
not allowed to sell slaves to Spanish America, since this diminished the
pool of slaves available for the Brazilian plantation workforce. Platine
merchants, on the other hand, were not allowed to trade silver, which
had to do with bullionist policies of the mercantile era. The official trade
thus consisted of local products such as sugar and tobacco from Brazil in
exchange for hides, meat, and tallow from Spanish America. Unofficially,
however, many slaves were exchanged against silver. Moreover, Portuguese
authorities protected Spanish vessels by allowing them to enter convoys
from Brazil to Portugal during wartime.64 The Portuguese state remained
neutral during the War of American Independence and the Napoleonic
wars (until 1807), and thus protected their belligerent neighbors against
British privateers.
It was therefore quite reasonable that, following the disaster at Mal-
donado, Mme. dEntremeuse set out to regain her financial losses in the
way that she did.65 She bought a new vessel in Montevideo commissioned
with goods for Brazil. Even though this was technically prohibited by Por-
tuguese law, most ships from Spanish America were received with open
arms, since their cargoes were deemed necessary for the Portuguese and
Brazilian economies. Using letters of recommendation from the viceroy in
Buenos Aires and merchants in Ro de la Plata that she had again obtained
through successful networking, the widow charmed her way into the Bra-
zilian capital in 1798, just as she had done in Salvador the year before.
Central to Mme. dEntremeuses success was her contact with the
local elite in the societies she stayed. As noted, if foreign visitors paid
due respect to the viceroy and his authority over the harbor, they could
expect to meet with equally cordial treatment by the kings representa-
tive in the New World. As became clear from the letters of support, Mme.
dEntremeuse was a very pleasant person who was able to cultivate a good
63Tratado de Aliana Defensiva, National Archives London, SP 89 (State Papers Por-

tugal), vol. 85, fl. 222r245r.
64For these regulations see: Dispatch Secretary of State Martinho de Melo e Castro
to Viceroy Lus de Vasconcellos e Souza, August 24, 1782, AHU, Rio de Janeiro, p.a., caixa
130, doc. 77.
65Interrogation of Jeanne dEntremeuse, October 5, 1799, AHI, III-30, Lata 185, mao 2,
fl. 28r29r, fl. 30r.
236 ernst pijning
relationship with the Brazilian viceroy, the Count of Resende, and an even
better one with his wife, the countess.66 Firmino de Magalhes Sequiera
da Fonseca, chancellor of the High Court of Bahia, wrote in one of these
confiscated letters that the friendly relations that you have with the Vice
Reine can be very useful to you.67 The French envoy in Lisbon, General
Lannes, confirmed the closeness of this relationship.68 In Brazil, she
stayed for seven months in Salvador from January into August 1797, for
seven months in Rio de Janeiro the first time in 1798, and the second time
for another six months from January through June 1799. Her personal cor-
respondence revealed how impressive Mme. dEntremeuses performance
was. These letters include at least two sets of letters of recommendation,
one of which is completely preserved and includes the letter describing
her connection to the viceroy and vicereine of Brazil, as well as letters
from Mme. dEntremeuse to others involved in her case, such as the
Prince Regent of Portugal. While the entirety of these letters contents has
not survived, what remains indicates the breadth of Mme. dEntremeuses
contacts.69 It was, in fact, the wide range of these contacts that worried
the Portuguese authorities. The earlier observation of Pina Manique, the
superintendent of police who ordered Mme. dEntremeuse strip-searched,
that many inhabitants of these cities gave her letters of recommenda-
66Personal letter to Entremeuse, letters confiscated from Joanna dEntremeuse, no. 12,
AHU, Rio de Janeiro, p.a., caixa 179, doc. 48.
67As relaoens de amizade que tendes com a Vice Raynha vos podem ser uteis, Per-
sonal letter to Entremeuse, letters confiscated from Joanna dEntremeuse, no. 12, AHU, Rio
de Janeiro, p.a., caixa 179, doc. 48. For Fonsecas identity see Letters of dom Rodrigo da
Souza Countinho to Count of Resende (then president of the Overseas Council), April 20,
1800, AHU, Bahia, p.a. caixa 219, doc. 51; caixa 217, doc. 38.
68Mmoire pour Madame dEntremeuse w.d. ANTT, MNE, Legao de Frana, caixa
476. The original French reads: Madame DEntremeuse, traite dans ces deux voyages et
pendant 13 mois de sejour, de la manire le plus flatteuse par le Vice-roi et son pouse.
69Unfortunately, not all the content of the correspondence has survived. Possibly the let-
ters were returned when the case was finally resolved in 1802. (Petition Joana dEntremeuse
w.d. [May 26, 1802] AHU, Rio de Janeiro, p.a., caixa 200, doc. 35). However, there were
some inquests into some of these letters which are used below. Next to this there are
references to letters of recommendation, and they are inventoried. Among them are vari-
ous letters of recommendation from Rio for Lisbon in Relao dos Papeis apprehendidos
pelo Dezembargador Corregedor do Rocio a Franceza Joanna dEntremeuse, abordo da
Galera Confiana, AHU, Rio de Janeiro, p.a., caixa 200, doc. 35. Only the content of a few
letters have survived in AHU, Rio de Janeiro, p.a., caixa 179, doc. 48. Jeanne dEntremeuse
certified these letters, and the French envoy Lannes described them as une vintaine de
letters de recommendations pour Lisbonne qui attestent la lgalit de ses demarches, et
que les operations quelle a fait ont t autoris par le viceroy (Some twenty letters of
recommendation sent to Lisbon which testify to the legality of her actions and operations
that were authorized by the viceroy) ANTT, Legao de Frana, MNE, caixa 476.
tion, underscores this. Pina Manique, who used the idea of female seduc-
tion to explain that Mme. dEntremeuse had achieved this with with her
lively character, so captivating and attractive, also hints at her methods.70
This line of thinking was similar to ancien-rgime male public discourse
concerning women and salons in France. According to some aristocrats,
salons were places of vice, by virtue of being female-run venues.71
Indeed, from one of her more prominent admirers letters, it becomes
clear that Mme. dEntremeuse ran her business as a salon. The French
widows cultural exchanges with merchants and officials were at least as
important as their potential gains from her transactions. Full of admira-
tion, Chancellor da Fonseca of the High Court of Bahia wrote that he could
not deliver all the books that Mme. dEntremeuse wanted, such as Rous-
seaus Nouvelle Heloise, but he could still present her with Popes Essay
on Man and his Sentimental Journey.72 Even more striking was Fonsecas
judgment of Mme. dEntremeuses intelligence and opinions: I count you
among those admirable women who have given glory to your sex and
to France.73 Mme. dEntremeuses admirer explained that he meant the
Chtelets, Deshoulires, and Svigns of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries.74
Cordiality led to a more liberal policy towards the widow, who openly
courted financial relationships with local mercantile communities in
70[P]ela sua viveza character: to insinuante e atrativo, que muitos dos habitantes
daquellas duas cidades lhe dero cartas de recomendao, Dispatch Diogo Ignacio de Pina
Manique to Pedro Duarte da Silva, October 1, 1799, AHI, III-30, Lata 185, mao 2, fl. 50r.
71Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 25, quoted from Carolyn C. Lougee, Le Paradis
des Femmes: Women, Salons and Social Stratification in Seventeenth-Century France (Prince
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 81.
72Personal letter Fonseca to Entremeuse, letters confiscated from Joanna dEntremeuse,
no. 12, AHU, Rio de Janeiro, p.a., caixa 179, doc. 48. Copy of letter no. 9, confiscated in Lis-
bon in 1799, AHU, Rio de Janeiro, p.a., caixa 179, doc. 48.
bon in 1799, AHU, Rio de Janeiro, p.a., caixa 179, doc. 48. The original reads: eu j vos
conto no numero destas admiraveis mulheres, que tem feito a gloria de vosso sexo, e da
Frana,...
bon in 1799, AHU, Rio de Janeiro, p.a., caixa 179, doc. 48. Gabrielle-milie Le Tonnelier de
Breteuil, Marquise du Chtelet (17061749) was a mathematician and physicist who had a
relationship with Voltaire; Antoinette du Ligier de la Garde Deshoulires (16381694) was a
poet and ran a politically influential salon; Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Svign
(16261696) was an author. See Encyclopdia Britannica Online: http://www.search.eb
.com/eb/article-9022685,-9030062and-9066970, accessed January 24, 2009.
238 ernst pijning
Brazil. Despite Mme. dEntremeuses undoubted success, such behavior

could also have less honorable implications in the official mind. Official
discourse would have frowned upon these relations, since persons of a
higher social status in general, let alone a widow of high status, were not
supposed to involve themselves openly in mercantile transactions. Only
unsupervised lower-echelon women were even permitted to pursue these
commercial practices publicly, and their behavior was quickly judged as
scandalous.75 Yet, even though she stepped into the public sphere in a
prominent way through her actions, Mme. dEntremeuse met with no
governmental interference initially. Like Tavares she made the right con-
nections (albeit by following a decidedly different set of rules gendered
for women), especially with the viceroy and his wife, which allowed her
unusual leeway in her trading practices.
After more than half a years stay in her first visit to Rio de Janeiro,
Mme. dEntremeuse had become a well-known and a popular figure, as
she gained the trust of both its imperial administrators and merchants.76
Her position was quite different from that of her three French former
companions who had by then been put under guard in Santa Cruz sev-
eral miles outside the city limits of Rio de Janeiro, because the viceroy
was suspicious of their intentions and their unauthorized illegal dealings.
In contrast, because of the gendered restrictions on her mobility and
her behavior that her salon suggested, Mme. dEntremeuse was able to
convince the viceroy of the legitimacy of her need to stay in Brazilian
ports. In addition, the viceroy even gave his full consent to her, officially
speaking, illegal dealings with Ro de la Plata. Thus, in 1798, when Mme.
dEntremeuse set sail with a new vessel to Buenos Aires and Montevideo,
she had loaded it with sugar to be sold on the Spanish American market.77
As we have already seen, voyages between Spanish and Portuguese
America were not completely unopposed. Indeed, the British admiral
of the Brazilian coastguard, Donald Campbell, complained of the loss of
75On this topic see for instance Luciano Raposo de Almeida Figueiredo, Barrocas fam-
lias: Vida familiar em Minas Gerais no sculo XVIII (So Paulo: HUCITEC, 1997), 131. About
women engaging in street commerce see his O avesso da memria: Cotidiano e trabalho
da mulher em Minas Gerais no sculo XVIII (Rio de Janeiro: Jos Olympio Editora, 1993),
3371.
76Testimony Jose Antnio, captain o Longueiro, October 14, 1799, AHI, III-30, Lata 185,
mao 2, fl. 12rv.
77According to a business partner she brought sugar to Buenos Aires, and hides, dried
meat, and other products in return. Interrogation of Joze Placido Correa de Brito, mer-
chant and inhabitant of Rio de Janeiro, October 9, 1799, AHI, II-30, lato 185, mao 2, fl. 19r.
It was illegal to transport slaves from Brazil to Ro de la Plata.
slaves due to the vast amount of contraband trade conducted between the
Portuguese and Spanish possessions in South America.78 Some four Span-
ish vessels were even confiscated for illegally trading in slaves. In general,
this sanction was applied not because of the trade in slaves as such, but
rather because the ships involved had taken the slaves on board illegally
without seeking prior approval from the Brazilian authorities.79 Against
this background, the Count of Resendes initial consent to the widows
enterprises was not surprising. However, the questionable legality of this
trade remained, and gave the Lisbon authorities a legal excuse to arrest
her a few years later.
Mme. dEntremeuses voyages forth and back to Montevideo, Buenos
Aires, and Cayenne were profitable.80 During her stays in Buenos Aires,
she was able to send letters of credit to her needy father-in-law by means
of neutral North American vessels, which increased her standing as her
familys provider. She also met up with several of her countrymen from
the Indian Ocean. They formed a vibrant enclave with strong commercial
ties to Mauritius and Reunion. Next to Mme. dEntremeuse other French
merchants such as Pechiron, Duclos Guyot, Abbot Darth, Gadnel, and
many more were commercially active.81 Officially, the widow only sold
sugar, tobacco, and other products from Brazil in exchange for hides, tal-
low, and cash. Mme. dEntremeuse never admitted that she sold human
cargo, although no one would have been surprised had she done so. In
practice, local authorities laid few obstacles in the path of this very lucra-
tive trade in humans. Indeed, the 1790s was the most prolific decade
of this highly profitable commerce.82 But if Mme. dEntremeuse had taken
this step, her trading activities would have been judged more illegal and
thus punishable by the authorities in Lisbon, and would therefore prob-
ably have been revealed if true.
78Donald Campbell, Reflexoens imparciais sobre o trafico de escravatura entre as colo-

nias de Portugal e Hespanha, April 30, 1802, AHU, Rio de Janeiro, p.a., caixa 199, doc. 6.
79Pijning, Regulating Illegal Trade, 34966.
80She arrived at least once in Cayenne (French Guyana) in 1799, where her vessel was
at first impounded, and later liberated since the ship flew a Portuguese flag. A. de Pistoye
and Charles DuVerdy, Trait des Prises Maritimes dans lequel on a repondu en partie le
Trait de Valin en lappropriant a la lgislation nouvelle (w.p.: Auguste Durand, Libraire,
1859), 1:33436.
81Jos M. Mariluz Urquijo, El Virreinato del Ro de la Plata en la epoca del marquis do
Aviles (17991801) (Buenos Aires: Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1964), 131.
82George Reid Andrews, The Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires 18001900 (Madison, WI:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1980), 25.
240 ernst pijning
By the time she had put into Rio de Janeiro for a second time in 1799,
Mme. dEntremeuse had finally amassed enough money to sail back to
France. Her main preoccupation was to sail safely, and especially to min-
imize the possibility of confiscation by an enemy privateer. Since both
France and Spain were at war with Britain, the widow tried to avoid cap-
ture by sailing in a Portuguese convoy flying Portuguese, Spanish, and
French flags and carrying two cargo lists that proved that the goods were
hers in the first list, and owned by Brazilian merchants in the second list.83
Of course, these actions were prohibited by Portuguese law, but her good
relations with the colonial administration in Rio de Janeiro ensured that
the laws would be applied more flexibly in her case. Moreover, in doing
this the French widow was merely following the example of many Platine
vessels that the Portuguese administration allowed to join the fleet. Mme.
dEntremeuse did not plan to countenance any risk that could lose her
cargo again. She sold her vessel to her young Brazilian captain so that
the ship became legally Portuguese, while she remained responsible for
the cargo. Finally, to be completely on the safe side, she also carried a
tricouleur (French revolutionary flag) should the French marine show up
and inspect the fleet. Now it was all up to her good fortune. And, as one
of Mme. dEntremeuses admirers had written in gender-specific terms,
your conduct is irreproachable, all can trust you, but not in your good
fortune.84 With this he contrasted male behavior, saying man is such
a precarious animal, that one can never fully trust him.85 These words
would prove to be prophetic.
All in all, Mme. dEntremeuse had few reasons to suspect that disaster
awaited her in Lisbon. Full of confidence, with her vessel, the Confiana,
loaded up with Brazilian trading goods, she set sail for Lisbon. Just as any
other merchant would have done, she had secured letters of recommen-
83Interrogation of Joo de Souza Lobo, October 9, 1799, AHI, III-30, Lata 185, mao 2,
fl. 18v19r.
84Vossa conduta h irreprehensivel, todos se podem firar em vs, porem no vissa
fortuna, Personal letter to Entremeuse, letters confiscated from Joanna dEntremeuse,
no.12, AHU, Rio de Janeiro, p.a., caixa 179, doc. 48.
These personal letters later led to judicial inquiries against the chancellor of the High
Court of Bahia [i.e. Salvador or Salvador da Bahia], Firmino de Magalhes Sequiera da
Fonseca and against Colonel Antnio Jos de Sousa Portugal in the same city. Letters of
dom Rodrigo da Souza Countinho to Count of Resende (then president of the Overseas
Council), April 20, 1800, AHU, Bahia, p.a. caixa 219, doc. 51; caixa 217, doc. 38.
85O homem h hum Animal to variavel, que nunca j mais se pode contar sobre elle,
Personal letter to Entremeuse, letters confiscated from Joanna dEntremeuse, no. 12, AHU,
Rio de Janeiro, p.a., caixa 179, doc. 48.
dation from many notable local merchants in Rio de Janeiro, and from
the viceroy. Mme. dEntremeuse had become, in fact, a full-fledged mer-
chant, sharing the risks of her voyage with local merchants who allowed
her to transport some of their goods. At first the viceroy had objected
to her sailing to Lisbon in her own vessel, but he seemed to have been
mollified when the widow sold her boat to her young Brazilian captain.86
Mme. dEntremeuse knew that she had challenged the viceroys authority
over this issue, and she did not realize that in doing so, she had thereby
transgressed the boundaries between illegal trade that was condoned and
proscribed. Instead, she thought that her previous friendly contacts with
him would save her from any repercussions that her actions in this regard
might bring. Mme. dEntremeuse did not suspect that the viceroy had
sent a letter to the secretary of state in Lisbon, denouncing her suspicious
activities. He wrote to the Secretary of State for the Navy and Overseas
Territories dom Rodrigo de Souza Countinho that:
...a Frenchwoman who calls herself Joana dEntremeuse and who is appar-
ently in the same scene that has been described [as Eleutrio Tavares and
the three Frenchmen on board the Boa Viagem] gives me reason to describe
her conduct to Your Excellency, because we should not be indifferent to the
voyage that this woman is making to Lisbon in the next convoy, given that
her nation, her liveliness, her ingratiating character, and her projects and
industriousness make her worthy of being watched with caution.87
The viceroy put this message in this portion of his letter hesitantly, but
with a clear sign of warning, possibly betraying some reluctance to turn
against Mme. dEntremeuse.
As the French envoy in Lisbon later put it, Mme. dEntremeuse, who
was treated in a very flattering way by the viceroy and his lady during her
two trips and during her 13-month stay [in Rio de Janeiro], could never
have imagined that behind so much generosity was hidden the worst
86DEntremeuses request to sell the vessel was approved by the judge of the customs,
since this was more widely practiced among Spanish captains. Dispatch, Judge of the Cus-
toms, Freire, to the Count of Resende, April 26, 1799. ANRJ, Col., caixa 495, pc. 1; Interroga-
tion of Joo de Souza Lobo, October 18, 1799, AHI, III-30, Lata 185, mao 2, fl. 16v.
87Entretanto uma Francesa, que se intitula Joana dEntremeuse, e que nesta cena
parece que tem igalmente representado, me d ocassio a descrever a Vossa Excellncia
a sua conduta por no julgar indiferente a viagem que esta mulher fez para Lisboa no
prximo comboio, quando ela pela sua nao, pela sua viveza, pelo seu carater insinuante,
e pelos seus projetos, e indstria se faz merecedoria de ser olhada com circunspeco.
Count of Resende to dom Rodrigo de Souza Countinho, Rio de Janeiro, June 5, 1799,
ANRJ, Colonial, cdice 69, vol. 9, fl. 57r58v. in Histria Luso-Brasileira: Os franceses na
colnia.
242 ernst pijning
treachery.88 And there were yet other factors that the widow had not
taken into account. Among these was the Portuguese fear of foreigners, and
especially French citizens, which led immediately to Mme. dEntremeuses
arrest upon her disembarking in Lisbon. The superintendent of police,
Pina Manique, the person responsible for the handling of the fleet in Lis-
bon, typically arrested anyone he suspected of being a French Revolution
sympathizer and he especially went after the public that attended the So
Carlos theater in Lisbon as well as Freemasons. French sympathies were
heartfelt in the colonies in his view, and he attributed several unsavory
incidents that had happened there to French ideas.89
Officially Mme. dEntremeuse was denounced by the viceroy, the Count
of Resende, for simulating the sale of her vessel to a Brazilian captain
in order to sail in the convoy.90 That said, the viceroy had also received
a letter from the governor of Angola, who had passed on a letter from
Mme. dEntremeuses daughter Elonore to her husband dated May 3,
1799, which mentioned Mme. dEntremeuse, and which was seized from
a French privateer from Mauritius. On the basis of this letter, the governor
had written:
I have news of Madame dEntremeuse via the captured vessel Minerva,
whose captain knows her. She was at the end of February in Rio de Janeiro,
owner of two vessels of which one left for Cayenne and she on the second
for Montevideo, where she is for the moment. She conducts herself well, and
does good business.91
Obviously this letter put the viceroy in a very delicate position. He had
allowed the French widow to trade on somewhat shaky legal grounds. In
fact, it was her closeness to the privateers that made the viceroy write the
88Madame DEntremeuse trait dans ces deux voyages, et pendent 13 mois de sejour,
de la maniere la plus flatteuse, par le Vice-Roi, et son Epouse, devait elle imaginer que tant
de generosits cachaient la plus noire trahison, Memoire pour Mme. DEntremeuse, w.d.
ANTT, MNE. Legao da Frana, caixa 952.
89Maria Fernanda Bicalho, A cidade e o imprio: O Rio de Janeiro na dinmica colonial
portuguesa: Sculos XVII e XVIII (Rio de Janeiro: Civilao Brasileira, 2003), 14456. One of
the incidents was directed at the Count of Resende himself, the so-called Inconfidncia
Carioca of 1794. For the most complete account on this see Afonso Carlos Marques dos
Santos, No rascunho da nao: Inconfidncia no Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: Prefeitura
da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro, 1992).
90Bicalho, Joana dEntremeuse, 109.
91Jai eu des nouvelles de Madame dEntremeusse par la prise La Minerve dont le
Capitaine la connait: elle etait fin de Fevrier a Rio Janneirio proprietaire de deux Vaisseaux
dont lun partait pour Cayenne et elle sur le second pour Montevideo ou elle est en ce
moment. Elle se portait bien, e fesait de bonne affaires. ANJR, Col., caixa 502, pc. 1.
letter to the secretary of state that led to her imprisonment in Lisbon. In

the same letter to Secretary of State Coutinho as quoted above he also
reported that:
after a few months the same woman reappeared for the second time in her
own vessel, stating that she sailed from Montevideo with destination the
Cape of Good Hope, and from there to the Isle of France, and in order to
avoid confrontations with French pirates, she asked for a safe conduct from
Auguste Carbonel, commander of a corsair called Bonaparte, to sail under
the security of a Spanish banner. All this was directed at asking formal per-
mission from me to sail under a Portuguese flag as soon as she arrived in this
city, to escape any confrontation with English vessels. I absolutely refused
this, as it was against all sense of good faith and the alliance that exists
between that nation and that of Portugal, and I remembering the bad faith
that the same French pirates have when they meet with the vessel of this
woman, and knowing about the dissimulation with which she travels.92
Indeed, French privateers had been disturbing Brazilian trade near Angola,
and with the same fleet to Lisbon went a letter railing against the prac-
tices of French corsairs, who captured Brazilian vessels by flying an Eng-
lish flag and subsequently sold the prizes in Montevideo.93 One of these
corsairs was the Bonaparte, whose captain had given Jeanne dEntremeuse
a free passage.
This letter denouncing Mme. dEntremeuses actions drew her activi-
ties to the attention of the Lisbon authorities. So, in a sense, fate had
in the end decided that the viceroy had to act decisively against Mme.
dEntremeuses commercial practices, as a result of which he had to make
the case as strong as possible against the enterprising French Republican
widow.
92Passando meses, apereceu aqui segunda vez esta mulher em navio seu, dizendo
que saira de Montevideu com o destino de ir ao Cabo de Boa Esperana, e passer-se a
ilha de Frana, e que por evitar contestaes com piratas francesas, pedira um ressalvo de
Augusto Cabonel, comandante do corsrio denomindao Buonaparte, para poder navegar
com segurana de baixo da bandiera castelhana. Todo o seu empenho logo que chegou
a esta cidade foi pretender de mim um despacho, e permisso para poder navegar com
pavilhio portugus, a fim de escaper de todo o encontro que tivesse com embaraes
inglesas. Neguei-lho absolutamente semelhante pretenso to ofensiva da boa f e aliana
que existe entre esta nao e a portuguesa, e at lembrando-me de que esta m f con-
staria aos mesmos piratas franceses, se algum ncontrasse com o navio desta mulher, e
conhecesse a dissimulao com que navegava. Count of Resende to dom Rodrigo de
Souza Coutinho, Rio de Janeiro, June 5, 1799, ANRJ, Colonial, cdice 69, vol. 9, fl. 57r58v
published in Histria Luso-Brasileira: Os franceses na colnia.
93Letter Florncio Rosa to dom Rodrigo de Souza Coutinho, Rio de Janeiro, Septem-
ber28, 1799, AHU, Rio de Janeiro, p.a., caixa 187, doc. 48.
244 ernst pijning
The Lisbon officials were confirmed in their suspicions concerning her

activities when they discovered the tricouleur in her cargo, and a booklet
with information about the arrival and departure of the annual fleets.94
It was these facts that caused the superintendent of police to think that
Jeanne dEntremeuse could be a man disguised as a woman, because this
would allow her to spy more effectively in Brazil. In the eyes of the Lisbon
authorities, the widows activities might have been part of preparations
for a French invasion of Brazil as had happened before in 1711 and almost
happened a second time in 1762.
The superintendent did not stop with half-measures, choosing to treat
Jeanne dEntremeuse with the full rigor that the Portuguese authorities
reserved for a known spy. Under cover of night she was conducted to a
dark prison and all her papers and goods were confiscated. In very undig-
nified circumstances, she had to undergo three interrogations, during
which she proved to be quite recalcitrant. Later on Mme. dEntremeuse
described this period in a petition to the Prince Regent of Portugal. She
wrote that it was a prosecution of which the details are of such a nature,
[that]...her gender and the delicacy of her sentiments mandate a code
of silence in order not to offend the ears of Your Majesty.95 In describing
the same incident, the French envoy, General Lannes, stated that when
she arrived at the fortress (prison), she was searched in the most indecent
way before the jailer and the guards.96 The purpose was to humiliate the
suspected French spy, to expose her as a suspect, but also to diminish her
status from that of an elite woman to that of a vulnerable prisoner. More-
over, this action exposed Jeanne dEntremeuses sexuality by stressing the
male vision of widows engaged in commerce as seductresses who needed
to be kept in their place and separated from society.97 In the end, she was
not condemned for spying, or for her relations with privateers, but for
94Bicalho, Joana dEntremeuse, 109.

95[E] huma perseguio cujos detalhes so de to natureza, que seu sexo, e delica-
deza de seus sentimentos lhe fazem huma Ley de callarse, para no offender os ouvidos
de Vossa Alteza Real. Petition Joana dEntremeuse to prince regent, w.d., AHU, Rio de
Janeiro, p.a., caixa 200, doc. 35.
96Arrive la fortresse, on la visit de la maniere la plus indcente devant le geolier
et les gardes. Mmoire pour Madame dEntremeuse, w.d. ANTT, MNE, Legao da Frana,
caixa 476.
97On the female misogynist stereotype in Brazil see Maria Odila Silva Dias, Power and
Everyday Life: The Lives of Working Women in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 24.
trespassing commercial laws, which the superintendent alleged to have

proven with the fake sale of the vessel to the Portuguese captain.98
Mme. dEntremeuses own actions were able to overcome even these
dire circumstances in an unexpected way. Jeanne dEntremeuse was able
to smuggle a letter written in blood out of the prison that she managed to
get through to the Spanish ambassador.99 During her Atlantic crossing to
Lisbon she was in communication with dom Gaspar Rico, a Spanish mer-
chant with whom she sailed across the ocean.100 Initially, Pina Manique
arrested dom Gaspar Rico as well as the carrier of the letters, and he
found a much larger correspondence.101 Jeanne dEntremeuse was moved
to a still more secure prison, and she subsequently went on a hunger strike.
Matters became worse, and the Superintendent of Police even sarcasti-
cally ordered her to have an appealing lunch and dinner served by her two
female servants, as well as have a priest to stand by ready to administer
her the sacraments of penitence or the Eucharist.102 Pina Maniques strict
measures came as he was convinced that:
Dom Gaspar Rico, Spaniard, who came from that port and in the same con-
voy, went to this Capital with a vessel of his nation, communicated on the
high seas with the Frenchwoman on her vessel, and took with her a Repub-
lican Flag. There they had many conferences and communications, and we
can deduce that they had similar intentions and that their commissions were
the same, namely to explore the ports of Rio and Bahia, the armed forces
of the Prince Regent, and incite the sentiments of the populations with the
vile doctrines, which the Jacobins use to incite the population to revolt and
subsequently manipulate it for their own purposes; or at least they go to our
colonies to conduct a clandestine trade, or even sell goods, that the French
have taken from Portuguese vessels...from all this the Frenchwoman can
make a large profit, and take in much gold and diamonds.103
98Minute of reponse to General Lannes, French envoy in Lisbon, w.d. [1802], ANTT,
MNE, Legao da Frana, caixa 952.
99Elle lui crit avec son sang, tout stait pass. Memoire pour Madame dEntremeuse
by General Lannes, w.d., ANTT, MNE, Legao da Frana, caixa 952. Dispatch Pina Manique
to Pedro Duarte da Silva, Lisbon, September 30, 1799, ANTT, IGP, 200, fl. 50rv.
100Dispatch Pina Manique to Pedro Duarte da Silva, Corregedor Bairo de Rocio, Lisbon,
September 30, 1799, ANTT, IGP, Livro 200, fl. 50r.
101Dispatch Pina Manique to Luis Pinto da Souza, Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Lisbon,
October 14, 1799, ANTT, IGP, Livro 6, fl. 4v6r.
102Dispatch Pina Manique to Pedro Duarte da Silva, Lisbon, October 30, 1799, ANTT,
IGP, 200, fl. 62r.
103Prova-se tambem, que D. Gaspar Rico Hespanhol, que do ditto Porto, e no mesmo
comboy vinha para o desta Capital sobre hum Navio da sua Nao, se communicava no
Alto mar com a referida Franceza hindo ao seo Navio, e que lhe levra hua Bandeiro
Republicana havendo entre outros varias conferencias e conversaoens, de que pode
246 ernst pijning
Eventually, the superintendent of police was ordered to hand over the

case to the Overseas Council, and to release dom Gaspar Rico. The actions
of the Spanish ambassador, the Duke of Frias, and dom Gaspar Rico made
Jeanne dEntremeuses situation public, and after a two-month stay in jail
without any light and fresh air, she was incarcerated in a more comfort-
able location where she could speak and write freely.
In Lisbon too, Mme. dEntremeuses connections with dom Gaspar Rico
proved crucial in improving her situation. She sent her letter in blood
to the Spanish instead of the French envoy, for she had particular con-
nections through dom Gaspar Rico and the Duke of Frias, which proved
extremely useful: the Countess of Oeynhausen and the French Senator
Cabanis. Soon after the Spanish envoy received her letter, she received a
visit from the Countess of Oeynhausen, herself a prominent widow, whose
influence helped her obtain better quarters while she awaited the final
decision in her case.104 Beyond providing her with a more respectable
carceral domicile, the countesss actions gave Jeanne dEntremeuse better
access to the Portuguese courts. From this more advantageous position,
the widow was able to contact the very prominent Senator Cabanis, who
made sure that the French government acted in her favor to obtain liberty
for her person and her goods.105
What is striking about this part of Mme. dEntremeuses case is the
consistency of her strategy. Even though she was in very difficult circum-
stances, she did not at first seek an institutional solution to her problem
by trying to obtain the French governments support. Rather she sought
inferir-se que os negocios de hum e outros ero os mesmos, e que as suas commissoens,
ou se encaminhavo a explorer os Portos de Rio, e Bahia, as forcas do Principe Regente
N.Sr. alli tinha os sentimentos dos habitantes destas colonias, e insiuar, e dissiminar as
infames doutrinas, de que os Jacobinas se servem para revoltar os Povos e dispor para os
seos fins; ou pelo menos que hio as mesmas colonias a fazer hum comercio clandestino,
e talvez venderem as fazendas, que os Francezes havio tomados aos Navios portuguezes,
por serem proprios para as ditas Colonias, e para as quais tinho sido carregadas nos Por-
tos deste Reyno, no que muito pode lucrar a dita Franceza, e tirar muito ouro e Diaman-
tes. Pina Manique to dom Rodrigo de Souza Countinho, Lisbon, October 25, 1799, ANTT,
IGP, Livro 6, fl. 18rv.
104The Countess of Oeynhausen, later Marquise of Alorna and known under her pen
name Alcipe, had lived through similar circumstances. Her family was imprisoned for
political reasons, and she remained in jail as a child. Later she became a celebrated author
and was exiled to Great Britain in 1802, only to return after the Napoleonic wars. For more
on her see Maria Leonor Machado de Sousa, Marion Ehrardt, and Jos Esteves Pereira, eds.,
Alcipe e a sua poca (Lisbon: Edies Colibri, 2003).
105Memoire pour Madame dEntremeuse by General Lannes, w.d., ANTT, MNE, Lega-
o da Frana, caixa 952.
out officials of the Spanish government who were known to her and
female members of the nobility who could influence the prince regent
and the superintendent of police. And even when all of their good offices
failed to obtain the results she sought, Mme. dEntremeuse still worked
through the influential senator (who supported Napoleons coup dtat
in 1802) when she tried to involve the French government. It was, finally,
political blackmail that led to the widows freedom. Through the pressure
placed by the Countess of Oeynhausen and the Spanish ambassador on
the Portuguese prince regent, Mme. dEntremeuse was able to obtain her
liberty, but two years later it was the threats of General Lannes that really
intimidated the prince regent. The victory was not complete, as the widow
did not receive full compensation for her confiscated goods, and she was
forced to leave the country, but it was a victory nonetheless.106
Mme. dEntremeuse re-entered the public sphere after her imprison-
ment. She returned to Portugal two years later to petition the prince
regent personally for what she saw as her hard-earned commercial win-
nings. According to an early nineteenth-century Portuguese historian, she
even went to the royal palace in Queluz to explain her situation. Accord-
ing to this story, the prince regent refused to meet with the French widow;
however, a chamberlain did accept her petition and her oral explanation.107
At first, her attempts at persuasion did not have positive results, and her
presentation led to questioning of a French womans presence at court.108
This might be a tall tale; however, Jeanne dEntremeuses reputation as
uma astucioza mulher (an agile woman) was well established.109 Yet,
only the eventual threat of calling in the French army swayed the Portu-
guese authorities in a French direction.
106Bicalho, Joana dEntremeuse, 111. Dispatch Pina Manique to Secretary of Over-

seas Affairs and Marine, Viscount of Anadia, April 22, 1802, ANTT, IGP, Livro 6, fl. 292v.
[A] copia do aviso...para embarcar a diata Mandama Joana dEntremeuse, e sahir natu-
ral deste Reino; e igualmente encontrar V.Ex.ca a copia da relao dos effeitos, que ainda
paro na Alfandega grande.
107[Joo Candido Baptista de Gouva], Policia Secreta dos ultimos tempos do Reinado do
Senhor D. Joo VI: sua continuao at Dezembro de 1826 (Lisbon: Na imprensa de Candido
Antonio da Silva Carvalho, 1835), vi, footnote 2. Luiz Edmundo repeated this, even using
an illustration of Jeanne dEntremeuse before her interrogators; Luiz Edmundo, A crte de
D. Joo no Rio de Janeiro 2nd ed. (Rio de Janeiro: Conquista, 1957), 3:619.
108Eduardo de Noronha, Pina Manique: O intendente de antes quebrar (Porto: Livraria
Civilizao, 1923), 272. Eduardo de Noronhas version of events is chronologically chal-
lenged.
109Letter of Overseas Council to prince regent, December 16, 1799, AHU, Bahia, p.a.,
caixa 216, doc. 38.
248 ernst pijning
In 1802, Mme dEntremeuse obtained full support from the French

ambassador in Lisbon. General Lannes, the warlike general-turned-
diplomat, threatened the Portuguese government with an invasion
should the prince regent not give in. Lannes was successful, and Mme.
dEntremeuses vessel was restored.110 Yet again, in the discourse between
Portuguese and French authorities, gendered norms played a key part.
For the French general, Jeanne dEntremeuse became the passive woman.
Even though women had participated at the core of the French Revolu-
tion, and had fought hard for their own rights, the male visions of women
as the weaker sex still prevailed. In 1802, when the saber-rattling French
envoy petitioned for damages in Mme. dEntremeuses name, he did not
depict the widow as a brave woman who had suffered much. Instead,
Lannes challenged the superintendents harsh methods against a feeble
woman without defense.111 In the two years since her release, Jeanne
dEntremeuses perceived status was once again reduced from a pro-
active widow to the victim of a mans shameless exploitation of feeble
womanhood.
Portuguese authorities argued that Mme. dEntremeuses case demon-
strated why women should not be engaged in transnational commercial
enterprises. In reply to the French general, one Portuguese official argued
that Mme. dEntremeuse had trespassed against Portuguese laws which
had a financial and corporal component. When a person, especially a
woman, sets herself to such an adventurous enterprise as commercial
speculation in foreign colonies, she has the strict obligation to instruct
herself in the laws of the country pertinent to the prohibition or license of
commercial transactions, and under no circumstance can she can there-
fore plead ignorance of the laws as a justification.112 Apparently, illegal
110The prince regent did return Mme. dEntremeuses vessel. He also allowed her to
choose between importing some French liquor free of customs, or free repairs of her ship
to make it seaworthy. Bicalho, Joana dEntremeuse, 111. For the superintendents delay-
ing tactics see his dispatches to secretary of state, April 17, and May 3, 1802, ANTT, IGP,
Correspondncia no Corte no. 201, fl. 177v178r, fl. 184rv. On Lanness performance see:
Margaret S. Chrisawn, A Military Bull in a Diplomatic China Shop: General Jean Lanness
Mission to Lisbon, 18021804, Portuguese Studies Review 3, no. 1 (199394): 4667.
111On auroit de la peine a consevoir les motifs des percecutions quon a fait prov-
ver a une femme foible et sans dfense, si lon ne savoit encore que Mr Pina Manique en
est lauteur, Petition Lannes to secretary of state, April 7, 1802, ANTT, MNE, Legao da
Frana, caixa 496.
112Quando a huma pessoa especialmente huma mulher entrega se empreza to
aventurada como speculaes de commercio em Colonials estrangeiras, fica ella na stricta
obrigao de se instruir das leys da terra, pertennentes prohibio ou licena de com-
mercio, em nenhuma parte, a sua ignorana esta respeita lhe h imputada como meio
trade weighed more heavily than gender norms, for he implied that the
burden was not on Portuguese authorities to protect women, but on the
women who had engaged in illegal activities to know the law.
Mme. dEntremeuses personal petitions, on the other hand, appealed
to the prince regents sense of masculine honor and dignity. On two occa-
sions she asked the prince regent for his intervention, and she did it in
terms sensitive to and reflecting male discourse on women. I have to turn
to Your Highness to ask you to give me justice, but in my fear of affect-
ing your heart with renewed grievances, and the certitude of finding Your
Highness understanding what I need, I have stopped my actions. I hope to
believe that my trust has not been mistaken, and that Your Highness who
was so generous to be my advocate in this unfortunate affair will resolve
it with the delicacy and the good spirit that characterizes him.113 Given
that the Portuguese authorities intentions were contrary to his honor,
she hoped that his Royal Highness surely would act in good faith and do
her justice.114 Mme. dEntremeuses petition assumed that the actions of
the superintendent were contrary to the honor of the prince regent, and
if the Portuguese sovereign allowed these actions to take effect without
reprieve, his own standing would be at stake. In other words, she used
the very male discourse of womens vulnerability to turn the tables on the
Portuguese leader, questioning his own male reputation.
Jeanne dEntremeuses case demonstrates well the ambiguities of
women in the eighteenth-century Atlantic. On the one hand there
remained an official discourse (and there remains a historiography) that
framed early modern and modern women as economically inactive. Part
of this interpretation is due to sources. In official discourses, records, and
some literature, womens roles were circumscribed. In contrast, notarial
records demonstrate female activity on many levels. Still, state represen-
tatives used official discourse to regulate and challenge women when
they became too public about their activities, in the very same way as
de justificao. Minute of reponse to Lannes, w.d. [1802], ANTT, MNE, Legao da Frana,
caixa 952.
113Jaurrais pu recouvrir son Altesse Royal, pour le supplier de me faire justice, mais
la crainte daffluger son coeur par de nouvelles plaintes, et la certitude de trouver dans
Votre Excellance lapplu dont jai besoin me font suspendre ma dmarche. Jose croire que
ma confiance ne ser pas trompe, et que Votre Excellance qui a eu la gnrosit dtre
mon advocat dans cette malheureuse affaire la terminera avec la delicatesse et la bonne
foy que le caratrisent. Petition Jeanne dEntremeuse to prince regent, April 11, 1802, AHI,
II-30, Lata 185 mao 2, fl. 16v.
114Com intenes contraria de sua honra, Petition w.d. to prince regent, AHU, Rio de
Janeiro, p.a., caixa 200, doc. 35.
250 ernst pijning
they regulated colonial commerce. Jeanne dEntremeuse seemed to have

understood this ambiguity. She maintained good relations with the high-
est authorities to conduct her commercial transactions, and when driven
to the extreme, she used the very discourse of male honor to navigate the
Portuguese, Spanish, and French turmoil. In the context of this volume,
her story serves as a reminder to scholars of the Atlantic world that the
outwardly closed circles of elite officials, many of them nobles in the Por-
tuguese empire, actually offered women in particular opportunities for
networking and accrual of power that their patriarchal values would seem
to have denied them.
From Mozambique to Mauritius, from Portugal to Paris we find com-
mercially active women in the Indian and Atlantic Ocean world. As his-
torians of the early modern Atlantic world are increasingly discovering,
female merchants as a category were part of the backbone of Atlantic
commerce, yet they seem to be invisible.115 Yet, what does invisible
mean? The lack of female representation in the governmental and official
intellectual circles made female presence in the public sphere stand out
as notable at best, or improper at worst in official discourse. The case
of Jeanne dEntremeuse illustrates this well. Some male counterparts dis-
guised her role as a merchant, or portrayed her as innocent even when
they supported her actions (for instance General Lannes). Other male
counterparts, such as the Count of Resende, described her behavior in
terms of inappropriateness, using phrases such as insinuating character,
but not in completely negative terms. Because of her mobility and her
entrance into a public sphere where few women of her time had gone
before, Jeanne dEntremeuse had to attract the attention of her male and
female counterparts. Her performance made visible a strong undercurrent
of active women whose commercial activities shaped the Atlantic world
and uncovering the structural supports for those activities must now be
more at the forefront of current research agendas.
115See for instance Benigna Zimba, Mulheres invisveis: O gnero e as polticas comercais
no sul de Moambique, 17201830 (Maputo: Promedia, 2003).
LIVES ON THE SEAS: WOMENS TRAJECTORIES IN PORT CITIES
OF THE PORTUGUESE OVERSEAS EMPIRE1
Lives in Motion
On June 4, 1821, an unusual procession arrived in Lisbon as King Joo VI,

who had transferred the Portuguese court to the port city of Rio de Janeiro
in Brazil in 1808, returned to his kingdom.2 The royal entourage included
the mortal remains of the kings mother, Maria I, who had died in Brazil
on March 20, 1816. The queens coffin, which lay in state in a chamber con-
structed in the boats interior, was brought onto land and accompanied by
a funeral procession to the Basilica da Estrela, built to the queens orders
some years earlier. The queens departure for Brazil and the return of her
body to Lisbon five years later casts light on an important aspect of the life
of Portuguese women in the context of maritime expansion in the early
modern period: the constant movement between imperial port cities that
marked many of their lives, a fate that not even the royal family could
escape, and one which particularly marked the life of Maria I.3 The pur-
pose of this article is to reveal, through the study of these women, a wom-
ens world in the port cities of the early modern Portuguese world. This
movement, combined with the circulation of a variety of ideas, people,
and things characteristic of this empire and especially its port cities,
created new openings and transformed the traditional roles of women,
as they occupied what had been considered to be mens roles in going to
war, managing businesses, leading rebellions, having free political opin-
ions, and becoming writers and owners of land and slaves.
The Jesuit Father Vieira commented in the seventeenth century that
the port city of Salvador da Bahia, like other city ports in Brazil, spends
only six months on land, since during the other six they walk over the
water, coming and going to Portugal, and from this vast Ocean land it is
1Translated from the original Portuguese by Jodi Campbell.

2The year 2008 saw the celebration of the 200th anniversary of the Portuguese courts
move to Rio de Janeiro.
3For an overview of Maria Is life see Alexandre Honrado, Dona Maria I: Nem todas as
loucas so piedosas (Lisbon, Guerra e Paz, 2007).
252 jnia ferreira furtado
impossible to defend their walls.4 Like Salvador da Bahia, in fact, from

the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, port cities all around the world
served as links between the various parts of the far-flung Portuguese mari-
time empire. Between them, carried by the caravels that constantly sailed
the seas and oceans, flowed a constant stream of people and goods. These
ports connected regions that were physically far apart, and therefore, in
spite of their differences, they were united by their function as much as
by being part of the same empire.5 In the different regions of such a vast
empire, throughout these three centuries, women played a wide variety of
different roles, often inverting the traditional positions accorded them in
a society marked by misogyny and the maintenance of social hierarchies.
In Portugal throughout the early modern period, maritime business was
the main cause of these transformations, at the economic level as much
as the social and cultural.
In recent decades, research on women has used the concept of gender
to escape the biological determinism in which historical analysis of the
feminine has found itself trapped.6 The concept of gender lets us see with
greater clarity the heterodox roles that various female protagonists, trav-
eling between port cities of the Portuguese maritime empire (whether in
the kingdom itself or throughout its overseas territories) did not hesitate
to play, defying the limits imposed on their sex.
In all early modern European societies, as in the case of Portugal, the
place occupied by each individual was determined by his or her birth.
Portuguese society was therefore structured by difference, in that the
highest levelsthose considered to be noblewere clearly distinguished
and separated from the lower sectors, the commoners. This hierarchy was
exported via the port cities of the kingdom to the farthest corners of the
empire. The caravels therefore became transmitters of culture, since in
addition to men, women, and material, they also carried ideas, ways of
thinking, and behavior. Based on these principles, the social order, meant
to be reproduced in the various regions of the empire, was intended to
4Father Vieira, Voz de Deos ao mundo, a Portugal e Bahia, juzo do cometa que nela
foi visto em 27 de de outubro de 1695, in Sermoens, e vrios discursos do Padre Antonio
Vieyra da Companhia de Jesu (Lisboa, Valentim da Cista Deslandes, 1710), 258.
5See, for example, Michael Naylor Pearson, Port Cities and Intruders: The Swahili Coast,
India, and Portugal in the Early Modern Era (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1998).
6Joan Scott, Gnero: uma categoria til de anlise histrica, Educao and Realidade
20, no. 2 (July/Dec 1995): 7199; Jane Flax, Gender as a Social Problem: In and for Feminist
Theory, Amerikastudien/American Studies 31, no. 2 (June 1986): 193213.
lives on the seas 253
establish a hierarchy among citizens, favoring some over others. Yet mari-
time expansion created paradoxes in this rigid order, and many women
took advantage of the opportunities that opened up for them at home
and abroad.7
Among other factors, maritime expansion was responsible for a vari-
ety of socio-economic transformations throughout the empire. It created
an environment in which the traditional nobility derived its wealth more
and more from overseas trade or service to the king rather than from
landholding, effectively creating a service nobility that encompassed the
aristocracy but whose roots reached into the ranks of commoners. In this
Portugal arguably took an approach to empire and overseas expansion
that differed from other European societies with Atlantic and East Indies
pretensions. Offices such as the captains-donatary in Brazil and captain-
cies elsewhere in the Portuguese empire, which drew explicitly on the
language and practices surrounding the granting of titles and lands to Por-
tuguese nobles, provide a good example. So too does the reality that the
Portuguese empire remained dependent on a military and administrative
presence that nobles dominated and which inhabitants of the empires
far reaches could join through ennoblement even if they did not have
Portuguese blood. In contrast, the Dutch Republic had few nobles who
could contribute; Frances service nobility (and the merchants wanting
to join it) remained focused on careers in France; Britain had noble and
gentry participation in its overseas activities, but they did not participate
as nobles; and Spains conquests relied more heavily on commoners or
persons with noble ties but who were not really nobles themselves.8
7On this topic, see the pioneering work of Charles C. Boxer, Women in Iberian Expan-
sion Overseas 14151815: Some Facts, Fancies and Personalities (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1975); also A. J. R. Russell-Wood, Women and Society in Colonial Brazil, Latin
American Studies 9 (1977): 134; Maria Odila Leite da Silva Dias, Power and Everyday Life:
The Lives of Working Women in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Uni-
versity Press, 1995); Sandra Lauderdale Graham, Caetana Says No: Womens Stories from a
Brazilian Slave Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Jnia Ferreira Fur-
tado, Chica da Silva: A Brazilian Slave of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008).
8On France, see, for example, Gayle Brunelles contribution to this collection. On Brit-
ain, see, for example, Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder, and Settlement: Maritime Enter-
prises and the Genesis of the British Empire, 14801630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1984). Military Governors and Imperial Frontiers, 16001800: A Study of Scotland and
Empires, eds. Andrew MacKillop and Steve Murdoch (Leiden: Brill, 2003) shows that Scots
became service nobles, but in Swedish and Russian rather than British service; on Spain
see inter alia Matthew Restall, Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2004), 2743. On Portugal see M. D. D. Newitt, The Portuguese
As a result of the Portuguese Crowns approach to empire, countless

business possibilities opened up for the established and the newer nobil-
ity as well as those such as planters who aspired to a noble ethos, includ-
ing women.9 As this article will show, this had three major outcomes. On
one hand, the Portuguese empire called on noblewomen to act as heads of
household in frontier ports, straining gendered expectations that they not
take active roles in managing family affairs.10 It also placed elite women of
non-noble status living on the empires frontiers in the position of having
to act as agents effectuating the inheritance strategies of planter families
desiring to ennoble their lifestyle. Arguably, then, the Portuguese empire
presumed women would have an active and public role in supporting
men who were or aspired to nobility. On the other hand, the increased
economic opportunities extended the middle social strata at the same
time that it generated new ranks of nobility based on merit and service
and, consequently, broadened the concept of nobility itself to include
women as lords in their own right in trading zones straddling ports and
their hinterlands.11 A third implication of the Portuguese Crowns success-
ful mobilization of opportunity was racial and cultural mixing, which was
intensified by the incorporation into the empire of individuals from differ-
ent continents, bringing a variety of skin colors, languages, religions, and
customs. Many of those of African origin were reduced to slavery (or, as
in the case of regions like Zambezia, incorporated into the empire with
the slave status they already had), as were the indigenous populations
of the New World. While slavery increased the distance separating social
strata, at the same time it did not impede the rise of certain ex-slaves and
their descendants, many of them bearing the label mulatto. Members
Nobility and the Rise and Decline of Portuguese Military Power, in The Chivalric Ethos
and the Development of Military Professionalism, ed. David J. B. Trim (Leiden: Brill, 2003),
89115; Newitt, A History of Mozambique (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995),
21732; Newitt, A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion, 14001668 (London: Routledge,
2005), 18392; H. B. Johnson, Jr., The Donatary Captaincy in Perspective: Portuguese Back-
grounds to the Settlement of Brazil, Hispanic American Historical Review 52, no. 2 (May
1972): 20314; G. J. Ames, Renascent Empire?: Pedro II and the Quest for Stability in Portuguese
Monsoon Asia ca.16401682 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999), 2023, 3958.
9On the aspirations of planters to a noble way of life see Philip Curtin, The Rise and
Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991), 4656.
10For the secondary literature on this issue see below.
11Rafael Bluteau registers this distinction between the nobility of blood and the new
nobility in Dicionrio da lngua portuguesa, expanded by Antnio de Morais (Lisbon: Ofi-
cina de Thadeo Ferreira, 1739), 732. For more details on the effects of empire on nobility
see section 3 below.
of these groups, as they grew wealthier, sought out ways to improve their
situation, both economically and in terms of social recognition and cul-
tural achievement.12 Just as women benefited from the rise of the Portu-
guese empires service nobles, so too did they gain from the promotion
and diversification of social roles through the advance of creole groups
tied to Portugals ultramarine territories, especially in commercially con-
nected maritime communities and their hinterlands, which particularly
attracted the Portuguese empires interest.13 Although the trajectories that
womens lives abroad illustrate were as diverse as the many roles Portu-
gals burgeoning imperial spaces were generating, they had in common a
context of constant movement. Somewhat paradoxically, given the strong
cultural proscription against female mobility in mainstream metropolitan
and even colonial Portuguese culture, it was this freedom of movement
that opened up for women the possibilities of the vast empire that they
and their families were building. This was especially true in port cities,
where the circulation of people, goods, and ideas was more extensive.
Displacements and Dislocations: Elite Women and Elite Customs

on the Move
Sometimes the Portuguese empire itself provided the initial impulse

behind these movements, as in the case of the transatlantic transloca-
tion of Mazago from Morocco to northeastern Brazil. Between the years
1773 and 1778, almost three hundred families in broad canoes arrived at
the port town of New Mazago on the river Mutuac, one of the branches
12A classic case in Brazil would be Chica da Silva, the daughter of a slave from the
Costa da Mina region of Africa and a Portuguese nobleman, who lived in Tejuco in the
Minas Gerais region of Brazil (a region that brought together African slaves and freedmen,
Portuguese, and Native Americans) in the eighteenth century, and by dint of her own
strategic maneuvering became both free and quite successful; see Furtado, Chica da Silva.
Mozambique, on the other hand, provides a sense of things in Africa; see Newitt, A History
of Mozambique, 21732.
13Cape Verde provides a wonderful example of the possibilities for womens agency as
a result of the intermixing of peoples that the Portuguese empire promoted in compact
port/hinterland contexts; see Isabel P. B. Fo Rodrigues, Islands of Sexuality: Theories and
History of Creolization in Cape Verde, International Journal of African Historical Studies 36,
no. 1 (2003): 93101; Boxer, Women in Iberian Expansion Overseas, 1920. For a broader dis-
cussion of ports and hinterlands focused on the Swahili city-states see Pearson, Ports and
Intruders, 64100. On the Portuguese interest in ports see Philip D. Curtin, Cross-Cultural
Trade in World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 3437, 13648.
In the port cities of the Portuguese empire both women of color and European
women had opportunities for social advancement. The Luso-African women,
Portuguese women, and free African women depicted here as they would have
appeared in eighteenth-century Rio de Janeiro, and all dressed in a similar fash-
ion, embody this reality. From a print by Carlos Julio (17401811). Used by per-
mission of the Fundao Biblioteca Nacional. Authors photographs.
of the Amazon, not far from the mouth of that great river.14 Among them
was Maria da Cunha,15 one of the fifty-one widows who would there
reach the end of a long adventure.16 On March 11, 1769, the original city
of Mazago, located on the coast of Morocco in the north of Africa, was a
walled fortress. On that day, dom Jos I, the king of Portugal, decided to
give up resistance against the centuries of Muslim attacks, opting instead
to evacuate the city. This choice was in line with the plans of the Marquis
of Pombal, then the all-powerful prime minister of the kingdom, to increase
settlements along the Amazon and in that way reinforce the Portuguese
imperial borders with Spanish and French America.17 Thus it was decided
to transfer the entire population from the fortress to a new city to be built
on the edge of the Amazon, which was baptized New Mazago.
The journey made by Maria da Cunha, along with the close to 1,300
other mazaganistas who completed the journey between Africa and the
Amazon region (with stops along the way in Lisbon and the port city of
Belm in Brazil), reveals once again the incessant movement that marked
the lives of many women in the Portuguese overseas empire and the for-
tunes and misfortunes resulting from that constant travel. Maria da Cunha,
like the other widows, left the Moroccan fortress via its seaporta small
opening in the fortress, facing the Atlanticand embarked on one of the
fourteen ships sent for their transport to Lisbon. As she was the widow of
a Portuguese nobleman, she boarded one of the first three ships to leave
the fortress, which were designated for the governor, the nobles and their
families, the clergy, military officers, and their prisoners and exiles. The
other eleven ships were allocated to the other residents of the city. The
fleet that left Mazago was a mirror image of the hierarchical society that
had been constructed in the city and that Portugal sought to reproduce
and maintain in all the cities of its empire; it was an organized city on
the move.18
14On the history of Mazago, see Laurent Vidal, Mazago, la ville qui traversa
lAtlantique: du Maroc lAmazonie (17691783) (Paris: Aubier, 2005) from which I have
drawn the information about this episode.
15Vidal, Mazago, 161.
17In 1750, after years of negotiation, the Treaty of Madrid ended the terms of the Treaty
of Tordesillas, which until then had established the boundaries between Portugual and
Spain in the Americas. The new treaty established that each Crown would remain in pos-
session of the regions it had colonized. Portugal extended its borders to the west, towards
the Andes, including territory around the Amazon, and through the rest of the eighteenth
century it slowly increased settlement and colonization in that area.
During the next ten years, amidst the salty tang of the Atlantic and the
Amazon River, the society of Mazago and the social role of its women
would go through profound transformations. One of the most significant
of these was that in the transition between Africa and Brazil, all the resi-
dents, including Maria da Cunha, became slaveowners. Part of the reloca-
tion payment received by the mazaganistas came in the form of slaves,
five per family. Maria da Cunha, the widow of a noble gentleman of the
old forts cavalry who had died in combat, was able to take advantage of
her slaves and become, in the Amazon, a successful farmer.19
The traditional structure of old Mazago, based on warfare and embrac-
ing the values of courage and bravery demonstrated in combat, no longer
shaped the widows fortunes. In the middle of the Amazonian jungle, Maria
da Cunha dedicated herself instead to business and became a farmer and
a colonist, responsible for providing for her family, a function which in
the wealthier classes was traditionally performed by men. Through her
widowhood and through the journey between the old and new Mazagos,
with the inevitable changes that occurred in the passage from a military
society to an agricultural one, Maria da Cunha forged a new indepen-
dence. She made this shift to an agricultural living with the help of land,
slaves and loans that the newly-founded trading company of Gro-Par
provided to the mazaganistas. She initially received five slaves (by 1778
two of them had died), though for the time this represented a small-scale
labor force. With these workers she could only manage a relatively small
rural property. Even so, once established in New Mazago, even without
the economic support of a husband, Maria da Cunha was able to support
her daughter and two sons. Not only did she maintain her family, but she
managed to establish them among the local elites, with one son becoming
a lieutenant of the troops of the captaincy of Par.20
For most elite Portuguese women the opportunities for autonomy
were usually more restricted, although not without possibilities. Many,
of course, left the supervision of their fathers only to pass directly to the
control of their husbands, with some experiencing an interim period of
enclosure in a convent, a path that Maria da Cunha too would likely have
followed before her unexpected move to the Americas. Also like Maria
da Cunha, it was often in widowhood that many elite Portuguese women

20Lisboa. Arquivo Histrico Ultramarino. Cdice 1257, f. 108. Belm. APEPA. Acervo
da Companhia do Gro-Par. (Thanks to Laurent Vidal for his kindness in providing this
reference.)
became independent, legally and sometimes financially, although even

then the process was neither direct nor simple. The law stated that wid-
ows, but not widowers, had to go through the justice system (via the Juzo
dos rfos e Ausentes, the Court of Orphans and the Missing) to legitimize
themselves as guardians of their minor children and to be able to manage
their assets. If the value of the estate exceeded sixty mil-ris, their guard-
ianship needed to be ratified by the king himself.21 But the widows of the
Portuguese elite, much like Maria da Cunha, did not shrink from taking
the necessary steps, and in this way many were able to control their own
destinies and those of their children.
Moreover, the constant movement between the different ports of the
empire that women like Maria da Cunha experienced, as in the case of
the geographical transfer of Mazago from Africa to Brazil, was often an
important element in facilitating these changes and opening spaces of
independence for these and other women in the Portuguese empire.22 To
illustrate this, we can look briefly at the fate of women whom the Por-
tuguese empire deemed commoners, but who settled in smaller port or
river towns like New Mazago, such as the regional port of Parnaba.
In Parnaba, as Alida Metcalfs work shows, the mobility of women like
Maria da Cunha formed part of a world in which planters, although legally
commoners, looked to Lisbon, the Portuguese empire, and to Portuguese
nobles and what they viewed as their cosmopolitan standards in shaping
their own family strategies. It was not possible to organize their estates
as morgados or entailed estates, as Portuguese law forbade this to com-
moners. But by choosing and granting to one daughter and her husband a
sizeable dowry that they effectively kept, planter families could gain many
of the benefits of such a practice.23
The dependence of planters on women as conduits for the transfer of
their wealth and reputation over generations did not necessarily mean
that women had an independent role in these matters. Brazilian planter
21Raquel Mendes Pinto Chequer, Negcios de famlia, gerncia de vivas: Senhoras

administradoras de bens e de pessoas (Minas Gerais 17501800), (MA thesis, Universidade
Federal de Minas Gerais, 2002).
22For a more detailed discussion of the impact of mobility on womens possibilities see
Ernst Pijnings piece in this collection.
23For a detailed discussion of this practice and some fine examples of the practice in
Parnaba, see Alida Metcalf, Family and Frontier in Colonial Brazil (Austin, TX: University
of Texas Press, 2005), 9091, 94119. That these strategies were not limited to port-based
planters is obvious from the work of Muriel Nazzari, Disappearance of the Dowry: Women,
Families, and Social Change in So Paulo, Brazil (16001900) (Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 1991), 1585.
society expected women to live rather secluded lives and it is quite clear
that fathers in particular had substantial authority to make the decisions
regarding marital alliances and dowries, including reclaiming dowries
from misbehaving sons-in-law.24 Nevertheless, as Metcalf puts it, as the
marriage matured, a wife became a more visible person in town and an
important member of her family.25 One reason for this is the Portuguese
adoption of the Roman law community of property, which guaranteed
Portuguese women legal title to 50 percent of all household resources,
much as wives in New Netherland and the Dutch Republic had.26 Indeed,
while Brazilian husbands had the right to manage all household assets,
they needed their wives permission to make use of their legal half of the
estate.27 As in the case of noblewomen like Maria da Cunha, commoner
widows too gained a lot of control over household affairs by becoming
household heads.28
Creole Ascent
If frontier contexts such as that provided by the port of Mazago (in

both its incarnations) and Parnaba (an inland port facing the frontier
and the Atlantic) offered one arena for womens mobility and agency, the
emergence of a service nobility offered another. One important factor in
structuring the Portuguese empire, characteristic of old regime societies
(though not necessarily of their imperial spaces), was the idea of nobility
and the particular social arrangements it made possible. In simple terms,
to be noble was to be among those at the top of society, and the con-
dition of nobility presumed a hierarchy among men.29 The apex of this
hierarchy, the aristocracy, legitimized itself chiefly by asserting claims of
noble birth and reproducing these claims in the social body via proving
kinship to the monarch. In this ordered society, which in theory should
have been inflexible, nobility was acquired through the blood, and lineage
24Metcalf, Family and Frontier, 8991.

26Metcalf, Family and Frontier, 9192, 97100. On the community of property in New
Netherland and the Dutch Republic see the contribution of Martha Shattuck and Kim
Todt in this volume.
28Metcalf, Family and Frontier, 91, 9899, 111.
29Bluteau, Dicionrio da lngua portuguesa, 730.
was an essential factor in maintaining the social order.30 Over time, how-
ever, nobility changed first to allow for the consolidation of royal power
in Portugal and then to allow the early modern Portuguese empire to
flourish by granting individuals noble status for their service to the Por-
tuguese Crown abroad.31 In the face of the Portuguese Crowns need for
skilled labor and, in the case of its empire, sufficient personnel to occupy
land, kinship ceded some of its place to cultural ideas of nobility tied to
merit and good conduct. To be noble in Portugal came to encompass that
which is differentiated in honor and esteem, by blood or by permission
of the Prince, from commoners and craftsmen.32 This notion of acquired
nobility reflected the profile that the nobility began to assume in the Por-
tuguese empire, where, alongside the nobility of birth, there emerged a
nobility of merit, composed of men [and women] whose grandparents
were unknown, but who with the favor and grace of the Princes, rose to
the most prominent positions in the Republic.33 This language masks
the more practical realities behind the shifts in nobilitys meaning, which
had less of princely grace about it and much more of imperial Portugals
dependence on mixed-lineage elites.34
This transformation of the concept of nobility allowed for social mobil-
ity not only for men, but also for women. The transformative power of
fictive kinship ties established by crown ennoblements was such that, at
times, not even skin color was an obstacle for women of non-noble origin
to reach the level of the nobility, as a few paradigmatic cases can illus-
trate. In the remote areas of the empire, unions between Portuguese and
indigenous men and women became fairly common, resulting in several
successive generations of persons of mixed-lineage origin. Often, due to
the accumulation of wealth over several generations from the process of
exploration and commercialization of colonial products, these men and
30Rita Costa Gomes, The Making of a Court Society: Kings and Nobles in Late Medieval
Portugal, trans. Alison Aiken (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 80109.
31Gomes, The Making of a Court Society, 10916; M. D. D. Newitt, A History of Portuguese
Overseas Expansion, 135, 18590; Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex, 312,
1721, 4656. Even the noblity accepted this transformation; see Ames, Renascent Empire?,
4142.
32Bluteau, Dicionrio da lngua portuguesa, 730 (emphasis mine).
34The most striking case would be Zambezia where a mixed-lineage elite with origins
in unions between individuals of African, Portuguese, and South Asian (often Goan) origin
anchored the Portuguese presence. See Newitt, A History of Mozambique, 21732.
women managed to rise several social levels, even reaching, through the
favor of the king, the nobility of merit.35
The production of tropical goods traded along transoceanic routes
became, over time, the most important source of wealth in the empire. The
state as well as those social sectors not noble by birth benefited dispropor-
tionately from the economic strength of this sector. The latter constantly
pressured the king for recognition and social ascendance.36 At times, there-
fore, these royal privileges of ennoblement and other benefits escaped the
Portuguese metropolitan ambit and became creolized. In Lower Zambe-
zia from Chicoa to the Zambezi River Delta, and as far afield as the Indian
port city of Goa, for example, women known as the donas da Zambezia
became famous as noble and quasi-noble landholders beginning in the
late seventeenth century.37 They first came to prominence because the
Crown granted them legal titles to substantial chieftaincies known as pra-
zos in the central region of what is now Mozambique. These chieftaincies
had originally come into the crowns orbit through the efforts of Afro-
Portuguese and Portuguese as well as Indian and Indo-Portuguese men of
Goan origins in its employ who were active beginning in the late sixteenth
century. These chieftaincies included substantial land and slaves from
which their masters extracted substantial resources (albeit not as planta-
tions), but until about the mid-nineteenth century, holders of prazos also
35Among the major maritime regions of the Portuguese empire where mixing resulted
in a mixed-lineage elite in which women gained prominence were the Cape Verde Islands,
West African and Central West African ports like Cacheu and Luanda, Zambezia (to
include Sofala), Goa, Cochin, and Macao. In Brazil, as the preceding discussion makes
clear, inheritance was not through the distaff side and elite men had sufficient access to
women of European origin, both of which limited prospects for women of mixed lineage.
It is also worthy of note that persons of mixed-lineage origin in Zambezia seem to have
been very prominent players in the Portuguese status game that offered ennoblement as
the ultimate prize. On these matters see Ren Barendse, The Arabian Seas: The Indian
Ocean World of the Seventeenth Century (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2002), 8589; Newitt, A
History of Mozambique, 21732; Curtin, Cross-Cultural, 3436, 13748; Rodrigues, Islands of
Sexuality, 93101; David Northrup, Africas Discovery of Europe, 14501850 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002), 58, 6869; Philip Haviks contribution to this volume.
36Newitt, A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion, 18488.
37Boxer, Women in Iberian Expansion Overseas, 8081; Newitt, A History of Mozam-
bique, 22837; K. M. Phiri, O. J. J. Kalinga, and H. H. K. Bhila, The Northern Zambezia-
Lake Malawi Region, in General History of Africa, vol. 5, Africa from the Sixteenth to the
Eighteenth Century, ed. B. A. Ogot (Paris: UNESCO, 1992), 63132; H. H. K. Bhila, Southern
Zambezia, in General History of Africa, vol. 5, 653; Allen F. Isaacman, Mozambique: The
Africanization of a European Institution: The Zambezi Prazos, 17501902 (Madison, WI: Uni-
versity of Wisconsin Press, 1972), 5658.
held the jurisdictional and political powers of the indigenous chiefs whom
they or their predecessors had replaced.38
By making Portuguese women in Lower Zambezia eligible for prazos,
the Crown appealed to the settler populations desire for status while still
following its typical practice of rewarding the widows and daughters of
men who had served the Crown and who would in turn marry Portuguese
husbands. It also prevented conquered lands from returning to indigenous
hands or remaining in the grasp of men whom the Crown deemed lawless,
although not to the extent it hoped.39
This failure becomes apparent if one looks at crown efforts to use prazo
grants to maintain Lower Zambezia as a European enclave. Although there
is some question as to when the Portuguese Crown began to insist on this,
sometime before the mid-eighteenth century it was stipulating that only
white women born of Portuguese parents could receive a prazo.40 More
importantly, these women could only pass on their titlesolely through
the female line it should be notedunder the condition that they married
white men.41 Despite the application of such a strict standard, the lack of
sufficient European partners meant that many women ended up marrying
local men, principally those of mixed-lineage or Indian origin. In spite of
the Portuguese Crowns desires, then, the increasingly mixed-lineage elite
of Lower Zambezia effectively creolized and some have even argued Afri-
canized itself and the prazos it had been granted by creating successive
generations of mixed-lineage prazeiros and prazeiras who adhered more
to indigenous than Portuguese culture.42 In short, by ignoring the origi-
nal conditions for prazo grants, mixed-lineage women became powerful
landowners, thereby becoming the so-called donas da Zambezia or Zam-
bezi donas, some of whom ruled like feudal lords in the areas under their
power.43 As a result it was quite common for them to choose their mar-
riage partners, to decide what they did with their slaves and dependents
38H. H. K. Bhila, Southern Zambezia, 65156; Newitt, A History of Mozambique, 217

37; Isaacman, Mozambique, 4356, 95123.
39Newitt, A History of Mozambique, 21922, 22829; Newitt, The Portuguese on the
Zambezi: An Historical Interpretation of the Prazo System, The Journal of African History
10, no. 1 (1969): 7175; Isaacman, Mozambique, 5663; Barendse, The Arabian Seas, 97.
40Boxer, Women in Iberian Expansion, 81.
41Boxer, Women in Iberian Expansion Overseas, 81; Isaacman, Mozambique, 5658,
9597; Newitt, A History of Mozambique, 22829; Newitt, The Portuguese, 7475.
42Newitt, Mozamabique, 22627, Isaacman, Mozambique, 5763; Boxer, Women in Ibe-
rian Expansion Overseas, 8183.
43Isaacman, Mozambique, 4456; Newitt, A History of Mozambique, 22930, 23237;
Boxer, Women in Iberian Expansion Overseas, 8183.
(including their slave soldiers), and to head their households. One such
woman from the eighteenth century was dona Ignez Pessoa de Almeida
Castello-Branco. She owned thousands of achikunda (slave soldiers) on
the extensive landholdings comprising her Cheringoma and Gorongoza
prazos. Another forced her husband, a former governor of Macao, to flee
Zambezia for East Timor. In 1757 one dona Catharina attempted to buy
off the viceroy of India. Other Zambezi donas played prominent roles in
pushing colonial projects like gold mining in Michonga in the 1790s or by
serving as powerful leaders in the later nineteenth century.44
Although the prazos began as and remained largely land-oriented
enterprises, the Zambezi donas actually had a maritime role, although
it did not rely solely on close interaction with port communities. First,
they projected an important and noticeable cultural presence in the ports
of Mozambique from Tete to Sofala to Mozambique Island and in Goa
through the houses they owned there. Second, and more importantly for
the Atlantic side of this story, as proprietors of prazos, the Zambezi donas
acted as middlemen of a sort in an international trading network. They
connected Portuguese factors and, after 1755, Indian traders from Goa
based chiefly on Mozambique Island, who imported cloth, beads, brass,
and European goods such as firearms, to interior Southeast African sup-
pliers of ivory, gold, wax, and, especially from the late eighteenth to the
mid-nineteenth century, slaves destined chiefly for northeastern Brazil.
Current literature on the prazos has demonstrated that, from the 1750s on,
Indian traders from Goa and indigenous Yao traders from Northern Zam-
bezia pushed the prazos into slave trading and, ultimately, into extinc-
tion. Yet given the prevalence of marriages between Indian merchants
and Zambezi donas from the mid-eighteenth century, it would seem quite
probable that estates organized around such marriages benefited rather
than suffered from the increasing success of Indian traders in the inte-
rior trading zone that prazo proprietors had once dominated. While this
must remain speculation, it would have represented the final inversion of
the Portuguese Crowns policy of capturing trade in Zambezia by control-
ling women, to find those very women marrying out of Portuguese circles
in order to succeed by removing Zambezi trade from Portuguese hands.
Since governors of Mozambique began auctioning off the prazos to the
highest bidder in the 1790s, just as Goans had reached prominence in the
44Boxer, Women in Iberian Expansion Overseas, 8384; Newitt, A History of Mozam-

bique, 22930.
prazo elite, their Zambezi dona wives would not have benefited from their
choice for long, but the irony remains poignant nonetheless.45
Nor were these women the only beneficiaries of the Portuguese Crowns
imperial ennoblements. As overseas commerce became the principal
activity of the Portuguese empire and the main source of income for the
state, the Crown tried to support and stimulate it. Portuguese interests
were so closely tied to commerce that the king of Portugal began to call
himself Lord of Conquest, Navigation and Commerce.46 The Crown used
the concession of titles and honors to lure in the service and the capi-
tal of the great businessmen.47 The association of these merchants with
the state developed through competition for markets that were increas-
ingly monopolized. In the Iberian countries, this cooperation was effec-
tive, since this important transoceanic transport system, connecting their
principal cities with their respective colonies, required considerable capi-
tal and an organizational structure that neither the state nor traditional
small-scale merchants were able to summon on their own. To the extent
that large-scale merchants were the only ones who accumulated substan-
tial capital and had an interest in investing in business, they were the
ideal partners for a colonial enterprise. Therefore, they were constantly
called upon to financially support the kingdom when it faced financial dif-
ficulties, or to negotiate various contracts for the development of colonial
products.48 The merchants, for their part, tried to assert themselves in a
society in which the predominant values were essentially noble ones. The
principal strategy they used was the purchase of offices and titles, which
45Newitt, A History of Mozambique, 232, 23742; Isaacman, Mozambique, 59, 6494,

11719; H. K. K. Bhila, Southern Zambezia, 65153, 65556; Curtin, Cross-Cultural, 3437.
46Dom Jos, por Graa de Deus, Rei de Portugal, e dos Algarves, daqum e dalm
Mar, em frica Senhor de Guin e da Conquista, Navegao, Comrcio da Ethipia, Arbia,
Prsia e da ndia. Antnio Delgado Silva, Coleo de Legislao portugues, 17631790 (Lis-
bon: Tipografia de Luiz Correa da Cunha, 1842), 672.
47On the linkage between office, monetary gain, honor, nobility, and the Portuguese
Crowns use of offices to encourage participation from the elite and the middling see
Newitt, A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion, 14001668, 18390. The captains dona-
tary of Brazil, all of whom were merchants or crown officials, are an example of the Portu-
guese Crowns willingness to grant honors to non-nobles and of non-nobles desire to seek
them. See Alida C. Metcalf, Donatary Captaincies, in Iberia and the Americas, eds. John
Michael Francis and Will Kaufman (New York: ABC-Clio, 2005), 412.
48On the role of merchant capital in the Portuguese Crowns early efforts to profit
from the spice trade see Bailey Wallys Diffie, Boyd C. Shafer, and George Davison Winius,
Foundations of the Portuguese Empire, 14151580, 2nd ed., (Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 1977), 40726.
then became an important source of funds for the financial support of the
Crown; these purchases allowed for the social ascendance of their wives
and children, often of mixed-lineage origin.
For the second half of the sixteenth century, one Simoa Godinho,
daughter of a Portuguese father and a slave mother, serves as an exam-
ple of how a second-generation mestia enriched by colonial exploration
could ascend to the highest social levels of Lisbon society, even being of
mixed-lineage origin.49 Her father was the owner of the morgado (entailed
estate) of the island of Ano Bom, part of the archipelago of So Tom and
Prncipe. The morgadio system was based on land assets, which were reg-
ulated and rendered indivisible, as land was a source of wealth and social
prestige.50 Regulated by various clauses, a morgado consisted of an agree-
ment between the institutor and the king. It was basically a repayment for
the good services rendered unto the king, a reward and compensation to
loyal and honored subjects, always understood as a royal concession and
subject to Portuguese law. The morgado created a mosaic of assets that
could not be divided or alienated and which would pass to the firstborn
son or daughter of each grantee upon his or her death. As the owner of
substantial sugarcane plantations, part of the morgado he had inherited in
So Tom and Prncipe, Simoas father made a fortune during the period
of peak sugar production in the archipelago.51 The birth of a mestio girl,
born of a white Portuguese father and a slave, was not unusual in So
Tom and the case of Simoa was not unique; in fact miscegenation in So
Tom had started with official encouragement.52 Many governors mar-
ried wealthy mixed-lineage heirs. It was common for Portuguese recently
arrived to the colonies to hire maids for household work, and just as com-
mon for them to have sexual relations with those women and even to
marry them, a practice that was accepted by the state.53
Born in So Tom, Simoa later went to Lisbon, on the banks of the
Tagus River. Even with her mixed-lineage background, she inherited a
49I am grateful to Walter Rossa for the information on Simoa Godinho in this and the
following two paragraphs.
50Margarida Sobral Neto, A persistncia do poder senhorial, in Histria de Portugal,
vol. 3, ed. Jos Mattoso (Lisbon: Caminho, 1995), 174.
51Rogrio de Oliveira Gonalves, Historia de Caxias, commemorative lecture on the
anniversary of the creation of the parish of Caxias, July 3, 2002, http://www.caxias.org/
caxias.htm, accessed February 12, 2012.
52Boxer, Women in Iberian Expansion Overseas, 19.
vast estate upon the death of her father, which brought her considerable
fame. In Lisbon she was known as dona Simoa de So Tom. She was
considered by all to be a black aristocrat, and the color of her skin posed
no obstacle to her social ascendance. As a symbol of the status she had
acquired, she founded a funerary chapel in the church of the Misericrdia.
Death was the last opportunity to externalize ones social category. Rites
to allow the forgiveness of sinners and the salvation of the soul, as well
as to preserve the social hierarchies established in life, surrounded death.
Funerals carried out with pomp, using the external signs of honor, con-
ferred dignity. The privilege of establishing a side chapel in one of the most
important churches of Lisbon reflected the social power that the daughter
of an ex-slave could acquire in Portuguese society. Simoas chapel is today
the principal altar of the Old Church of the Conception, as a result of the
architectural transformations carried out in Lisbon by the Marquis of Pom-
bal following the earthquake that rocked Lisbon in 1755. It is known for
its architectural value, dominated by the Manueline style, which became
common during Portugals greatest period of exploration.54
Simoa Godinho was also able to express her social worth through chari-
table works. In the society of the time, charity was the privilege of the
elites and needed to be expressed publicly in order to be a mechanism of
social ascent. With the goods Simoa inherited, she established an orphan-
age in So Tom, connected to the Santa Casa de Misericrdia, which
displays her name and, along with the altar erected to house her mortal
remains in Lisbon, immortalizes the importance and honor that a slaves
descendant could reach in Portugal. In spite of the hierarchical tendencies
of society, then, Portuguese overseas expansion created opportunities for
social mobility. While slavery initially rested on segregation, the condi-
tion of freedom allowed formerly enslaved men and women access to the
mechanisms and symbols of social dignity, though usually this was only
possible if they accepted the values of the white Portuguese world and
virtually erased their African and colored past.
The social ascent of Simoa de Gamboa, dona Ignez Pessoa de Almeida
Castello-Branco, and the other donas da Zambezia indicates that the
movement and circulation in port cities of the Portuguese empire
54The famous Hieronymite monastery in the Belm neighborhood of Lisbon is the

best-known example of Manueline architecture. This late-Gothic style used ropes and
anchors as decorative elements along with other nautical themes that alluded to Portu-
guese exploration.
f acilitated the social mobility of women. Their involvement in or connec-

tions to the production and commercialization of tropical products let
them take advantage of the expansion of the service nobility to promote
their own ascension. In the midst of this new nobility, women of mixed
lineage were able to dissolve the boundaries of color that separated them
from the blood elites, appropriating the external symbols of that tradi-
tional nobility.
That this did not always work, however, we can see in the life of Joana
Guedes de Brito. In 1731, Joaquim Quaresma Delgado received orders from
the Brazilian viceroy Vasco de Meneses, Count of Sabugosa, to prepare a
map of the road leading from the port city of Salvador da Bahia in Bra-
zil towards the mining region in the interior, following the course of the
Verde and San Francisco rivers.55 To carry out this task, Quaresma trav-
eled through the region over several months, passing through various
landholdings along the way and staying as a guest in several. Among these
were the cattle ranches of Boa Vista, Batalha, Campos de So Joo, Itibi-
raba, Mocambo, Campo Grande, Retiro do Curralinho, Santo Antnio do
Urubu, Santo Antnio do Retiro, and Riacho dos Porcos. Arranged almost
in a line along the course of the Verde River, all these farms were owned
by dona Joana da Silva Guedes de Brito. Her properties were so numerous
in the region that travelers passing through them knew the route as the
Road of Lady Joana.56
But who was Joana Guedes de Brito, who became one of the many pro-
prietors of land along the coast and in the interior of Brazil? She lived in
the port city of Salvador in Bahia, where she had built a famous residence,
today known as the Pao do Saldanha. She and her mother, Isabel Maria
Guedes de Brito, inherited a vast range of farmland, which they mostly
rented to third parties. Isabels lands included more than nine hundred
leagues of land conquered by her ancestors. In this great region there are
infinite farms, the residents of which pay her ten mil-reis each year for
every three leagues width of land. In length, these are as much as each
can cultivate; they end in bushland yet to be explored.57
55Urbino Vianna, Bandeiras e sertanistas baianos (So Paulo: Companhia Editora

Nacional 1935), 158207.
56Bosch Collection, Frankfurt. Noticias das minas da Amrica chamadas Geraes
Pertencentes El rei de Portugal relatada pellos tres irmaos chamados Nunes os quaes
rodara muytos annos por estas partes. Doc. 555.
57Noticias das minas da Amrica...
Even with this fortune, mother and daughter were disdained by the
Portuguese elite living in the city of Salvador, since they were considered
to be mestizo. Isabel was frequently described with racially loaded terms
such as mameluca, mestia, morena, and nativa. The two women were
descendants of an indigenous woman and Antnio Guedes de Brito, who
gained his fame as one of the bandeirantes or Indian-hunters who sought
out Amerindians in the Brazilian interior to supply as slaves to plantation
owners. In spite of these common prejudices, Joana found in the Portu-
guese court a way to establish a better view of her lineage. She arranged
a marriage with dom Joo de Mascarenhas, the brother of the Count of
Coculim.58 Their relationship, however, was rather rocky. The count was
a violent man and mocked Joana publicly for her mixed-lineage or mes-
tizo origins. He refused to house her relatives in the couples residence,
sending them instead into a nearby, less elegant building. Apart from that,
he lived a dissipated life in the city; he acted as the head of the household,
but in truth he did not possess the wealth necessary to support his habits
of ostentatious display. He was, one could say, the alter ego of the striving
Lower Zambezi prazeiro.59
With her indomitable nature and using the leverage of her wealth and
power over the land, Joana requested of the king that he free her from
this unwanted marriage that put her valuable inheritance at risk. At that
time, Joana was considered one of the wealthiest women in Brazil, so vast
were her territorial holdings. She convinced the king to have her husband
arrested and sent to Lisbon, where he died in 1729.60 As a widow, dona
Joana began to seek out the possibility of arranging a new marriage. She
found an attractive candidate in the Count of Ponte and viceroy of the
Indies dom Manuel de Saldanha da Gama, though he was nearly half her
age.61 The high social rank of the groom was not enough, however, to
guarantee conjugal harmony.
Love was not a necessary factor in marriage and was in fact quite dis-
connected from it, since matrimony did not necessarily constitute a space
58The text reads Dona Isabel Maria Guedes de Britosogra de dom Joo Mascaren-
has, irmo do Conde de Coculin. Noticias das minas da Amrica....
59See Joana Guedes de Brito, Dicionrio mulheres do Brasil, eds. Schuma Schumaher
and rico V. Brazil (Rio do Janeiro: J. Zahar, 2000) 29192, from which most of the follow-
ing information has been drawn.
60Joana Guedes de Brito, 292.
61Joana Guedes de Brito, 292.
for the development of passion or affection.62 As was customary among

the elites dispersed throughout the Portuguese empire, matrimony was a
family business, designed for the construction of alliances that promoted
the social and economic interests of those involved. Therefore they pri-
oritized motives other than the personal interests of the participants,63
for which these alliances were known as casamentos de razo, marriages
of reason.64 The sentiments that were expected to unite the couple were
principally friendship and respect, the values of conjugal love.65 The
majority of elite women, whether they were noble by virtue of blood or
merit, married very young, as soon as they reached puberty, and they were
joined in marriages arranged by their families to spouses whom they often
did not know. Dowries were an essential mechanism for effectuating these
marriages. The concession of a wifes dowry was a fundamental strategy
to attract advantageous and strategic relations among wealthy families
as well as among those with fewer resources, including those of mixed
lineage, who were able to use marriage to make alliances with families
considered to be of pure blood.66 For the newlyweds, the dowry, whether
ample or slim, constituted the assistance necessary to establish a new life
and family.67 The dowry, just as in the case of Joana Guedes de Brito, was
used as a way to attract good matches with an eye to improving social sta-
tus as well as taking a step closer to the ideal limpeza do sangue or clean
bloodlines for the descendants of many mixed-lineage women. In Joanas
case, although her strategy was correct, like many women throughout the
empire whose marriages were family arrangements, she did not accom-
plish her desired goal: she died in 1762, embittered by her unhappy mar-
riage and without leaving any descendants.
The two unhappy marriages of dona Joana raise some interesting points
about one of the questions that marked the daily lives of women in the
Portuguese empire: the extent of their submission to their husbands. The
power and wealth that these women derived from their control of vast
62Silvia Maria Jardim Brugger, Valores e vivncias matrimoniais: O triunfo do discurso

amoroso (MA thesis, Universidade Federal Fluminense, 1995), 38.
63Morton Hunt, The Natural History of Love (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1960).
64Jean-Louis Flandrin, Famlias: Parentesco, casa e sexualidade na sociedade antiga
(Lisbon: Editorial Estampa, 1992); Nathaniel Branden, A psicologia do amor (Rio de Janeiro:
Rosa dos Tempos, 1998).
65Mary del Priore, Ao sul do corpo (Rio de Janeiro: Jos Olympio, 1993).
66Nazzari, Disappearance of the Dowry.
67Maria Beatriz Silva, Mulheres na colnia: Uma histria a ser escrita, Revista da
SBPH (Curitiba), 18 (2000): 18.
landholdings allowed them to act autonomously. Many had enough eco-

nomic independence so that they were able, at times, to respond boldly
to the misogynist and moralist ideas of the church and the Portuguese
state.68 Accumulating properties or investing in various offices that would
assure their survival, many of them developed their own system of ethics
in constructing their family and affective ties. The case of Joana also illus-
trates that the opportunities for moving outside traditional social roles
worked more or less in the same way throughout the network of port cit-
ies that connected the Portuguese empire, whether in the Indian Ocean or
the North or South Atlantic. Joana Guedes de Brito was one of countless
women who knew how to take advantage of the dilution of racial bound-
aries and the possibilities of social ascent into the service nobility. Yet,
importantly, her case also illustrates that neither a robust network nor
ample funds always enabled women to escape completely the Portuguese
empires patriarchal norms. Taming ones master(s) could prove a risky
and unpredictable business.69
Honor a Feat in Itself?
As we saw in the cases of the Zambezi donas, Simoa Godinho, and Joana
Guedes de Brito, nobility and its privileges could be acquired not only
through lineage but also by royal concessions granted to those excelling in
service to and conduct towards the ultramarine empire. For that reason,
in the Portuguese empire, the concept of nobility tied to status became
directly linked to the concept of honor with its attachments to meritori-
ous performance, although the source of mens honor was different from
womens. Honor was the value that a person had in his own eyes, but
also in the view of society.70 In this sense, if honor is an ability, or an
image that a person has of him or herself, this value only has significance
68Luciano Raposo de Almeida Figueiredo, O avesso da memria: Cotidiano e trabalho

da mulher em Minas Gerais no scolo XVIII (Rio de Janeiro: Jos Olympio, 1993); Mary del
Priore, A mulher na histria do Brasil, Coleo Repensando a Histria (So Paulo: Contexto,
1989).
69I draw the phrasing in this sentence from Kris Lane, Taming the Master: Brujera,
Slavery, and the Encomienda in Barbacoas at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century, Ethno-
history 45, no. 3 (1998): 477507.
70Julian Pitt-Rivers, Honra e posio social, in Honra e vergonha: Valores das socie-
dades mediterrnicas, ed. J. G. Peristiany, 2nd ed. (Lisbon: Fundao Calouste Gulbenkian,
1988), 13.
in relation to others, when it is verified in society.71 In the Iberian world

(and by extension throughout the Portuguese overseas empire), where
the public and private spheres were closely connected, and where social
ties were conspicuously established in public space, honor only had sig-
nificance between and for others. Honor was the credit and good reputa-
tion that an individual enjoyed among his peers, in the public eye, and
therefore it constituted what was known as public fame or reputation.72
In Spain, Portugal and their overseas territories, the idea of honor went
beyond being an intrinsic or internal quality to be identified as reputa-
tion, as a public voice.73 If nobility could be acquired through honorable
service to the Portuguese Crown, the same was true of honor, which one
could hold like a status, and the latter could only be legitimized in the
public sphere. In their pursuit of honor, women as much as men were sus-
ceptible to the image that others created of them: based on whatever was
public and known and what was overheard, this was the image that the
community made of its members, according to the reputation that they
earned. For men, the characteristics of bravery, courage, and violence
extensions of the concept of masculinityguaranteed a good reputation,
while for women the most esteemed values were modesty, neatness, and
virtue. While masculine honor could be acquired through action, women
had to achieve it by resisting sexual temptation.74
In a society in which life was played out in public, proof of feminine
virtue was not determined so much by the womans actual behavior as
by the public recognition of her honor. Therefore we can see, especially
among women of the elite, a preoccupation with the preservation of
honor as an image that society constructed of each of them. The social
position of poor women, freed women, and slaves seemed to be in itself
a place of dishonor. Therefore the concept of honor, in the context of a
society in constant movement, became in a way open to change and more
flexible meaning. Even the lowest social ranks expressed concern about
the maintenance of this social value.
A representative example drawn from the port city of Belm do Par
in northeastern Brazil at the mouth of the Amazon River around 1780,
71A honra: Imagem de si ou dom de si um ideal equvoco, ed. Marie Gautheron (Porto
Alegre: L&PM, 1992).
73Evaldo Cabral de Mello, O nome e o sangue (So Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1989), 25.
74Marco Antonio Silveira, Fama pblica: Poder e costume nas Minas setecentistas
(PhD diss., University of So Paulo, 2000).
the very period in which slave exports from Lower Zambezi prazos began
flowing there, illustrates the importance that honor could acquire and its
range of meaning in the context of the empire. In that year, the cafusa75
Joana Baptista came before the city notary and, through a contract, sold
herself to Pedro da Costa, resident of the same city and of Catalan nation-
ality. Joana affirmed that from her birth, she had always been free and
not subject to captivity, leaving no doubt as to her free status, which she
then voluntarily renounced. She declared that she decided to give up her
freedom because she was very poor and unable to live in honor, which
meant keeping her virginity and not prostituting herself. Her parents,
already deceased, were the negro Ventura, who was the slave of Father
Jos de Mello, and the Indian Anna Maria, who was in the service of the
same Father.76
Portuguese law made a distinction between free and freed. Free
described a person who had been in that condition since birth; freed
were those who had previously been slaves and then were freed or released,
even if this freedom was granted at a young age, as early as the moment
they were baptized. Although freedmen were never able to reach the con-
dition of freemen, their children did enjoy this possibility.77 Joanas insis-
tence upon having been born free left no doubt that she had been born of
a free or freed woman. One of the changes put into effect by the Marquis
of Pombal in relation to the Indians of the Amazon was the establish-
ment of the so-called Diretrio dos ndios, the Directory of Indians. This
submitted indigenous Brazilians to a regime of forced labor, overseen by
the state, though without imposing the condition of slavery. It also pro-
vided a way to transform Indians into subjects of the Portuguese empire,
guaranteeing the crowns domination over the vast Amazonian territory.78
75A cafuso or cafusa was the child of a black parent and an indigenous American
parent.
76Lisbon, Arquivos Nacionais da Torre do Tombo (hereafter ANTT), Papis do Brasil,
avulso 7, no. 1. (All the subsequent quotations in this section refer to this document.) Tran-
scribed in Carlos Pontes, Uma escrava original, in Vicente Salles, O negro no Par: Sob o
regime da escravido (Rio de Janeiro: Fundao Getlio Vargas, 1971), 32830.
77For a practical sense of the differences between free, freed, and enslaved statuses see
Hendrik Kraay, Race, State, and Armed Forces in Independence Era Brazil: Bahia, 1790s1840s
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 1727. For an example of the status of the
children of freedmen see Eduardo Silva, Prince of the People: The Life and Times of a Brazil-
ian Free Man of Colour (London: Verson, 1993).
78For a recent discussion of this policy see Hal Langfur, The Forbidden Lands: Colonial
Identity, Frontier Violence, and the Persistence of Brazils Eastern Indians, 17501830 (Stan-
ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 6188.
Therefore, Joanas Indian mother was considered free and passed on that
condition to her daughter, even though her father was a slave.
Joana did not declare her age in this document, though we may make
some guesses. As she was not accompanied by an agent, nor declared to
have a guardian, she must have reached the age of majority. She identified
herself as single, and declared her intention someday to have children.
From these statements, we may conclude that she was in the early stage
of adult life. Her concern about age and illness, which might occur over
the course of life,79 and her lack of an occupation that could support her,
reinforce the idea that she was not at a very advanced age.
Contrary to what one would expect, Joana exchanged her freedom for
the assurance of living honorably and being taken care of for the rest of
her life. In the contract, she affirms that the impossibility of supporting
herself with dignity was the principal reason that led her to give up her
position as a free woman. She affirmed that at present, she found herself
without father or mother to manage and sustain her through the course
of life and its troubles, nor did she have the means to maintain herself in
freedom. The cafusa clearly stated the motives that led her to this choice
and the relative importance of each of them, according to her own system
of values. The first was the ability to live in peace; that is, the burden of
captivity exempted her from having to face the daily insecurity of survival
with no guarantees. Her second argument was that as a slave, she could
live in dedication to the service of God. In this way, her honor and her
unblemished life could be preserved, at a cost that she considered to be
less than that of dishonor. Finally, she presented as a third motive the
support she would receive in sickness and old age, reflecting her worries
about the future, since the master who would be in charge of her was
expected to take care of her and treat her problems.80
We should note Joanas emphasis on honor (a term she herself used) as
an important factor that led her to make this decision. Honor in this case
took on a double meaning. On one hand, it meant her capacity to gain
the economic means that would allow her to live with dignity, beyond
the threat of poverty, not only for the moment, but also in her old age,
when her master was obliged to ensure her well-being in exchange for her
service. On the other hand, it meant living according to morality and good
79Lisbon, ANTT, Papis do Brasil, avulso 7, no. 1.

habits, which for her meant dedicating herself to the service of God. Thus,
if in the first case honor was expressed in the private sphere, in satisfy-
ing her own material interests, in the second it was opened to the public
sphere, since it incorporated moral values, valid only in the eyes of society
and according to which Joana tried to live in the midst of the society she
was part of. Honor in this sense was a value that was within the reach of
more than just elite women. Even slave women could try to display their
virtuous lives, an essential element of feminine honor, although slavery
was the lowest social status that existed.
What tools did Joana possess to preserve the minimum conditions of
dignity, if by the terms of the contract she submitted herself to the laws
and penalties of slavery, and gave up forever all her legal rights to appeal?
What guarantees did she have that her master would treat her well? Her
belief that she had made the right choice and that her chosen master
would treat her humanely was based on the fact that he would do it in
order to preserve his investment.81 The new slave, without realizing it,
imputed a certain rationality to slavery that it did not necessarily possess.
Therefore, she tried to use the legal agreement to protect herself and
impose certain conditions to ensure the treatment that she considered
dignified and appropriate.82
Although violence was not always used to ensure a masters dominance
over his or her slaves, it was a technique inherent to the nature of slavery,
and it was always within the realm of possible punishments. Although
she hoped this would never occur, since she believed it to be against the
interests of a slaveowner, Joana knew that there was a possibility that her
purchaser would mistreat her, for whatever motive. In that case, it was
already arranged that he could sell her to whomever she wished, as his

82Here we can see a practical example of the complexities of understanding slave sta-
tus in Brazil. On the one hand, Joana Baptista assumed that she might make use of the
legal position that slaves in Brazil had, as others had done before her, which included the
possibility of buying ones freedom, some protection from being arbitrarily sold if one were
married, and some protection from punishment. Moreover, she might have pointed out
that life for freedmen and other persons of color consistently proved challenging. On the
other hand, there is no doubt that slaves viewed freedom as substantial; that arbitrary and
barbaric treatment of slaves on plantations and elsewhere was common; and that living
a normal family life could prove challenging. On these discussions see Graham, Caetana
Says No, 2249; David Baronov, The Abolition of Slavery in Brazil (Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press, 2000), 12932; Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian
Society: Bahia, 15501835 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 13348, 25154,
26063, 379412; E. Bradford Burns, A History of Brazil (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1993), 21023.
slave. Joana hoped to contain any violence against herself with her sale to
another master. Another possibility that she foresaw in the contract was
that she might have difficulty adapting to the condition of slavery, since
she had always lived as a free woman. Again in this case she asked that
the solution would be her sale to a new master, rather than having violent
means used against her.83
Joana affirmed in the contract that of her own free will, without coer-
cion by any person, she has agreed and contracted with the said Joo da
Costa to sell herself as his slave, to live as if she had been born of a slave
and had never been free, and to serve in this capacity until her death.84
Did this deed, the conscious surrender of her freedom, deprive Joana of
her human condition and reduce her to a mere object? This did not seem
to have been her view, since a simple examination of the conditions she
imposed on her future master demonstrate that she continued to be an
active agent and to play a role in her society, imposing her will on her
master, preserving her honor and dignity (material as well as moral), even
preserving herself from the threat of violence.
The first part of the agreement dealt with the price agreed on for her
sale, 80 mil-reis, namely, in coin or other metal...in goods and house-
hold items and whatever else is necessary for her accessories.85 The agreed
value, besides guaranteeing her a reasonable existence and even a little
extra, gave her possession of a supplementary financial reserve that she
could use as she wished. Even in the circumstances of a slave, Joana made
sure that she would possess material goods, which would not necessarily
be part of a normal slaves situation. The possession of these goods estab-
lished her as a property owner, one who could even use these goods to
purchase her own slave, as happened in more than one case in Brazil. In a
city port such as Belem do Par, freed people were able to appear in public
dressed similarly to whites, and to own slaves, both of which were impor-
tant ways to distinguish themselves from the unfree. Joana was aware of
this; the streets that she daily walked were a living school of the importance
83That Joana was indeed adopting a particular, if optimistic position here is borne out
by the Brazilian judiciarys approach to violence against slaves, which did include prec-
edents for protecting abused slaves by selling them to other masters. That the legal system
did not often take the slaves view, however, was also well-established fact. On these mat-
ters see Schwartz, Sugar Plantations, 13335, 26063; James H. Sweet, Recreating Africa:
Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese world, 14411770 (Chapel Hill, NC:
University of North Carolina Press, 2003), passim.
of the social codes of the city. So while she chose to give up her freedom,
she wanted to maintain the appearance of being free. Recalling the obvi-
ous creolization/Africanization of the Lower Zambezi Portuguese donas,
and the clear evidence of similar processes in Brazil around religion, it is
worth asking if slave ownership of slaves might not have been yet another
example of the sort of circulation of practices that this article has been
examining. In this case, however, perhaps African practices (from West
Africa but possibly also from the slaves arriving in northeastern Brazil from
Mozambique) rather than Portuguese practices were in play.86
But that was not all. Joana received in her deed of sale a large gold
rosicl87 and a pair of earrings of the same material, which, added to the
money she received, would allow her to forgive part of the debt of her
own purchase, in the amount of 58 mil-reis. The agreement stipulated
that the rest was to be paid and given to her, his slave, in the form of
material goods, whenever she requested it towards which the buyer
pledged himself, his real property and chattel. With that, Joana became
a creditor to her own master, since he promised her payment of the rest
of the debt. In addition to this pledge, it depended on her rather than
him to establish the moment to repay the rest of the debt. As with any
contract, she had recourse to the justice system if her future lord did not
honor his part of the bargain. In her role as party and active agent to the
agreement, she confirmed that she sold herself by her free and uncoerced
will. She also made it clear that the sale applied only to herself and her
person, and that if she were one day to have children, these would be
independent and free and exempt from captivity.88 We also see in this
unusual contract between Joana and her master that she reduced herself
to the condition of slavery, while at the same time she maintained certain
prerogatives appropriate to the world of free people, becoming creditor to
her own master, imposing her will, and establishing the conditions that
would allow her to continue to live in decency and dignity. In letting go
of her freedom and embracing slavery, Joana sought to guarantee her own
honor and make use of certain survival opportunities that slavery permit-
ted her, which she did not otherwise have access to as a free woman.
86Various studies have shown that Joanas ability to possess goods, even while she
was a slave, was not unusual. Some slaves even came to be owners of other slaves. See
especially Marcos Magalhes de Aguiar, Negras Minas Gerais: Uma histria da dispora
africana no Brasil colonial (PhD diss., University of So Paulo, 1999); on creolization and
Africanization in Brazil see Sweet, Recreating Africa.
87A necklace of gold beads with pearls or coral.
The judge responsible for the case, though he considered it to be

unusual, saw no impediment or conflict with the law and did not hesitate
to register the sale. He ordered, then, that its terms be carried out accord-
ing to his will.89 Even though Joana was reduced to the status of a slave,
her condition was paradoxical, since she continued to be mistress of her
own fate and imposed the conditions that she considered necessary to the
maintenance of her honor.
Joanas decision to sell herself and become a slave, while it guaranteed
her survival and the preservation of her values, also allows us to see the
perspectives provided by the constant transitions experienced by women
in port cities. The cafusa Joana from Belm and the widow Maria da Cunha
from Mazago found different ways of pursuing their economic security.
The first sold herself as a slave, while the second became the proprietor
of land and slaves. In their urban milieus, both on the edge of the sea,
fluid boundaries existed between the social roles originally established
for women. The society of these cities was not ossified; on the contrary,
it was in constant transformation and women took advantage of this for
social ascent and to guarantee their own security. If the world of a slave
was inherently undignified and dishonorable, the case of Joana shows that
even in slavery some thought it was possible to find honor, represented
by the preservation of her moral values. In an inversion of the rules on
which society was traditionally based, honor, usually the preserve of elites,
became a value maintained and pursued by women of lower status, even
slaves. The case of Joana is an extreme one, but it casts light on countless
other black, Indian, and mixed-lineage women scattered throughout the
port cities of the empire. These women, in spite of their skin color and
low birth, appropriated the values traditionally associated with elites
as in the case of feminine honorand transformed the traditional roles
for which they were destined, helped in their appropriation by the Por-
tuguese empires structural commitment to a fluid construction of core
values such as honor.
While feminine honor signified above all the maintenance of virtue,
many women in the Portuguese world assumed masculine roles and
adopted the signs of honor more appropriate to the world of men. To
some extent we have already seen this in the history of the Zambezi donas,
but more striking cases offer themselves for analysis. When he was barely

eighteen years old, Balthazar do Couto Cardoso left his parents home in
the port city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and embarked as a ships boy en
route to Lisbon, where on September 1, 1700, he enlisted as a soldier. He
then went to Africa, serving in the fortress of Mozambique, and from there
he was sent to India, first to the maritime fortress of Chaul, then to the
city of Bombay in the province of Maharashtra, and finally farther south,
to the port city of Goa, where he took part in various battles in that region.
In 1705, he distinguished himself in the taking of Aldona, being one of the
first to enter the enemy fortress where the victorious Portuguese would
later build the fort of Corjuem. He also fought in the battles of Tivim,
Bicholim, and Bardez along the Indian coast. In recognition of his bravery,
in 1706, he was named corporal of the Madre de Deus Fortress in Chaul.90
For 14 years, Balthazar do Couto Cardoso distinguished himself through
his military feats, even saving his captain, Afonso Teixeira Arrais de Melo
e Mendona, from being killed or captured by his enemies. Contrary to
everyones expectations, in 1714, he abandoned his military career. A few
years later, in 1718, in recognition of his service to the Crown and the brav-
ery that he demonstrated in all of the battles in which he took part, he
was granted for a period of six years the command of Pao de Pangim, a
settlement on the island of Goa.91
However, the charter of the honor granted to Balthazar do Couto Car-
doso, ratified by King Joo V in 1720, reveals an intriguing secret: the brave
soldier was in reality a woman. Her true identity was revealed when she
was treated for a serious wound received in battle.92 She turned out to be
dona Maria rsula de Abreu e Lencastre, the daughter of Joo de Abreu
Oliveira. Even though the discovery of her sex forced her to abandon her
military career, she still kept the honor and recognition she had earned,
thanks to the bravery and courage she demonstrated on the battlefield,
masculine values from which she profited. Nor did her adventurous past
preclude a profitable marriage, as her dismissal from military service was
90Lisbon, ANTT, Chancelaria de dom Joo V. Alvar de merc da capitania de Pao

do Panguim, com faculdade de a renunciar com um xarafim por dia, 3231720. Livro 53,
f. 189v.
91Lisbon, ANTT, Chancelaria de dom Joo V. Alvar de merc da capitania de Pao
do Panguim, com faculdade de a renunciar com um xarafim por dia, 3231720. Livro 53,
f. 189v.
followed by her marriage to Afonso Teixeira Arraes de Mello, the governor

of the fort of So Joo Baptista in Goa.93
As in the case of Maria rsula de Abreu e Lencastre, but without need-
ing to use the artifice of disguising their sex, other women took part in
battles against Portuguese enemies, on the sea as well as in the port cities
of Africa and Asia. In 1533, when the Portuguese North African port of
Cabo de Gu suffered a surprise attack, a powerful woman, six months
pregnant, arrived carrying great stones on her back, so large they would
have been difficult for two men to carry. She was even able to throw
these rocks with accuracy at the enemy, as if they weighed nothing, and
three months later she gave birth to a healthy child.94 In March of 1714,
as the Portuguese ship Nossa Senhora do Carmo e Santo Elias anchored on
the edge of the Tagus River near Lisbon, came under attack by Algerian
pirates, dona Rosa Maria de Siqueira not only shouted at the soldiers to
fight, but took the place of the ships captain, taking charge of the ships
defense.95
On these and other occasions, women demonstrated courage and fear-
lessness, appropriating masculine values and inverting the traditional
division of sexual roles that society was accustomed to employ. The threat
of attack (from pirates, foreigners, or natives) represented a real and con-
stant danger for these port cities. The forces of change to which they were
constantly subjected came not only from within the empire but also from
outside forces. The conjunction between constant peril and the ongoing
circulation of people among port cities meant that in many cases women
could take over roles normally monopolized by men. If Maria rsula de
Abreu e Lencastre had to dress as a man to acquire honor and glory in
battle, in the other cases described above, the presence of danger made
taking on masculine roles a question of life or death. This distinction and
occasional confusion between the values expected of each sex may be
observed in the funeral oration that Cristvo de Almeida composed in
1667 for the Lisbon native dona Incia da Silva: she was the flower of
discretion, she was the flower of beauty, she was the flower of nobility
93Coimbra, Biblioteca da Universidade de Coimbra, Manuscritos do Brasil. No. 555,

Coleo de vrias poesias em portugus e castelhano, vol. 309, f. 158; Manoel Pinheiro
Chagas, Dicionrio popular: Histrico, geogrphico, mytolgico, biogrphico, artistico, bibli-
ogrfico e litterario (Lisbon: Tipographia do Dirio Illustrado, 1880) vol. 7; Maria rsula
de Abreu e Lencastre, Dicionrio mulheres do Brasil, eds. Schuma Schumaher and rico V.
Brazil (Rio do Janeiro: J. Zahar, 2000), 416.
and the flower of virtue, but she also had the soul of a man, guiding
the body of a woman.96 Nor, as the history of Catalina de Erauso from
the Basque country demonstrates, could the Portuguese empire claim any
particular distinction here.97 Both Iberian empires had success in circulat-
ing their gender roles, loosing them from their moorings in the process.
What is noteworthy, though, is the scope of circulation that the Portu-
guese empire appears to have achieved.
Words of Liberation
At the same time that the woman-soldier Maria rsula de Abreu e Len-
castre was returning from the wars in which the Portuguese were engaged
in India, in 1716 or 1717, Teresa Margarida da Silva e Horta, born in So
Paulo, Brazil arrived in Lisbon accompanied by her parents.98 At that time
Teresa was approximately six years old; she was the daughter of the Bra-
zilian Catarina Horta and the Portuguese Jos Ramos da Silva, a merchant
who had gotten rich from the gold trade, providing food and supplies to
those who were willing to venture into the interior.99 Her oldest brother,
Mathias Ayres Ramos da Silva dEa, who would later become a purveyor
for the royal mint in Lisbon, became famous for writing the book Reflexes
sobre a vaidade dos homens (Reflections on the vanity of men), printed in
multiple editions during his own lifetime. Although it may not have been
her plan to follow her brother into the world of letters, this is precisely
what Teresa did.100
Once in Lisbon, Teresas life appeared to be on track to fit the pattern
expected of elite women. Her family enrolled her in the Trinitarian convent
96Oraam funebre nas exequias da senhora D. Ignacia da Sylva no anno de 1667, em

Lisboa. See also Maria Antnia Lopes, Mulheres, espao e sociabilidade: A transformao
dos papis femininos luz de fontes literrias (segunda metade do sculo XVIII) (Lisbon:
Livros Horizonte, 1989), 23.
97Catalina de Erauso, Lieutenant Nun: The Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New
World, trans. Michele Stepto and Gabriel Stepto (Boston: Beason Press, 1997).
98Inocncio Francisco da Silva states erroneously in his famous bibliographic diction-
ary that Teresa was a native of Lisbon. Dicionrio bibliogrfico portugus, s.v., da Silva e
Orta, Tereza Margarida; Diogo Barbosa Machado, Biblioteca lusitana (Lisbon: Oficina de
Incio Rodrigues, 1747), 4: 27172.
99Boxer, Women in Iberian Expansion Overseas, 5556; Dicionrio mulheres do Brasil,
s.v., da Silva e Orta, Teresa Margarida.
100Dicionrio Bibliogrfico portugus, s.v., da Silva dEa, Mathias Ayres Ramos; Bar-
bosa Machado, Biblioteca lusitana, 4: 254.
in Lisbon, where she received her formal education. The walls of institu-
tions such as this must have functioned for the women enclosed within
as an insuperable barrier to the outside world that surrounded them. A
thorough education for them signified above all a form of preparation for
a virtuous life. Pure, untouched and well trained, the cloistered girls were
prepared to choose between the two possibilities that the society of that
time offered them: a religious life or honorable matrimony.101
In the Portuguese world, to preserve feminine virtue and provide women
with an education, there were two basic institutions: the convent and the
recolhimento. While convents were designed to guide women towards a
monastic life, recolhimentos were meant to take in girls until they were old
enough to marry. They were also sought out by widows and even married
women who sought protection and peace, usually for a limited time. Some
did decide to stay and take religious vows, but most did not. Some women
were placed there against their will by their husbands, parents, or even
by the authorities, as punishment for bad behavior or adultery.102 Gener-
ally, though, the cloister was a place where women had access to a formal
education of some quality, though not with as much focus on domestic
skills as one might expect.
This was not the case for Teresa, however. In spite of the care taken by
her parents and directly against their will, Teresa left the convent at the age
of sixteen to marry Pedro Jansen Moller, a Fleming.103 As a consequence
of her defiance of her parents desires, they disinherited her. In 1752, a
romance was published with the title of Maximas da virtude e formosura,
com que Diofanes, Clymenea e Hemirena, principes de Thebas, venceram
os mais apertados lances da desgraa (Maxims of virtue and beauty, by
which Diophanes, Clymenea and Hemirena, princes of Thebes, overcame
the greatest straits of misfortune), written by a certain Dorothea Engras-
sia Tavareda Dalmira. Behind that name, which was really an anagram,
was hidden the true author, none other than Teresa Margarida da Silva
101Myriam Cyr, Letters of a Portuguese Nun: Uncovering the Mystery Behind a 17th-
Century Forbidden Love (New York: Hyperion, 2006) provides an overview of the place of
convents in the strategies of elite Portuguese families. It also recounts a case similar to
the one examined here.
102Leila Mezan Algranti, Honradas e devotas: Mulheres da colnia (Rio de Janeiro: Jos
Olympio, 1993).
103Mrcia Abreu, Aventuras do Rei de Tebas e de uma senhora portuguesa, in Vozes
femininas: Gnero, mediaes e prticas de escrita, eds. Flora Sssekind, Tnia Dias and
Carlito Azevedo (Rio de Janeiro: 7letras, Fundao Casa de Rui Barbosa, 2003), 4353.
e Horta, who by then was nearly forty.104 The books second edition was
printed in 1777 under the same pseudonym; the only change was in the
title, as it was now called Adventures of Diophanes, the name by which
it would become popularly known.105 The change of title in the second
edition was a nod to the great French romance The Adventures of Telema-
chus, written by the bishop Franois Fnelon, and taking advantage of
the great commercial success of the latter, it tried to evoke a connection
between the two works.106
The story narrates the difficulties suffered by Diophanes and Climineia,
rulers of Thebes, and their children Almeno and Hemirena. Their prob-
lems begin when a storm scatters the fleet that was taking their family
to the island of Delos to celebrate the wedding of Hemirena with Prince
Arnesto. Captured by their enemies, Diophanes was sold to Corinth and
Hemirena to Athens.107 Using the backdrop of classical antiquity, Teresa
filled her stories with constructive advice and, among other themes, criti-
cized the abuses of the absolutist monarchy, as she praised the ideal of the
good government of kings and royal administrators and the universaliza-
tion of education for women.108
As a resident of a large port city such as Lisbon, where feminine roles
were in constant transformation, Teresa had access to a formal education
and was able to enter the world of letters traditionally reserved for men.
Had she remained in the provincial city of So Paulo, in the interior of
Brazil, these accomplishments would not have been nearly as likely. In
spite of the resistance of her family, she was able not only to marry the
husband of her choice, but also to publish her book and enjoy the fame
104Dorothea Engrassia Tavareda Dalmira, Maximas da virtude e formosura, com que

Diofanes, Clymenea e Hemirena, principes de Thebas, venceram os mais apertados lances da
desgraa (Lisbon: Offic. de Miguel Manescal da Costa, 1752).
105Dorothea Engrassia Tavareda Dalmira, Aventuras de Diofanes, imitando o sapientis-
simo Fenelon na sua viagem de Telemaco (Lisbon: Regia Offic. Typ., 1777). A third edition,
from 1790, uses the same pseudonym, but adds the comment, frequently questioned by
specialists, that the author was actually Alexandre de Gusmo.
106In the Minas Gerais libraries studied by Lus Carlos Villalta, he found that nine of
them possessed copies of Aventuras de Telmaco in different editions and different lan-
guages. Mrcia Abreu has also identified this work as one of the most common among the
libraries of Rio de Janeiro, in Reformismo ilustrado, censura e prticas de leitura: Usos do
livro na Amrica Portuguesa (PhD diss., University of So Paulo, 1999), 348; Mrcia Abreu,
Leituras coloniais,in the published proceedings of the second Congresso Luso-Brasileiro
de Histria da Educao, Vol. 1 (So Paulo, 1998), 139.
107Abreu, Aventuras do Rei de Tebas e de uma senhora portuguesa, 4647.
108Abreu, Aventuras do Rei de Tebas e de uma senhora portuguesa, 49.
generated by her editorial success. Because of her intellectual achieve-

ments, Teresa also came to enjoy the friendship of great political and
intellectual male leaders of the time, such as Alexandre de Gusmo and
the friar Manuel do Cenculo, with whom she maintained an intense
and stimulating intellectual correspondence.109 Another famous woman
of the Enlightenment was educated in seclusion, for the most part in the
convent of Chelas in Lisbon. Dona Leonor, the Marquise of Alorna, using
the pseudonym of Alcipe, wrote a great deal of romantic poetry in the sec-
ond half of the eighteenth century. Her work demonstrates the influence
of much of the reading she did during her childhood and in the convent,
and many of her ideas reveal a nonconformist spirit.110
In the port city of Lisbon, access to the world of letters was not an
exceptional privilege acquired by just a few women. Given a formal edu-
cation and an artistic sensibility, more and more women ventured to
participate in the public arena of the intellectual circles of the city, such
as the literary salons, traditionally reserved for men. In the eighteenth
century, Lisbon, more than any other port city of the empire, received
books, gazettes, and other published material by way of the ships arriving
from the rest of Europe, which promoted a new culture of illumination
and reason. This can be clearly seen in the growing number of private
libraries maintained by nobles, clerks, and merchants; in the books adver-
tised in the Lisbon Gazette; in the number of book shops in the city such
as the French Bertrand, whose catalogue was over a hundred pages long;
and in the frequent demands of citizens to have access to forbidden
books.111 This new Enlightenment culture resonated not only among men,
but forged new social and cultural bonds among women as well. Access to
erudite culture, as in the cases of Teresa Margarida da Silva e Horta and
dona Leonor, Marquise of Alorna, often awoke in these women a spirit
of nonconformism and rebellion against contemporary norms, especially
those which restricted women. Those norms still shaped society, in spite
of the fact that in reality, especially in port cities where movement and
transformation were invariably linked, many women took on roles for-
merly restricted to men.
109Teresa Margarida da Silva e Orta, Dicionrio mulheres do Brasil, 50910.

110Anbal Pinto de Castro, Jos Esteves Pereira, Maria Manuela Delille, and Teresa
Sousa de Almeida, eds., Alcipe e as Luzes (Lisbon: Edies Colibri/ Fundao das Casas de
Fronteira e Alorna, 2007).
111Manuela D. Domingos, Bertrand: Uma livraria antes do terremoto (Lisbon: Biblioteca
Nacional, 2002); Domingos, Livreiros de setecentos (Lisbon: Biblioteca Nacional, 2000).
Conclusion
What do we gain by opening a discussion on the role of women in the port

cities of the Portuguese empire with these seemingly paradoxical cases?
In truth, they are examples of situations that became routine in the ample
space of an empire, whose subjects, including women, were in constant
transition. The accumulation of property, the economic maintenance of a
home, war, violence, words, the exercise of power and its opposite, rebel-
lion, all privileges of the masculine world, were in turn appropriated by
women.
These examples serve to point us towards the possibilities that the
expansion of the maritime boundaries of the Portuguese empire, con-
nected by a network of port cities, opened to the world of women. Portu-
guese women did not always occupy the traditional roles that one would
expect of a society centered on social hierarchy, masculine dominion, and
Catholic religiosity and morality. Contrary to what one might expect, in
this urban network connected by oceans, women were able to perform a
variety of different roles formerly reserved for men, such as being soldiers,
writers, rebels, and landowners. Throughout the early modern period, the
behavior of many women across the four corners of the empire, some of
whom have been described here as examples, shows that they were capa-
ble of creating unwritten norms of behavior, though often they were fixed
by the parameters that this hierarchical and misogynistic society imposed.
In these vast spaces, women were able to take part in war, violence, the
wealth of words, power and rebellion, and in so doing became their own
masters.
Two elements to emphasize are the impact of an emerging service
nobility within the Portuguese empire on womens opportunities, and the
impact of women of mixed heritage on that service nobility by virtue of
their inheritances and their successful efforts to benefit from traditional
symbols of elite status. Since ports are by their nature sites of circulation,
they influenced the Portuguese empire by circulating values. Through the
continuous movement and transformation that these port societies expe-
rienced, women reconfigured their lives and gave new meaning to the
concepts of honor, nobility, and hierarchy, and inverted the social roles
to which they had been previously destined.
This feminine heterodoxy provoked some resistance, of course. In the
eyes of many, the new developments seemed to invert the rules which
the Portuguese empire had previously considered reasonable, and the
feminine world reflected those transformations. The examples considered
here give the impression that the empire was a privileged locus from
which to observe a society in rapid transformation, where women took on
new and diverse roles, some of them previously limited to the masculine
world. With some trepidation, facing these transformations, a contempo-
rary observed that the spectacles that have been seen in such a short time
demonstrate what the world has become, and that we are passing from
one era to another.112
112Lisbon, Hospital So Jos, Testamentria de Francisco Pinheiro: Carta de Joo Pin-

heiro Netto a Francisco Pinheiro, no. 141, mao 18, f. 688. See also Lus Lisanti, Negcios
coloniais: Uma correspondncia comercial do sculo XVIII (Braslia: Ministrio da Fazenda
and So Paulo: Viso Editorial, 1973). For an analysis of this correspondence, see Jnia Fer-
reira Furtado, Homens de negcio: A interiorizao da metrpole e do comrcio nas Minas
setecentistas (So Paulo: Hucitec, 1999).
SECTION THREE
INTERACTIONS AND INTERMEDIARIES
While the essays in the two previous sections have dealt with the liminal
social spaces within European-dominated contexts, the essays in this sec-
tion concern communities that were, as a whole, liminal areas that fea-
tured greater demographic mixing and cross-cultural interaction. These
essays explore what women could achieve in circumstances that favored
the establishment of largely or wholly independent spheres of action.
Unlike some of the previous case studies, which featured colonies that
replicated European social and gender norms to a greater or lesser extent,
in these examples from Africa and the Caribbean, women found them-
selves in new, wholly hybrid spaces where they served as crucial inter-
mediaries between imperial and indigenous powers. The essays in this
section suggest that women had greater significance and more opportuni-
ties when they were not constrained by established social, cultural, and
legal norms, whether European or African in origin.
Ty Reeses work on Britains Gold Coast territories in Africa in the late
eighteenth century shows how the same set of circumstances afforded
very different opportunities for women depending on their race, status,
and origin. Unlike Britains colonial territories in the Americas, the Cape
Coast region was not clearly dominated by a colonial power; instead the
Company of Merchants Trading to Africa (CMTA) acted both as a patron
distributor of goods and as a tenant, reliant upon local African elites. In
this context, Fante and Fetu women benefited far more from the relation-
ship than did European women. Though the European wives of CMTA
men received company pay, they did not actively participate in the com-
panys political and economic activities, were not considered useful, and
were subject to prejudice on the part of both Africans and European
men. On the other hand, even though elite Fante and Fetu women were
regarded by local society as subservient to men, trade with Europeans
gave them access to goods that improved their status in their own com-
munities. Non-elite Fante and Fetu townswomen also benefited from the
colonial relationship, as they supplemented their income with temporary
company employment and in some cases profited from direct relation-
ships with Europeans. Local African customs and patterns prevailed and
288 section three
were not fundamentally transformed by their connection to the Atlan-

tic world. Yet because these local norms interacted with additional con-
straints placed on the CMTA by British imperial authorities, these women
effectively acted within and across established sets of norms as they took
advantage of new access to goods and property. Clearly men on both sides
profited most from this colonial relationship, but African women were
able to benefit from it to a far greater degree than their European coun-
terparts who could not take advantage of the hybridized colonial space
that Cape Coast became.
Another essay on cross-cultural interaction, Philip Haviks work on the
Portuguese trading post of Cacheu from the sixteenth to the eighteenth
centuries, focuses on free African women and on the new social and cul-
tural categories created by Euro-African relationships. In this context sev-
eral new groups emerged, including the Christianized Africans known as
Kriston and the Europeans, often of Sephardic origin, who became inte-
grated into African society. All became important trade intermediaries
and regional brokers, and women played a particularly important role in
these relationships. Unlike the Cape Coast territory described by Reese,
the Guinea coast had a longer history of female autonomy and matril-
iny. Also given the absence of men due to travel and military service
that was a common Atlantic port circumstance, African women came to
form a substantial majority among Eurafricans, free blacks, and slaves,
and became essential agents in social interaction and kinship networks.
Kriston women were active as commercial go-betweens and were recog-
nized as traders in their own right by the mid-seventeenth century. Even
female slaves gleaned some advantages from these relationships, as they
were valued for their kinship links and knowledge of local customs as
well as Portuguese and Creole dialects. Even though both Spanish and
Portuguese official authorities in the region became concerned about
their dependence on these women and came to regard them as poten-
tially deviant and dangerous, ultimately they had to recognize and adapt
to local realities that included the influence of African female agency. In
Cacheu and environs, then, a much greater degree of cultural hybridity
resulted in inflections of gender that produced commensurately greater
opportunities for women.
The late eighteenth-century French Caribbean was another context in
which, as Stewart King and Dominique Rogers demonstrate, free black
and mixed-lineage women were dynamic economic actors who partici-
pated in a variety of activities. In spite of predominant colonial stereo-
types that perceived white women as representatives of elite educated
interactions and intermediaries 289
culture and women of color only as witches or concubines, colonial reality

seems to have been far more flexible. There is much evidence of genuine
affective ties between white men and women of color, in which the lat-
ter were recognized and accepted as companions and trusted managers
of economic affairs. King and Rogers find no gender-specific barriers to
women who wanted to participate in the retail and commercial sectors.
In fact, notarial records suggest that women of color accumulated more
wealth than their male counterparts. As in the case of Haggertys Phila-
delphia, however, the variety of professional opportunities for women
remained limited. The dirigiste social engineering of the colonial port city
in the French Atlantic seems to have been an important factor here, with
the most lucrative and influential positions and economic niches reserved
for men. In a similar vein, since the metropole saw the ports of Saint-
Domingue as serving different purposes, the opportunities for women in
Port-au-Prince (mostly in the domestic sphere and in real estate) were
notably different than those in Cap Franais (where women were able to
be more active in commerce). Although many women who took part in
trade and investment worked with white partners, others acted indepen-
dently. Even those who were of mixed lineage, illegitimate, and without
male partners, all in violation of European norms, found greater freedom
in the dynamic of the port city to pursue economic and affective relation-
ships not ordinarily sanctioned by white society.
Despite the variety of womens fortunes in this last group of articles,
one conclusion is inescapable: in those port communities of the Atlan-
tic world that experienced the greatest degree of cultural mixing, women
fared best. More research must be done to understand the precise link-
ages between gender, hybridity, and opportunity. Havik, King, Reese, and
Rogers leave us in no doubt, however, as to the relevance of this work to
a full understanding of womens place in the Atlantic basin.
WIVES, BROKERS, AND LABORERS: WOMEN AT CAPE COAST,
17501807
Ty M. Reese
On May 25, 1795, Thomas J. W. Mitchell, a factor of Britains Company

of Merchants Trading to Africa (hereafter CMTA), died. In his will, he
bequeathed to his wench Nance, in consideration of her strict attention
and attendance on me, during the three years we have lived together the
sum of twenty pounds sterling to be paid her in gold dust at the rate of
four pounds sterling per ounce. He added that if his property was less
than 20, then she deserved what was due to her by her notes along with
his gold rings as a token of remembrance.1 Mitchell arrived, in the early
1790s, at the Fetu town of Cape Coast, or Ogua, as a CMTA servant whose
corporate mission was to maintain a coastal infrastructure to facilitate
Britains African trade; Cape Coast Castle was its administrative center.
Cape Coast was an enclave where the local people had interacted with
Europeans for over a century and this long-term interaction allowed for
the development of a broker society at Cape Coast. In this broker society,
women of all groups, even those with the lowest status, such as Nance,
developed different ways to benefit from the companys presence. Yet,
beyond the indigenous women, women from outside of Cape Coast found
life there difficult.
Cape Coast began, in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, as a Fetu
fishing and market town.2 In the late fifteenth century, the Portuguese
constructed a trade enclave at Elmina, less than ten miles away from Cape
Coast, thereby establishing a long-term system of cross-cultural trade and
interaction. In the seventeenth century, the European presence on the
1The National Archives (TNA), Kew Gardens: Public Records Office (PRO), Treasury 70
series, African Companies (T 70), TNA: PRO T70/34. The last will and testament of Thomas
J. W. Mitchell. Along the coast, one gold ounce, divided into sixteen ackies, equaled 4
while a trade ounce equaled 2. See Karl Polanyi, Sortings and Ounce Trade in the West
African Slave Trade, Journal of African History 5, no. 3 (1964): 38193; Marion Johnson,
The Ounce in Eighteenth Century West African Trade, Journal of African History 7, no. 2
(1966): 197214. A note was a coastal device that allowed the holder to draw a monthly
wage from the person or entity that granted the note.
2See Kwame Arhin, ed., The Cape Coast and Elmina Handbook: Past, Present and Future
(University of Ghana, Legon: Institute of African Studies, 1995).
292 ty m. reese
Gold Coast expanded with Sweden constructing the first trade enclave
at Cape Coast. After the British gained control, for over two hundred
years Cape Coast Castle served as the center of British activity on the
Gold Coast. During the slave trade, the British presence occurred first
through the monopolistic Royal African Company (hereafter RAC) until
1750 when Parliament created the CMTA. The new companys purpose
was to facilitate the slave trade for free British traders by maintaining
relations with coastal states and an infrastructure. Meanwhile, in the
early eighteenth century, Fante conquered Fetu and incorporated it into
the Fante confederation, leading Fante to become the dominant Gold
Coast trading state by the end of the eighteenth century. The Akan struc-
tures of Fante allowed for the assimilation of various peoples into their
societies while promoting individualism and trade. Thus, by the period
under study, cross-cultural interaction and trade were well established at
Cape Coast.
This essay explores the role of women in Cape Coast from the CMTAs
arrival until Britains abolition of its slave trade in 1807. During this period,
as Britains slave trade expanded, the Cape Coast people developed ways,
by making the CMTA into a tenant-patron, to benefit from the companys
presence. The company was a tenant because it paid rents and customs to
the Cape Coast, Fetu, and Fante elite who sanctioned its presence there. It
was a patron in that by becoming involved in Gold Coast affairs, it distrib-
uted the luxury goods associated with the slave trade to the local peoples.3
The companys tenant-patron position provided Cape Coast women with
opportunities to utilize the company as a patron, thereby gaining access
to the commodities being imported into the Gold Coast. While historians
have revised their understanding of these commodities by labeling them
as luxury goods, they were not benign.4
Cape Coasts position as a center of trade and interaction influenced
the experiences of four groups of women there: the elite Fetu and Fante
women, Fetu and Fante townswomen living in Cape Coast, the female
3See Ty M. Reese, Eating Luxuries: Fante Middlemen, British Goods, and Changing
Dependencies on the Gold Coast, William and Mary Quarterly 66, no. 4 (2009): 85372.
4Historians label goods imported into West Africa within the transatlantic slave trade
as luxury goods to signify that indigenous populations put them to their own uses, as
seen in the importation of iron bars that local smiths reworked into wares for local con-
sumption and in the unraveling and reweaving of imported textiles. This challenges an
older argument that imported goods destroyed indigenous production. On this see John
Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 14001800 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992).
wives, brokers and laborers 293
company slaves, and the European women in the castle garrison.5 Within
these interactions at Cape Coast, some women benefited, usually local
women, while others, usually outsiders, did not. At the top were the
female Fetu and Fante elite whose already established status placed them
in the best position to benefit from the companys presence. Next were
the townswomen who, through their labor or the development of rela-
tionships with the company garrison, acquired ways to benefit from the
companys presence. By profiting from the company, both groups of local
women helped to transform Cape Coast society. The other two groups,
company slaves and European women, were outsiders who lacked the
protection and support networks of local women and thus found survival
at Cape Coast difficult. The female company slaves toiled in a subsistence
environment in which they were susceptible to a variety of threats. Euro-
pean women who lived at Cape Coast encountered an environment in
which the brutality of garrison life offered them little opportunity.
The first group of women, wives of the local elite, possessed direct
access to the luxury goods of the slave trade because of their husbands
control over positions of power, their relationship to the company, and
their involvement in coastal trade. Unfortunately, the surviving records
focus more on the coastal male elite, especially those with company ties,
devoting attention to elite women mainly in relation to matrilineal suc-
cession and polygamy. The Akan cultural group, of which the Fante were
a part, viewed women as subservient to men. Thus, despite Akan societys
custom of matrilineal succession, diffuse authority within Fante allowed
for patrilineal succession to occur. While the female clan, abusa, was vital
to ordering Akan societies, within the family and coastal affairs males
dominated.6 A second issue for elite women was polygyny, as multiple
5On this see John Mensah Sarbah, Fanti Customary Laws, 3rd ed. (London: Frank Cass &
Co., Ltd., 1968), 11, which relies on William Bosman, A New and Accurate Description of the
Coast of Guinea: Divided into the Gold, the Slave and the Ivory Coasts (1704; repr. NY: Barnes
and Noble, 1967) to define Akan social divisions as the traditional elite, the caboceers
(powerful individuals), the wealthy or mercantile elite, the commoners, and slaves. J. D.
Fage, Slaves and Society in Western Africa, c.1445c.1700, Journal of African History 21, no.
3 (1980): 289310, adds servants, women, children, and occupational castes to the picture.
Additionally, none of these divisions were static; a slave could acquire wealth and power
while commoners who fell on hard times could be enslaved.
6On matrilineal succession see James Boyd Christensen, Double Descent Among the
Fanti (New Haven, CT: Human Relations Area Files, 1954), 1; Kwame Arhin, Diffuse
Authority Among the Coastal Fante, Ghana Notes and Queries 9 (November 1966): 6670;
David Henige, Akan Stool Succession Under Colonial Rule: Continuity or Change? Jour-
nal of African History 16, no. 2 (1975): 285301. For the role of the abusa see Arthur Ffoulkes,
The Fanti Family System, Journal of the Royal African Society 7, no. 28 (1908): 394409.
294 ty m. reese
wives denoted high status.7 In cases of polygyny, the first wife maintained
power over succession, but each wife served her role by maintaining sepa-
rate households within the larger family unit.8
For the female elite of Cape Coast, Atlantic trade provided them with
access to commodities that reinforced their status. They were able, for
example, to obtain high-value, luxury textiles from India or Europe that
indicated their high rank. In 1752, Thomas Melvil requested that the Afri-
can Committee send specific presents to be distributed only to the coastal
elite. These presents included scarlet and blue broad cloth, hats laced
with gold and silver and feathers, some damasks.9 The best example of
how elite wives utilized their position to gain favors and gifts from the
company involved the life and death of Cudjoe Caboceer [Kwadwo Egyir
or Brempon Kudwo].
From the 1740s until his death in 1776, Cudjoe Caboceer was a power-
ful Gold Coast birempon who worked to maintain favorable Fante-British
relations.10 While Cape Coasts traditional elite maintained their positions
of power, Cudjoes position as caboceer (a powerful individual), coupled
with his relationship with the British, made him the most powerful indi-
vidual at Cape Coast.11 As a caboceer, Cudjoe was a member of the new
7Henry Meredith, An Account of the Gold Coast of Africa with a Brief History of the
African Company (1812; repr., London: Frank Cass, 1967), 107; John Hippisley, Essays: I, On
the Populousness of Africa; II, On the Trade at the Forts on the Gold Coast; III, On the Neces-
sity of Erecting a Fort at Cape Appolonia (London: Printed for T. Lownds, in Fleet-Street,
1764). Essay I has also been reprinted: John Hippisley, On the Populousness of Africa: An
Eighteenth-Century Text, Population and Development Review 24, no. 3 (1998): 601608.
In essay I, Hippisley argued that polygyny existed because the slave trade took dispropor-
tionately more males than females out of West Africa. In this he was wrong, but he might
be partially right in explaining polygynys utility for family organization in the eighteenth
century.
8Nicholas Villaut, A Relation of the Coast of Africa Called Guinee, 2nd ed., translated
into English (London: Printed for John Starkley, 1670), 14648.
9TNA: PRO T 70/29, March 14, 1752.
10A birempon was a coastal big man. Birempons constituted a new elite who shared
power with the traditional elite by acquiring clients through their role in trade as opposed
to politics. For more see John Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea, Brazil and the West Indies (Lon-
don: Caesar Ward, 1735), 59; David Henige, John Kabes of Komenda: An Early African
Entrepreneur and State-Builder, Journal of African History 18, no. 1 (1977): 119; Mary
McCarthy, Social Change and the Growth of British Power in the Gold Coast: The Fante States,
18071874 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983).
11Cudjoe was a de facto leader, because the Cape Coast already had a king, or dey, and
penyins, or family heads. By this period, the company maintained caboceers in each of
its enclaves whom they paid to represent company interests. Caboceers were commonly
wealthy and powerful individuals. The term dey refers to a member of the traditional elite,
though the precise position held varied. A dey could, for example, be a king or merely a
treasurer. Cape Coast had a dey, a king, and a feturah or fetuhen. See David Birmingham,
elite who, through trade with British companies and free traders, acquired
wealth and, more importantly, retainers and slaves who increased his status
and authority. This made him a birempon. His position allowed him, like
the traditional elite, to protect dependents, especially his wives. When, in
August 1772, the Cape Coast townspeople prepared to make their annual
yam custom by offering gifts to their gods, the company slaves insulted
one of Cudjoes wives and stole from her a quantity of fetish gold and
aggrey beads.12 The company, to appease Cudjoe and his insulted wife,
agreed to limit interaction between the town and the company slaves,
admittedly a challenge as slaves lived in the town, while reimbursing Cud-
joe with 39 in goods.13
Not surprisingly, Cudjoes death marked a period of change for local
relations in that his successors lacked his ability and authority to resolve
problems, thereby causing a gradual disintegration in local relations.14 It
also marked a transition for his dependents. His multiple positions pro-
vided Cudjoe, his wives, family, and clients with access to a variety of
goods, wealth, and power. When he died, Akan customs of matrilineal
descent meant that Cudjoes sons would not succeed to his position.15
Indeed, Cudjoes wealth and power stayed not within the immediate fam-
ily but instead went to Cudjoes nephew Botty [Botwe]. While Cudjoes
wives remained part of the extended family unit, they lost direct access
A Note on the Kingdom of Fetu, Ghana Notes and Queries 9 (1966): 3033; Georg Nor-
regard, Danish Settlements in West Africa 16851850 (Boston: Boston University Press, 1966);
Sarbah, Fanti Customary Laws; James Sanders, The Expansion of the Fante and the Emer-
gence of the Asante in the Eighteenth Century, Journal of African History 20, no. 3 (1979):
34964; Arhin, The Cape Coast and Elmina Handbook. The penyin was the elected family
head who represented the family in local and regional affairs. A towns penyins formed a
council that adjudicated palavers, and, in cooperation with the elite, made decisions. See
Arthur Ffoulkes, Fanti Family; Sarbah, Fanti Customary Laws.
12Fetish gold was often given as part of the process of taking fetish which involved
two or more sides agreeing to a set of resolutions. After publicly taking fetish, in which
they agreed to abide by the resolutions, they exchanged fetish gold as security, which an
aggrieved party could keep if a resolution were broken. For aggrey beads see J. D. Fage,
Some Remarks on Beads and Trade in Lower Guinea in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries, Journal of African History 3, no. 2 (1962): 34347.
13TNA: PRO T70/152, August 16, 1772. All values are coastal unless otherwise noted. The
standard was that goods valued at 2 in England would be worth 4 on the coast though
fluctuating coastal and European values complicated matters.
14See Ty M. Reese, Liberty, Insolence and Rum: Cape Coast and the American Revo-
lution, Itinerario: International Journal on the History of European Expansion and Global
Interaction 28, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 1837.
15That matrilineal succession was the standard did not preclude patrilineal succession.
See Christensen, Double Descent; Arhin, Diffuse Authority, 6670; and Henige, Akan
Stool, 285301.
296 ty m. reese
to Cudjoes wealth and power in several ways. First, Cudjoes position

allowed him to acquire goods that were rare along the coast especially in
regards to textiles that, when worn by the possessor, became a mark of
status. Second, he acquired numerous popular coastal goods that could
be bartered for provisions and just about anything else available. Finally,
the ability to distribute these goods demonstrated the patronage that kept
Cudjoe and his family in a position of authority. While he was alive, Cud-
joe attained these goods and presented them to his wives through trade,
through his company employment, and through his ability to eat from
the company by demanding gifts from them. As company caboceer, Cud-
joe received a monthly salary and proved extremely effective at eating;
everything he received from the company was in commodities. In 1756,
Cudjoe requested that the company provide him with malabar checks,
half says, romals, bejutapeaux, neganipauts, long ells of sorts and brandy
for the money that they owed him.16 Cudjoes wives had access to these
textiles for barter or distribution to others. During the funeral, custom,
and then election process, all of Cudjoes dependents, including his wives,
were anxious for a successor who would continue to support them.17
Ultimately, while his death limited their access, Cudjoes wives
attempted, because of Cudjoes strong relationship with the company, to
continue to eat. In early March 1777, Cudjoes wives arrived at the castle
to pay their respects to Governor David Mill. For their visit, Mill presented
them with a fathom of tobacco and two gallons of rum.18 In November,
after the local people made custom for Cudjoe on the anniversary of his
death, Cudjoes wives entered the fort to thank the company for its help.
16TNA: PRO T70/30, March 20, 1756. For a description of these textiles see Stanley B.
Alpern, What Africans Got for Their Slaves: A Master List of European Trade Goods,
History in Africa 22 (1995): 543. Along the coast, eating referred to the coastal peoples
ability to demand presents and dashees (gifts of goods) from the company. An individuals
ability to eat helped to define his or her coastal position. Similarly, the companys distri-
bution of such dashees demonstrated its tenant-patron status.
17TNA: PRO T70/32, May 7, 1776. Coastal funerals involved an immediate burial, because
of the climate, with the funeral afterwards. The scope of the funeral was determined by the
individuals coastal position. For more on funerals see Christensen, Double Descent; Arthur
Ffoulkes, Funeral Customs of the Gold Coast Colony, Journal of the African Society 8, no.
30 (1909): 15464; I. Chukwukere, A Coffin for The Loved One: The Structure of Fante
Death Rituals, Current Anthropology 22, no. 1 (1981): 6168. An election involved estab-
lishing the person who would inherit the deceaseds position, including their wealth and
clients. On this see Christensen, Double Descent. Cudjoes funeral, during which sacrifices
might have occurred, and Bottys election are best described in The Life and Letters of Philip
Quaque: The First African Anglican Missionary, ed. Vincent Carretta and Ty Reese (Athens,
GA: University of Georgia Press, 2010).
18TNA: PRO T70/1040, March 4, 1777.
In return, they received one anker of rum and eight pounds of tobacco.19
What occurred in the above two examples was a combination of prac-
tices. From the perspective of Cudjoes wives, they personally thanked
those who had contributed both Essiadzi and Nsowa (gifts of money or
goods) to the custom process, while the company fulfilled its obligation
of presenting gifts to distinguished visitors who came to meet with the
governor.20 Next, in February 1779, Ginshebah, one of Cudjoes wives,
paid the governor a visit and received a gallon of rum and a fathom of
tobacco.21 Later that year, and again around the anniversary of Cudjoes
death, the governor presented his wives with eight gallons of brandy and
six pounds of tobacco.22 The final present for Cudjoes wives occurred in
July 1783 when, for Black Christmas, the company presented them with
four gallons of brandy.23 While Cudjoes wives were the only elite women
who consistently appeared in the company records, a few others did gar-
ner mention.24
As shown, through their husbands the female elite of Cape Coast pos-
sessed ways to acquire the luxury goods being imported into the Gold
Coast thereby reinforcing their established position. For the rest of Cape
Coast society, the traditional means of acquiring goods stemmed from the
coastal patron-client system in which the patrons, the traditional and new
elite, provided goods and services to their clients. The development of
permanent trade enclaves along the Gold Coast changed this by expand-
ing access to these goods and slowly diluting the traditional basis of power
as both the elite and the commoners ate from the company, albeit in dif-
ferent ways. The company needed the elite to sanction its coastal pres-
ence while it needed the commoners, especially their labor, to physically
create and maintain this presence. Company employment allowed Cape
19TNA: PRO T70/1040, November 23, 25, and December 1, 12, 15, 1777.
20Essiadzi involved gifts to the family to help cover the funeral expenses while Nsowa
involved gifts to specific individuals. See Arthur Ffoulkes, Funeral Customs; Sarbah, Fanti
Customary Laws.
21TNA: PRO T70/1043, February 13, 1779.
22TNA: PRO T70/1043, November 30, 1779.
23TNA: PRO T70/1046, July 26, 1783. I have found no explanation of Black Christmas
yet the records show that it always occurred before the annual Yam festival and the only
person who received anything for it was Cudjoe Caboceer. There is the possibility that
Cudjoe created this custom to gain more from the company while demonstrating to the
local people his importance.
24See TNA: PRO T70/1037, November 28, 1775; TNA: PRO T70/1049, October 7, 20, 21,
1785, which concern, respectively, the daughters of the king of Aborah and one Aggery
(along with the king of Abrimboe).
298 ty m. reese
Coast women to supplement their traditional means of subsistence with

desirable luxury goods that they could consume or trade.25 Through this
supplemental work women obtained goods, traditionally acquired from a
patron, that possessed prestige value. This system provided a broader seg-
ment of the population with a new way to acquire goods independent of
the indigenous elite, by exchanging their labor for goods, yet their accep-
tance did not bind them to a new patron.
Construction was the chief activity providing this opportunity. When
the CMTA attempted to improve and expand the decrepit coastal posses-
sions it received from the RAC to create a faade of power, it employed
large amounts of free and unfree labor, including Cape Coast women.26 An
example involved the companys continual need for shells that it turned
into lime. In early 1765, the company purchased eight hundred hogsheads
of shells from the Anaqua townspeople at the rate of five shillings per
hogshead. Most likely the main collectors of shells were the women and
children of Anaqua.27 For their labor, they earned a variety of textiles,
knives, gunpowder, iron bars, brandy, fifteen-inch pipes, pewter, brass
pans, and quart tankards.28 The records do not explain how these goods
were divided up among the shell collectors, yet it was likely that each
received a portion.
Shells were not the only building material that the local peoples helped
the company acquire in exchange for goods. Every Tuesday in 1773 the
Cape Coast people carried stones for the company gratis and in exchange
received gifts of rum.29 Again, while the records are not clear, by the use
of the word townspeople, and the nature of the work, it is very probable
that women were involved. Once the company possessed the necessary
supplies, they then hired local laborers to assist in the construction proj-
ects. In February 1769, the company paid twenty-eight male and ten
25McCarthy, Social Change, 18.

26As Parliament prohibited the company from transferring its annual grant to Africa
as specie, it shipped commodities purchased in England to the Gold Coast. Consequently,
every company transaction on the Gold Coast involved commodities. For more on labor at
Cape Coast see Ty M. Reese, The Drudgery of the Slave Trade: Labor at Cape Coast Castle,
17501790, in The Atlantic Economy During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century: Orga-
nization, Operation, Practices, and Personnel, ed. Peter Coclanis (Columbia, SC: University
of South Carolina Press, 2005).
27John Adams, Sketches Taken During Ten Voyages to Africa, Between the Years 1786 and
1800 (1822; repr., New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1970), 8, argues that throughout
West Africa the women worked while the men were gossiping, drinking or sleeping. See
McCarthy, Social Change, 19.
29TNA: PRO T70/1034, September 30, 1773. The reason for carrying stones every Tues-
day was that it was the local day of rest as fishing on Tuesdays angered the local god.
female laborers for their completed work; the men earned twenty shillings
of goods per month, the women fifteen. For two months work, each male
received half of a long ell of cotton cloth and each female a soot romal.30
In 1775, the company hired another group of laborers but this time at a
lower rate; thirteen men and one woman received fifteen shillings of goods
per month while two men and five women received eleven shillings three
pence. In three months they earned twenty-two cheloes and 15 guinea
stuffs.31 What must be remembered was that the women who worked for
the company did not do so to survive as they, and their family, contin-
ued their traditional means of subsistence. What company employment
provided was access to popular luxury goods that attracted the women
to work for the company. There was no coercion to do so; rather, they
worked because of their desire for these goods. These goods could then
be utilized within the household or bartered at local and regional markets
for more necessary or practical goods.32
Beyond building-related work, the company hired the local peoples to
complete a variety of tasks. In 1761, the company employed the Cape Coast
townspeople to clean out the watering pond in the companys garden and
paid them with six gallons of brandy. Later that year, the company hired
free people to work in their garden.33 When a company slave became ill,
a black doctress cured her. The doctress earned two bajutapeaux and
two guinea stuffs and her pay of 6 was the most that the company paid to
a single individual hired for such a short amount of time.34 In December
1774, a Prapra woman received half of a long ell of cotton cloth for clean-
ing the hall and public rooms after they were whitewashed.35 Finally, in
1779, the townspeople, after the canoemen transported supplies from the
30TNA: PRO T70/1028, February 28, 1769. One problem here involves the distribution of
the goods as the company records do not state who earned what. It is likely that each male
laborer received half a long ell, as a whole long ell was worth eighty shillings, while each
female laborer received a soot romal worth thirty shillings. A soot romal was a variety of
piece good imported from South Asia for trade in West Africa consisting of about a square
yard of patterned blue cotton cloth that one could use as a kerchief.
31TNA: PRO T70/1037, September 30, 1775. Cheloes were a check-patterned cotton tex-
tile and guinea stuffs were a kind of block-printed cotton textile; both were piece goods
imported from South Asia for trade in West Africa.
32For a fuller explanation of the demand and consequences of these goods along the
Gold Coast see Reese, Eating Luxury.
33TNA: PRO T70/1016, May 3 and September 15, 1761.
34TNA: PRO T70/1031, May 17, 1771. A bajutapeaux was a variety of striped cotton piece
good imported from South Asia for the West African trade.
35TNA: PRO T70/1035, December 18, 1774. There was a region of the coast known as
Prapra but it is unclear how the company obtained women from there. When the records
mention Prapra women, they do so within the context of domestic labor, especially clean-
ing the castle.
300 ty m. reese
store ship to shore, rolled the supplies from the beach into the castle. For
their labor they received a variety of textiles and sixteen lead bars.36
Beyond labor, the Cape Coast women gained access to goods through
the companys involvement in local affairs. This provided the local people
with opportunities to demand dashees (gifts of goods) from the company;
the company records differentiated between presents, which they freely
gave, and dashees, which the local people demanded. Over time, some of
these dashees became customary gifts. In 1761, when Charles Bell became
the new governor, he distributed the customary presents associated with
his appointment. This tradition stemmed from the local election process
wherein when a new individual came into power they distributed gifts
to the townspeople. While the local elite received separate presents, the
Cape Coast, Mumford, and Queen Annes Point townspeople collectively
received thirty-six gallons of brandy.37 Another customary present was
that of Christmas and in December 1777 the local elite, townspeople,
cooks, servants, cleaning women, and company slaves received rum, gun-
powder, and a variety of textiles.38 A final example occurred in 1785 when
the company presented the Cape Coast women with brandy, tobacco, and
pipes after they made custom.39
While the above opportunities represented new ways to utilize tradi-
tional social structures, an important transforming opportunity developed
when Cape Coast women formed direct relationships with the castle gar-
rison and with the free European traders living in town. The company
officials usually recorded these relationships in negative terms, most often
by describing the women in question as wenches, but their observa-
tions occasionally provide glimpses that these relationships were more
than just physical. In 1777, Thomas Westgate complained of the tyranny of
Governor Richard Miles. According to Westgate, Miles monopolized the
officers trade in slaves and, through his distribution of the companys sup-
plies, the only fine goods any officer acquired was a wench now and
then.40 While Westgate viewed the local women strictly in sexual terms,
Charles Deey, chief at Appolonia, suspecting that a boy had fetished
36TNA: PRO T70/1043, August 11, 1779.

37TNA: PRO T70/1016, May 16, 1761.
38TNA: PRO T70/1040, December 25, 1777.
39TNA: PRO T70/1049, August 31, 1785. When the phrase make custom appears in
the sources in association with the coastal people, it most often concerns a religious or
cultural context. For example, during the funeral process and the annual New Yam festival
they made offerings of gifts to their various gods to either insure a good afterlife or a good
harvest.
40TNA: PRO T70/32, April 10, 1777.
(cursed) his lady, or wench, as she is usually called, procured the decapi-
tation of the poor creature. A new problem then arose as his head was
struck off by inconsiderate Appolonians who after this act repented their
conduct and assaulted the fort. Deeys reaction, while impulsive, shows
that a strong bond existed between himself and his lady.
At Cape Coast it was clear that relationships developed between the
Europeans in the garrison and local women. Yet the nature of these rela-
tions, i.e. whether they were based upon lust, economic gain, basic neces-
sities, or genuine feelings, is hard to garner from the sources. What we do
know, and this becomes especially clear in the travel literature, was that
Europeans harbored particular, and problematic, stereotypes of African
women in this period. While these views were reinforced within the cor-
respondence that occurred between the forts and the company officials in
England, evidence exists that shows that not only was this not the case,
but that within these relationships local women created opportunities for
themselves and their larger family. Local women were not being forced
into these relationships; rather, they entered them for a variety of rea-
sons. In some cases, such as the marriage between Richard Brew and the
daughter of John Currantee, a powerful individual and slave trader at the
important enclave of Anomabu, the relations created a trade partnership;
this usually occurred between those company officials with the resources
to trade, or free traders, and the local elite. For others, the relationships
developed from the desire to survive and the opportunities, or feelings,
that the relationship created. As George Brooks has shown for the Sen-
egambia region, local African women within and around enclaves played
an important role in the survival and success of European company ser-
vants and traders. While the company records and traveler accounts cen-
ter upon the sexual role of African women at Cape Coast, enough evidence
exists to allow us to better understand how and why they freely entered
into these relationships and the consequences of them.41
Many of these problematic views developed from the European belief
that people who lived in a tropical climate were sexually aggressive. Nicho-
las Villaut reported that Gold Coast women have wit enough, good mind,
41For a thorough examination of the role of African women within this coastal trading
environment, and thus a clear statement in regards to their agency, see George Brooks,
Eurafricans in Western Africa: Commerce, Social Status, Gender, and Religious Observance
from the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Century (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2003). For
more on Brew see Margaret Priestley, West African Trade and Coast Society: A Family Study
(London: Oxford University Press, 1969).
302 ty m. reese
honest and obliging...[b]ut their lasciviousness is above all...playing

hoytytoyty amongst the young fellows stark naked. There are but few of
them barren before, but when married they are seldom over fertile. He
described young women who make it their whole business from morn-
ing to night to spruce up themselves, and make themselves acceptable,
above all to whites, whom they seem to care much more about than those
of their own complexion.42 William Bosman likewise saw Gold Coast
women as sexually aggressive when he wrote that children of eight or
nine years know very well how the world is propagated, and before twelve
they generally reduce their knowledge into practice: so that it is impos-
sible to meet with a maid at marriageable years. Bosman reported that
the women are so well-skilled in their fashions, that they know how to
dress themselves sufficiently tempting to allure several Europeans; but
their greatest power is over those who make no difference between white
and black, especially when the former colour is not to be found.43 Bos-
mans sexualization of these womens role could not be clearer.
Both Villaut and Bosman, then, viewed Gold Coast women within a
predominately sexual context. At issue here, however, is the cultural con-
text of the writer and the subject. Both writers were European males who
came from cultures in which religion and climate dictated that women
be completely covered and that sexual relations were chiefly for propaga-
tion.44 When they encountered women who did not fit into these cultural
constructions they described the women as sexually aggressive. William
Smith reinforced these stereotypes when he wrote, in a phrase that clearly
borrows from Bosman, that they know how to dress themselves up suffi-
ciently tempting to allure the Christians, especially when there is no white
female to be found. Smith also reported on what he believed to be insti-
tutionalized prostitution, which he probably believed would interest read-
ers, though it created for the reader a skewed picture of coastal women.45
A secondary theme found in many of these writers involved adultery.
Archibald Dalzel informed his brother that if a man catches another lying
42Villaut, A Relation of the Coast of Africa Called Guinee, 14144.

43Bosman, A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea, 110, 121.
44See Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, Christianity and Sexuality in the Early Modern World
(New York: Routledge. 2000).
45William Smith, A New Voyage to Guinea (London: Printed for John Nourse, at the
Lamb, without Temple-Bar, 1744), 210, 22425. Many of the travel writers of this period
borrowed from one another. For Akan prostitution see Emmanuel Akyeampong, Sexual-
ity and Prostitution Among the Akan of the Gold Coast c. 16501950, Past and Present 156
(1997): 14473.
with his wife, he makes both his slaves by the laws of the country. In one
case, when the husband accused his wife of infidelity, she denied this,
causing them to take fetish. Having each got a small bit of the bark of
a certain tree, used on these occasions, and a large quantity of water,
they sat facing one another and, after eating the bark, they began to con-
sume large draughts of water. When the woman vomited...the crowd
immediately declared that her palaver...was right, by which means the
man, after being severely buffeted, was made her slave.46 Henry Meredith
reported on another side of infidelity when he wrote that men with young
and handsome wives sent them out to entrap the wary. They then con-
fronted the male adulterer and either forced him to pay a penalty or sold
him as a slave.47 These discussions of adultery reinforced the promiscuous
stereotype of coastal women and continue to skew our understanding of
coastal women and their relationship to the garrison.
On occasion, however, we get a less censorious glimpse of these rela-
tionships that speaks to their complexity and to the ways in which indig-
enous women and their European partners related to one another and to
the cultural context in which they lived. John Atkins, in his description of
Cape Coast Castle, explored the relationship between the Royal African
Company general and his consa, which by the Negros is understood a
temporary wife because she is not obligated to leave the country. The
generals wife was a mulatto woman begot by a Dutch soldier at Elmina,
by whom he had four children of fair flaxen hair and complexion. His
wife and her connections to the local population add interest and power
to him and he again can back their injustice in the pawns irregularly pro-
cured to the garrison. At the same time, he dotes on this woman, whom
he persuades now and then to our chapel services, and she complies with-
out devotion, being a strict adherer to the negrish customs. According to
Atkins, the general wore fetishes when ill and while he had good sense, yet
could not help yielding to the silly customs created by our fears. Atkins
description illuminated a complex relationship. The general attempted to
assimilate his wife by making her attend services and through his unsuc-
cessful attempts to dress her in European fashions. In reaction, the wife
refused to become European, probably because she saw no benefit in it,
46Dalzel Letters M.S. Dk. 7.52 E.U.L (microfilm): Number II.

47Meredith, An Account of the Gold Coast of Africa, 107108. Meredith includes an infi-
delity trial similar to that of Dalzel with the added information that vomiting denotes
innocence.
304 ty m. reese
and convinced the general to wear fetishes and to use his authority for the
benefit of herself and her family.48
A coastal relationship that facilitated economic opportunity was that of
Richard Brew who married the daughter of the Anomabu caboceer, and
dominant slave merchant, John Currantee [Eno Baisie Kurentsi]. Anomabu
was an important slave-trading enclave and it was there that Richard
Brew, a company servant who resigned to become a private trader, saw
an opportunity to dominate the trade. Thus he constructed his own trade
castle, Castle Brew, and married the local birempons daughter. This mar-
riage gave Brew important connections to the Anomabu slave traders and
to Amonu Kuma, an important Fante official.49 For Brew, his marriage
integrated him into the local economic system while ensuring, through
his relationships, that the local slave traders held him in high esteem. It
was clear that both Brew and John Currantee benefited from this relation-
ship through their trade with one another, yet it remains unclear what his
spouse gained. Upon his death, company officials worked to deal with all
of his creditors, but they knew that they needed to appease his African
creditors, especially Currantees family, before the Europeans.
While Brews wife facilitated his ability to trade, for many company
servants an African wife meant survival. As only company officers ate at
the company table, all others, the soldiers, craftsmen, writers, and artifi-
cers, bartered their wages for food. The problem was that much of their
pay came in the form of alcohol and tobacco that many men consumed,
leaving them with no way to obtain food. The other problem was that the
company paid out rum at five shillings per gallon while the coastal price
was two shillings six pence. According to Ludewig Rmer, the benefit of
a wanton European having a black crone was that she will not let
him starve to death. The wife possessed the ability to obtain food for
her husband from her parents and friends, and to take care, when the
husband received his salary, that they are repaid, although not very much,
and at a lower price than a foreigner could purchase food.50 Later, Rmer
reported that in the opposite situation, such as that of the RAC general
above, the wife attempted to get all they can out of their man at every
48Atkins, Voyage to Guinea, 9495.

49Information on John Brew includes TNA: PRO T70/30, 31 and 32 along with Margaret
A. Priestley, Richard Brew: An Eighteenth-Century Trader at Anomabu, Transactions of
the Historical Society of Ghana 4, no. 1 (1959): 2946; Priestley, West African Trade and Coast
Society: A Family Study.
50Ludewig Ferdinand Rmer, A Reliable Account of the Coast of Guinea, trans. and ed.
Selena Axelrod Winsnes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 18687.
opportunity.51 There are examples, such as Thomas Mitchell, a factor who

most likely depended upon his wife to survive, where company servants
provided inheritances for their coastal wives. George Kent Norris left his
mulatto wench a silver plate and a set of silver keys, and ten ounces of
gold dust. And to my black wench a small silver plate, and a set of silver
keys and five ounces gold dust. John Harding amended his will to provide
two ounces of gold dust to his mulatto wench. Charles Alexander pro-
vided his wench with a slave boy and two slave girls. Of the four, only
Mitchell provided the name of his companion in his will.52
A final way that Cape Coast women became involved in company affairs
occurred when their husbands served the company. In 1759, Gilbert Petrie,
chief at Sekondi, became enraged at the company linguist there on the
pretense of his having sold goods to the prejudice of his trade and ordered
his servants to panyar the mans wife. Petrie put the woman into irons,
placed her in the slave dungeon, and attempted to sell her as a slave;
the linguist successfully prevented this.53 During the fighting of 178182, a
Fante messenger wounded by grapeshot committed suicide by cutting his
throat at Tantumkweri. Governor Weuves immediately ordered the chief
there not to bury him, it being the law of the country that whoever buries
the dead renders himself liable to the debts of the deceased. When the
family arrived, the company presented them with goods to allow them to
make custom. Soon after, the family demanded that they receive a note,
for four ackies trade per month, or a slave. After some negotiation, the
company agreed to pay his widow four ounces eight ackies trade as they
knew if they did not, very few would serve the company.54
One result of these cross-cultural relations was the development of a
Eurafrican community at Cape Coast and along the Gold Coast.55 This
developing Eurafrican population played an important role not only as
cross-cultural brokers but by providing a ready labor force, and possible
companions, for the garrison. The interesting element of this community
51Rmer, A Reliable Account of the Coast of Guinea, 234.

52TNA: PRO T70/34.
53TNA: PRO T70/30, January 12, 1759. During a coastal palaver or dispute, each side
possessed the right to panyar, literally man stealing, from the other. They could panyar
individuals from the immediate family or, if not available, then from the local community,
or goods. The panyaring process insured that both sides would actively work to resolve the
palaver in order to reacquire the panyared individual(s) or goods.
54TNA: PRO T70/33, January 30, 1782.
55The term Eurafrican is preferred here to the sources use of mulatto.
306 ty m. reese
involved their status at Cape Coast as they were neither fully Akan nor
fully European and while this occasionally created problems it created a
broker position for this small community between the two groups. The
situation of Eurafricans at Cape Coast was similar to those of Senegam-
bia explored by George Brooks.56 Because of this lack of a clearly defined
status, many of the Europeans who visited the coast developed negative
opinions of the coastal Eurafricans. William Smith stated that:
This bastard brood is a parcel of the most profligate villains, neither true to
the Negros, nor to one another, yet they assume the names of Christians,
but are indeed as great idolaters as any on the coast. Most of the women
are public whores to the Europeans and private ones to the negros. In short,
whatever is bad among the Europeans, or the Negros, is united in them; so
that they are the stink of both. They are frightfully ugly, when they grow in
years, especially the women.57
While Smith saw only the negative in the Eurafrican population, they
played an important role within the garrison and Cape Coast as brokers,
laborers, soldiers, and wives. Their role in Cape Coast is seen in the cre-
ation of a Eurafrican asafo company, the Akrampa, which gave them a
position within local affairs.58
The letters of Reverend Philip Quaque and the company records make
it clear that while some men abandoned their Cape Coast children, either
through death or by returning to Britain, many worked to ensure that
their children had opportunities for their future. Thus, if the father died or
returned to Europe, the children would be able to support the mother. An
example involved John Hippisley hiring Philip Quaque to educate his son;
he stopped attending class after Hippisley died.59 In 1764, when Richard
56See Brooks, Eurafricans, who explored the important broker position of Eurafricans
within Sengambia as their mixed ancestry closed some opportunities to them but pre-
sented others. Also see James F. Searing, West African Slavery and Atlantic Commerce: The
Senegal River Valley, 17001860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
57Smith, A New Voyage to Guinea, 213.
58Ansu K. Datta and R. Porter, The Asafo System in Historical Perspective: An Inquiry
into the Origin and Development of a Ghanian Institution, Journal of African History 12,
no. 2 (1971): 286.
59Quaque, Letters, September 28, 1766. Quaque was the only survivor of the reverend
Thomas Thompsons plan to take three Fetu boys back to England to be educated, pros-
elytized, and ordained; they would then return to the Gold Coast to establish missions.
Histories of Quaque include F. L. Bartels, Philip Quaque, 17411816. Transactions of the
Historical Society of Ghana 1, no. 5 (1955): 15377; Ty M. Reese, Sheep in the Jaws of So
Many Ravenous Wolves: The Slave Trade and Anglican Missionary Activity at Cape Coast
Castle, 17521816, Journal of Religion in Africa 34, no. 3 (2004): 34872.
Minns died he left a portion of his estate to his children in this country.60
Several years later, the company entered Mr. Seniors son into its service
as an assistant writer at 40 per annum. Seniors African-born son spent
eight years in England being educated. Governor Hippisley reported that
he writes, even now, a tolerable good hand, and being, as appearance, not
above fourteen years old, will in very little time I hope be useful in your
accountants office. Hippisley embraced the use of Eurafrican servants
in that they are not subject to sickness as the Europeans.61 The will of
James Smyth gave each member of his family, his mother, father, sister,
and brother, one quarter of his estate. The stipulation to this was that they
needed to properly raise his daughter Rachel Smyth whom they had to
transport from the Gold Coast to England. As Smyths will does not men-
tion a wife, but he does leave an ounce of gold dust and one good cloth
to each of his wenches, Rachel must have been part of this Eurafrican
community.62 While only Eurafrican men entered into company service,
many Eurafrican women became involved in marriages to members of the
garrison thus providing both with a means of support.
While the above groups possessed some degree of freedom in deter-
mining how they interacted with the company, and what they gained
from it, the company slaves lacked this luxury. The company slaves were
in an interesting position in that while directly tied to the slave trade,
the CMTA was limited in how it could utilize its slaves. Slavery within
Cape Coast Castle was a hybrid that incorporated both European and Afri-
can conceptions of slavery. To the company, its slaves were property, but
because of the African setting in which it utilized them, the companys
slaves retained rights and privileges that the company could not take
away.63 The company was not a slave-trading company, as Parliament
forbade it from selling slaves off the coast. This meant that all of the slaves
that it purchased had to remain in the companys possession until the
slave died or until he or she was sold for use along the coast. Naturally,

61TNA: PRO T70/31, June 14, 1766.
62TNA: PRO T70/34, Will of James Smyth.
63See Ty M. Reese, Facilitating the Slave Trade: Company Slaves at Cape Coast Castle,
17501807 Slavery and Abolition 31, no. 3 (2010): 36377. For slavery in Africa see Suzanne
Miers and Igor Kopytoff, eds., Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives
(Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977); Paul Lovejoy, ed., The Ideology of Slav-
ery in Africa (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1981); Claire C. Robertson and Martin
A. Klein, eds., Women and Slavery in Africa (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press,
1983); Akosua Adoma Perbi, A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana: From the 15th to the
19th Century (Accra: Sub-Saharan Publishers, 2004).
308 ty m. reese
as soon as the company slaves learned that they could not be punished,
they took advantage of their position thereby creating problems for the
company.64
Throughout its existence, the company liked to acquire its slaves from
Gambia for two reasons. The first was that they found it was easier to
utilize outsiders as company slaves. While there existed a ready sup-
ply of Gold Coast slaves, the company feared that utilizing them would
prove difficult as their proximity to home made it easier for them to flee.
The second was that company officials believed that some slaves worked
harder than others; the Gambian slaves were the dubious winners in this
competition. In 1753, as construction at Anomabu commenced, the com-
pany received twenty-eight male and eleven female Gambian slaves and
made plans to purchase as many young, fourteen- to twenty-year-old,
Gambian slaves as possible.65 In December 1761, the company purchased
a slave laboress named Essebah for 16 in goods. The goods used to pur-
chase Essebah were similar to those included in coastal sortings.66 While
female slaves were always fewer in number then male slaves, they formed
a considerable part of the Cape Coast garrison. From 1755 to 1779 the larg-
est number of female slaves at Cape Coast was 114 with the lowest being
69. Male slaves in the same period ranged from 252 to 100.67 In 1770, after
forty company slaves died from smallpox, Governor Grossle requested
that the African Committee purchase one hundred strong men and boys
from Senegal and Gambia. He specifically requested no women.68
Once it acquired company slaves, the company employed them in
maintaining its coastal structures. The majority of female slaves were
common laboresses who performed many of the menial physical tasks,
such as hauling material, involved in construction. Interestingly, the com-
panys thinking here utilized European gender conceptions as it trained
its male slaves in different trades, but never its female slaves. A typical
example occurred in 1761 when the company employed fifteen male and
six female company slaves to pave the batteries at Anomabu fort. Seven
men were bricklayers, two were sawyers, and six were laborers while all
64In 1786, when the company slaves pilfered a large quantity of brandy while unload-
ing the annual store-ship, no company slaves were punished for this theft. TNA: PRO
T70/33, February 19, 1786.
65TNA: PRO T70/30, April 24, 1753.
66TNA: PRO T70/1016, December 15, 1761. A sorting was a group of commodities, valued
in gold ounces, exchanged for a slave.
67These numbers come from the Company Day Books for 1755 to 1779.
68TNA: PRO T70/31, January 29, 1770.
six women were laborers.69 Moreover, the company records regarding

company slave pay described the majority of female slaves as laborers.
That said, female slaves served other positions including: hospital tender,
cook, washer woman, washer girl, doctress, Prapra woman, hall supervi-
sor, hall sweeper, pantry woman, warehouse sweeper, stockyard sweeper,
cotton gatherer, surgery attendant, officers apartments, accountant apart-
ments and battlements, governors cook room, governors apartment, gar-
den girls, hospital woman, cotton gatherer for light guard, toll gatherer at
Queen Annes Point, and slaves cook.70
Most company slaves, especially the female slaves, toiled within and
around Cape Coast Castle and its other Gold Coast possessions. Only once
did the company send a group of female company slaves to work beyond
the shadows of one of its enclaves. This occurred in 1786 when the com-
pany needed more shells. To address this dearth, the governor located
a spot six miles from Cape Coast, near Elmina, where large quantities
of shells existed. The governor sent some female and children company
slaves to this spot to collect shells, but after a few days found it was too
time-consuming to have them commute between Cape Coast and the
beaches where the shells lay. To solve this problem, he sent twelve women
and some children there to stay for a week after which a new group would
replace them. This decision upset the male company slaves who cohab-
ited with them and in response all of the able-bodied company slaves
ran away. When company officials finally found them, negotiations began
for their return during which the company slaves demanded less work
and more liquor. The company refused and a short while later, after the
officers promised not to punish the runaways, they returned.71
No matter what type of work they did, the company slaves had set work
days and hours and whenever they worked beyond this they received
compensation for their extra labor. In 1779, the company provided its
company slave carpenters, bricklayers, and male and female laborers with
three gallons of brandy and two fathoms of tobacco for working beyond
their set hours.72 One thing that made company slavery unique within
the larger framework of Atlantic slavery was that they received a subsis-
tence wage; like everyone else they received goods, mainly alcohol and
69TNA: PRO T70/1016, January 31, 1761.

70This list of occupations comes from various Day Book listings for Company Slaves
Paid.
310 ty m. reese
tobacco but occasionally textiles, that they could then barter for provi-
sions. The company slaves who paved the batteries at Anomabu in 1761
each received one gallon of rum and anywhere from one to five fathoms
of tobacco. When we look at the compensation, though, it becomes clear
that the company made use of European gender norms in calculating it.
Twelve of the male slaves received a monthly wage of twenty shillings
while two earned twenty-five and one thirty. In comparison, five of the
female slaves earned ten and one five.73 When they received their pay in
March 1761, the female slaves monthly salary ranged from five to fifteen
shillings. If she had children the company did not provide extra pay,
although it is clear, as least for boys, that when they were old enough
they began to work and earned a wage for that.74
The problem was that this system placed the company slaves in a debil-
itating position in terms of the local economy as they received their pay in
the same goods, but at an inflated value, that slavers exchanged with the
free population in the area for slaves. As the Cape Coast people possessed
direct access to these goods they had no reason to barter with the com-
pany slaves. Another problem was that many consumed their alcohol and
tobacco, and, in doing so, had nothing to barter for food. Finally, in times
of coastal dearth, it became impossible for the company slaves to acquire
food. In 1766, when a famine occurred, Governor Hippisley reported that
I have been witness to the most touching instances of distress for want of
food. While the European garrison had plenty to eat, the company slaves
afford the most piteous examples that can be conceived. Even in times
of plenty a slaves pay barely permitted survival. Thus, in a period when
the cost of corn was six times higher survival was impossible, especially
for female slaves who earned less than the men and often had children.75
Because they lived in town, and had an independent sphere to set up
households, slaves likely developed families to ensure their survival, but
the records provide little insight here.
The final group of women to consider consisted of wives, servants, and
transported felons from Europe. While company policy disallowed men
in employ from bringing their families to Cape Coast, this proved hard
to enforce.76 The first European women to appear in the garrison ledgers
73TNA: PRO T70/1016, January 31, 1761.

74TNA: PRO T70/1016, March 31, 1761.
75TNA: PRO T70/31, June 14, 1766.
76TNA: PRO T70/69, February 2 and 15, 1764. In this correspondence the African Com-
mittee ordered their crimp to forbid the men from bringing their families.
were Elizabeth Jones and Katherine Frazier in 1752 with the next, Eliza-
beth Southall, surfacing in 1761 and remaining on the garrison ledger until
1766. When Jones, Frazier, and Southall appeared in the records there
were no men with the same last name, suggesting that their husbands
had died and that the company felt a need to support them. The company
consistently provided wives with a salary that continued even after their
spouses had died. In 1790 Mrs. Phillis, wife of sergeant Phillis, was put on
the ledgers at 25 company pay.77
The companys grants to European wives and widows aside, life in the
male-dominated castle was hard on any women there as they faced a garri-
son full of intoxicated, angry, and, at times, driven men. Company officers
were in West Africa to make money from private trade. For them, an Afri-
can wife with local connections was more important politically and eco-
nomically than a European wife; many men with African wives also had
wives and families in Britain. The garrisons other denizens, soldiers and
laborers, were crimped from London, poorly paid (and partly in tobacco
and alcohol), and lucky if they survived. How difficult life for European
women must have been becomes obvious in the following incidents.
In 1759, Mr. Byrne entered the governors chamber to inform him that
Mr. West had abused his wife in stating that he wished all the white
womens tongues in this castle were cut out. When Governor Nassau
Senior called in Byrne, he stated that he was not referring to Mrs. West,
but rather to all the white women who were tattlers. When the two par-
ties came together, Byrne and West began a fight that quickly spread to
other servants.78 In 18034, the London-based African Committee received
a series of letters from John Fountaine reporting the abuse his family
received from the garrisons denizens. The problems began in late 1803
when Fountaines wife and three-year-old daughter died and soon after
his infant daughter.79 By March, Fountaine had remarried to a European
lady who had traveled with his family and she was put on the books with
a salary of 50. During this period, the relationship between Fountaine and
the rest of the garrison soured until, in late 1804, Fountaine reported that:
My [new] wife and son have been insulted and beaten by a vagabond son
of Mr. Quaques, the same I formerly took with me to England. This villain
has recently been dismissed from Mr. Collins employ, after receiving several

78TNA: PRO T70/30, November 26, 1759.
312 ty m. reese
dozen lashes for thieving the best of his goods and selling them at Apam; he
has been instigated to this insult by Mould, Dawson and Ellis, & therefore it
is upon this principle that I complain to you and had not the natives kindly
interfered and retaliated upon the wretch a part of his ill usage, its more
then probable, that they might have sustained some material injury. Bless
god they are safe but they must no longer venture into town...three more
artful daring villains do not exist...80
The feud continued as the three villains nightly tormented Fountaine
until he entered the public hall with a naked hanger in his hand, making
use of abusive language, when he was struck down by one of the gentle-
men present. They then placed Fountaine under arrest.81 What was clear
here, beyond the antagonism that existed between the two parties, was
that Fountaine and his family lived in the garrison and this brought them
into daily contact with the hard living of the garrisons predominately
male inhabitants.
As shown, life in the garrison must have been an ordeal for any woman,
but it was especially so for the wife of Philip Quaque. When Quaque
returned to the coast in 1766 to establish his mission, he brought with him
his English wife Catherine Blunt and her traveling companion. During his
stay in England, Quaque developed an English identity in that he associ-
ated himself more with English culture than with Cape Coast culture and
when he returned, the garrison refused to accept his Englishness because
of his skin color. His English wife and her traveling companion most likely
intensified the garrisons animosity towards him. Soon after their arrival,
Governor Hippisley reported that Mr. Quaque and his wife shall want for
no convenience that can be procured in this castle. They have been put
into possession of two of the most convenient rooms, and I believe are
as satisfied as they can reasonable expect in a country so dreadful for a
white woman. While Hippisley worked to help Quaque establish his mis-
sion, he also let his opinion on the place of white women in West Africa
be known:
So many are the shocking circumstances attending the residence of a Euro-
pean female, if of reputation that she ought to prefer the most indigent way
in her own country; and if an adventurer, besides the ill idea formed from
her by the blacks of our country women at home (a matter of some con-
sequence, and in some degree connected with the idea that ought to be
80TNA: PRO T70/34, January 1, 1805.

cherished of our nation) she becomes a theme of dispute, the cause of idle-
ness, and a spring of disease among your officers. Discourage them gentle-
men let me entreat you, the coming of white women to this country.82
Less than a year later, Mrs. Quaque died after a miscarriage.83
The same kind of concern, although less concerted, was shown for the
transported female felons who began arriving in the 1780s. When, in early
1783, Governor Miles learned that some of the felons soon to arrive were
women, he wrote the African Committee:
but good heavens gentlemen, only consider women of our own colour
landed here to be common prostitutes among the blacks; a knowledge of
all the dreadful consequences of such a measure prompts me to say, that if
their lives are forfeited to their country, it were humanity rather to let the
forfeit be paid; I entreat you therefore put a stop to it.84
For the European men of Cape Coast, West Africa was no place for a
European woman, despite their efforts to impose European gender norms
where and when they could.
The place of Cape Coast as a slave-trade enclave and administrative
center, coupled with its long history of cross-cultural relations, dictated
the experiences that women had there. For the local women, the compa-
nys presence provided an opportunity to gain access to the commodities
of the slave trade. Some gained access through the position and labor of
their husbands, while others found that company employment or devel-
oping a relationship with a member of the garrison provided the most
direct access to these goods. For the women imported into Cape Coast,
the company slaves and European women, however, it was another story.
As outsiders, the company slaves were caught between their European
owners and the local peoples, albeit local conceptions of slavery guaran-
teed them certain rights. Sadly, these rights did not always ensure their
survival such as in times of famine. For European women, Cape Coast
Castle was the last place that they wanted to be. On the one hand, their
expectations and those of the European men around them were heavily
influenced by European gender norms. Yet, on the other hand, the envi-
ronment within the castle was not at all female-friendly and certainly not
in any way reflective of life back home in Britain. As a result, most of the
82TNA: PRO T70/31, March 20, 1766

83TNA: PRO T70/31, January 31, 1767.
314 ty m. reese
European women who arrived on the coast had shorter life spans than
men. Thus, while the possibilities for women at Cape Coast were gener-
ally limited by gender norms of European and West African origin, Cape
Coasts role as a trade enclave, and the status of the women within it,
provided some with new opportunities while forcing others to survive in
a harsh environment.
GENDERING THE BLACK ATLANTIC:
WOMENS AGENCY IN COASTAL TRADE SETTLEMENTS
IN THE GUINEA BISSAU REGION1
Philip J. Havik
Introduction
Over the past decades, Afro-Atlantic ports have received increasing atten-
tion from historians and economists; the Upper Guinea Coast and Guinea
Bissau are no exception to the rule.2 However, they have generally been
studied from a purely historical angle, whereas anthropological approaches
have been few and far between. The present essay traces the evolution
of gendered role patterns and womens involvement in the Portuguese
Afro-Atlantic trading post of Cacheu3 from the period of early contact in
the sixteenth century to the intensification of commercial exchange and
1Instituto de Investigao Cientfica Tropical (IICT), in Lisbon, Portugal, and with the
financial support of the Fundao para a Cincia e Tecnologia (FCT).
2See, for example, Margaret Priestley, West African Trade and Coast Society: A Family
Study (London: Oxford University Press, 1969); Kwame Y. Daaku, Trade and Politics on
the Gold Coast, 16001720 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970); C. Meilassoux, ed., The
Development of Indigenous Trade and Markets in West Africa (London: Oxford University
Press, 1971); Philip D. Curtin, Economic Change in Pre-Colonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era
of the Slave Trade (Madison, WI: Wisconsin University Press, 1975); David Northrup, Trade
without Rulers: Pre-colonial Economic Development in South Eastern Nigeria (Oxford: Clar-
endon Press, 1978); Ray Kea, Settlements, Trade and Politics in the 17th Century Gold Coast
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch and
Paul E. Lovejoy, eds., The Workers of African Trade (Beverley Hills, CA: Sage, 1985); Joseph
Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 17301830 (Madi-
son, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); H. M. Feinberg, Africans and Europeans in
West-Africa: Dutchmen and Elminians on the Gold Coast during the 18th Century (Philadel-
phia: The American Philosophical Society, 1989); Robin Law, The Slave Coast of West Africa,
15501750: The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on an African Society (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1991); Ralph Austen and Jonathan Derrick, Middlemen of the Cameroons Riv-
ers: The Duala and Their Hinterland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
3The port of Cacheu was established as an Afro-Atlantic trade settlement by private
traders in the early 1500s at the mouth of the Cacheu River in the north of what is now
Guinea-Bissau (see map on p. 320). Unlike the fort at Elmina, founded in 1482, the Portu-
guese presence in Cacheu did not result in the building of permanent fortifications until
the late 1700s and early 1800s. Nevertheless, it remained the principal Portuguese strong-
hold and slave port along the Upper Guinea Coast until the last quarter of the 1700s, when
it was overtaken by Bissau, fifty miles further south.
316 philip j. havik
European competition into the late 1700s. This period has been the subject
of a number of historical studies undertaken by Portuguese, French, and
American authors who established the town as a niche of scholarly study
in the context of West Africa.4 Indeed, over the last forty years, the Upper
Guinea Coast has become the focus of research of a growing number of
Africanists.5 The geography of the region, which is dissected by many riv-
ers and creeks, induced the formation of integrative trade networks that
were to have a decisive impact upon its ties to Afro-Atlantic commerce.
Along with these networks, a fascinating mosaic of cross-cultural inter-
action developed that produced hybrid communities and customs. As a
result, the above-mentioned works have particularly focused on the emer-
gence of Luso-African, Eur-African, or Afro-Portuguese trading com-
munities along the Upper Guinea Coast. With a few exceptions, however,
they have not specifically addressed the role of women in these interac-
tions during the period in question.6
4See, for example, Avelino Teixeira da Mota, Contactos Culturais Luso-Africanos na

Guin do Cabo Verde, Boletim da Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa 69, separata (1951):
65967; da Mota, Guin portuguesa, 2 vols. (Lisbon: Agncia Geral do Ultramar, 1954); da
Mota, Alguns aspectos da colonizao e do comrcio martimo dos portugueses na frica
Ocidental nos sculos XV e XVI, srie separata, vol. XCVIII (Lisbon: Centro de Estudos de
Cartografia Antiga, 1976); Walter Rodney, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 15451800
(Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1970); Antnio Carreira, Os portugueses nos Rios de Guin,
(15001900) (Lisbon: published by the author, 1984); Jean Boulgue, Les Luso-Africains de
Sngambie, XVIeXIXe sicles (Lisbon: IICT, 1989); George E. Brooks, Landlords and Strang-
ers: Ecology, Society and Trade in Western Africa, 10001630 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press,
1993); Brooks, Eurafricans in Western Africa: Commerce, Social Status, Gender, and Religious
Observance from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Athens, OH: Ohio University
Press, 2003) for a more detailed discussion of this literature.
5Also see John Blake, West Africa: Quest for God and Gold, 14541578 (London: Cur-
zon Press, 1977); Florence Mahoney, Notes on Mulattoes of the Gambia before the Mid-
Nineteenth Century, Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana, VIII (1965): 12029;
Curtin, Economic Change in Precolonial Africa; Bruce L. Mouser, Landlords and Strangers:
A Process of Accommodation and Assmiliation, Journal of African History 8, no. 3 (1975):
42540; Boubacar Barry, Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998); Peter Mark, Portuguese Style and Luso-African Identity: Precolonial
Senegambia, Sixteenth-Nineteenth Centuries (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
2002); Jos da Silva Horta, Evidence for a Luso-African Identity in Portuguese Accounts
on the Guinea of the Cape Verde, History in Africa 27 (2000): 99130; Walter Hawthorne,
Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations along the Guinea-Bissau Coast,
14001900 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003).
6See for example Natalie Everts, Cherchez la Femme: Gender-Related Issues in Eigh-
teenth-Century Elmina, Itinerrio XX, no. 1 (1996): 4557; Sandra E. Greene, Gender, Eth-
nicity and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast: A History of the Anlo-Ewe (Portsmouth,
NH, and Oxford: Heinemann/James Currey, 1996); Amanda Sackur, The Development of
Creole Society and Culture in Saint-Louis and Gore, 17191817 (PhD diss., School for Ori-
ental and African Studies (SOAS), London, 1999).
gendering the black atlantic 317
The great demographic diversity characterizing trading posts such as

Cacheu was strengthened by institutions that integrated slaves and free
Africans as well as accommodating Atlantic outsiders. For example, these
nominally Portuguese settlements incorporated African women, some
working as domestic slaves and others as petty and big traders in their
own right. These women invariably formed part of the Kriston stratum
composed of Christianized Africans resident in Afro-Atlantic trade settle-
ments located along the coast and rivers of the Guinea Bissau region7 who
constituted the dynamic core of these trade settlements on the fringes of
empire. An intermediate social stratum rather than an ethnic group, Kris-
ton formed bilineal communities in and around these sites that operated
and largely dominated the river-based relay trade between trading posts in
the interior such as Farim and Geba (see map on p. 320) and the regions
main Atlantic ports, Cacheu and Bissau. Their emergence in the sixteenth
century is directly associated with the relations between European and
Cape Verdean tradersabove all the lanados (see note 19), private trad-
ers operating beyond royal contractand local elders and chiefs who
provided the former with rowers, pilots, and interpreters. As trade settle-
ments began to develop on the coast and river banks in the 1500s, their
social and cultural interaction with the African populations surrounding
these small nuclei imprinted specific characteristics on each community,
marked by close relations based upon kinship, wardship, intermarriage,
and clientship with ethnic societies. The process of Christianization
they underwent was conducted by Roman Catholic missionaries from the
Capuchin, Jesuit, and Franciscan orders, who visited them in the small
settlements that formed in the region and facilitated conversion, thereby
distinguishing them from the surrounding heathen.8 The Kriston, Chris-
tianized Africans living in these ports and along Guineas rivers who worked
with Atlantic traders as interpreters, clerks, pilots, petty traders, house-
hold servants, and washerwomen, thus came to be identified as separate
strata differing from their non-Christian fellows in written sources, while
straddling the heathen/Christian divide. They were also called Cristos
7For the period under consideration here, the area extends from the Gambia River to
the northwestern outliers of the Futa Djallon massif, delimited in the interior by the tidal
reach (see map); see Brooks, Landlords and Strangers, 60.
8For an analysis of the correspondence of Baltasar Barreira, who headed the Jesuit
mission to the Guinea coast (16041647) from 1604 to 1612 and initiated the policy of con-
verting African rulers, see Philip J. Havik, Missionrios e Moradores na Costa da Guin: Os
padres da Companhia de Jesus e os tangomos no princpio do sculo XVII, Studia: Revista
Semestral 56/57 (2000): 22362; Avelino Teixeira da Mota, As viagens do bispo D. Frei Vito-
riano Portuense Guin e a cristianizao dos reis de Bissau (Lisbon: Junta de Investigaes
do Ultramar, 1974).
318 philip j. havik
da terra (i.e. locally-born Christians) or Cristos por ceremonia (i.e. cer-

emonial Christians) in official sources, thus emphasizing the purported
superficiality of their conversion, and their syncretic beliefs and deviant
behavior. This initial process of Christianization was thus intertwined
with the dynamics of inter-ethnic relations induced by the riverine and
Atlantic trade. The networks in question extended from the African inte-
rior to the Cape Verde Islands, situated just over 300 miles off the West-
African coast, which fell under Portuguese jurisdiction from the 1460s and
soon became an entrept for the transatlantic slave trade.9
The earliest references in travel accounts from the 1570s already men-
tion the presence of women, the tungums (free women)10 and grumetes
(from Portuguese grumete, or ships boy) in their midst.11 The fact that by
that time the Kriston had already developed a local pidgin, i.e. Guinean
Creole or Kriol which was to become the new lingua franca for commer-
cial transactions in the region, demonstrates the growing importance of
their cultural universe in the region.12 In a transferred use of the term,
other sixteenth-century Portuguese travel accounts describe the tangoms
as women who accompanied private traders on their journeys along the
coast and to and from Cape Verde, demonstrating the early gender asym-
metry forged by the relay trade.13 Skillfully using their social networks and
exploring the spatial and social mobility these sites gave them, some Kris-
ton women became influential regional traders and power-brokers. Their
notable presence became apparent in the seventeenth century as Kriston
communities developed their own institutions to engage with African
neighbors and European authorities and began to form a cohesive stra-
tum with its own leaders. The free women born in these trading posts,
9For a general overview of the Kriston communities as well as the relevant secondary
literature see Philip J. Havik, Silences and Soundbites: The Gendered Dynamics of Trade
and Brokerage in the Pre-Colonial Guinea Bissau Region (Mnster and New Brunswick: LIT/
Transaction Publishers, 2004), 12946.
10Here I use the Guinean Creole term tungum in the sense of its later, seventeenth-
century meaning, when it applied only to free Kriston women. For a discussion of the
term, see note 19 below.
11On the grumetes see Jean-Claude Nardin, Recherches sur les Gourmets de lAfrique
Occidentale, Rvue Franais dHistoire dOutre-Mer 190191 (1966): 21544; Havik, Silences
and Soundbites, 12945.
12On Guinean Creole or Kriol, see Luigi Scantamburlo, ed., Diccionrio do Guineense, 2
vols. (Lisbon and Bissau: Colibri/Faspebi, 19992002).
13See, for example, lvares de Almada, Tratado breve dos rios de Guin de Cabo Verde
(Lisbon: LIAM, 1964 [1594]), 9798, an account based upon the authors travels in the
region during the 1570s.
known as tungums, capitalized on their bonds of relatedness with African

ruling lineages while allying themselves with Portuguese, Cape Verdean,
and Guinean-born traders. Their role demonstrates the importance of
trade and brokerage in an Afro-Atlantic setting and the measure of auton-
omy and social mobility it afforded to women within flexible domestic
arrangements and cross-cultural bonds of solidarity.14
The case studies of two women traders from Cacheu examined below
show how they challenged the Portuguese Crown, the Church, and the
Inquisition, and were caught and imprisoned for different reasons, one by
clerical and the other by secular institutions. Although in different ways,
they both succeeded in defending themselves against considerable odds,
and ended up demonstrating the weakness of the Portuguese position and
the inherent contradictions of their policies in the region. Their examples
provide evidence for a reconsideration of the Afro-Atlantic context of
coastal ports and of womens position in them, as well as for pondering
gendered tropes that governed cross-cultural interaction in these loca-
tions on the fringes of empire.
Ports and Peoples: The Afro-Atlantic Context
Steeped in Atlantic history, the town of Cacheu and the surrounding

region studied here, which today forms part of the independent state of
Guinea Bissau, was during the first centuries of contact the most important
Portuguese port on the Upper Guinea Coast. Located on the left bank of the
Cacheu River, it was the site for an encounter between African and Atlantic
actors from the mid-sixteenth century; thus the period studied here, the
early 1500s to the late 1600s, provides a window on the evolution of these
relations during a crucial period of the Afro-Atlantic trade. Yet compara-
tively few scholars have approached the subject of Afro-Atlantic interac-
tion from the sort of multi-disciplinary perspective that allows for a proper
appreciation of kinship and clientship in creating novel opportunities for
women.15 In order to redress the balance, this essay takes a closer look at
the bonds of relatedness that included complex kinship and clientship
14On the tungums and their origins see notes 10 and 19.
15For inter-disciplinary approaches, see Wilson Trajano Filho, Polymorphic Creole-
dom: The Creole Society of Guinea Bissau, (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1998);
Havik, Silences and Soundbites.
320 philip j. havik
A map of West Africa, including the Cape Verde Islands and the major ports,
settlements, regions, and states discussed in this chapter.
relations, which will allow for an analysis of the position of women in a

strategic port and its surroundings in the Guinea Bissau region.16
This extensive littoral region was an important area of intervention for
Lusophone traders operating in the transatlantic market during the first
centuries of contact.17 It is characterized by low-lying floodplain and man-
grove areas along the coast that continue approximately 95125 miles into
the interior, which is dominated by the dryer savannah beyond the tidal
impact. Dissected by a number of large rivers, their tributaries, and a myr-
iad of smaller creeks, this littoral region can transmit the influence of tidal
16On the issue of bonds of relatedness and gender relations, and the debate in anthro-
pology, see Janet Carsten, Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Bonds of relatedness are understood here
as biological and social ties between individuals and groups from different areas and soci-
eties that are used to define their membership in a wider, cross-cultural community.
17The expression Rivers of Guinea of Cape Verde refers to the fact that the Portuguese
ports on the Guinea Coast were ruled from the Cape Verde Islands from the mid-1500s
until 1879 when Portuguese Guinea became administratively independent from the archi-
pelago. See Rodney, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 20022.
movements for over a hundred miles upstream. As a result, medium-sized

vessels were able to reach river ports such as Farim and Geba, facilitating
access to the savannah regions. Unlike the regions rivers, the Rio Grande
inlet further south permitted the passage of larger sea-going vessels.
The town known as Cacheu was located in an area controlled by the Pepel,
a matrilineal ethnic group established in the area between the Cacheu
and Geba rivers, i.e. between the ports of Cacheu and Bissau. The Cacheu
River formed a natural border, dividing different groups such as the Pepel
on the left bank from the Baun and Felupe/Djola on the right bank of
the river. Thus, the establishment of an Afro-Atlantic entrept there was
by no means accidental as it provided a convenient vantage point at
the intersection between different indigenous trade networks stretching
from the Geba to the Casamance and Gambia Rivers.18 However, the lack
of an autonomous fresh water supply, its dependence on food imports,
and the opposition of Pepel dignitaries to any further territorial expan-
sion of the settlement, originally erected by private traders or lanados,
would severely limit its growth. Above all this dynamic was in evidence
after Cacheu came under Portuguese administration from 1615 onwards,
when tensions increased between European interests and those of African
overlords.
As the relay trade developed from the late fifteenth century, gold, slaves,
ivory, hides, salt, and beeswax became the most coveted commodities in
the region. From the mid-sixteenth century, through the ports of Santa
Cruz on the Rio Grande and Cacheu in particular, these goods were bar-
tered for iron bars, gunpowder, arms, cotton cloth, and trinkets with local
populations. However, rather than being controlled by the royal factors or
feitores and private contractors authorized by the Portuguese Crown, the
relay trade was actually controlled by African intermediaries and private
maverick traders, the so-called lanados and tangomos, in conjunction
with the Kriston and local elders and chiefs from different ethnic groups
such as the Pepel, Baun, and Mandinga.19 A mixture of Cape Verdean
18See Brooks, Landlords and Strangers, 197257.

19The term lanados (lanados com os negros, those who launched themselves amongst
the negroes), a Portuguese term, and tangomos (other spellings include tangomau,
tangos-maus, tanganho, tangomango, and tanglomanglo) were applied to acculturated
Portuguese (and other European) male traders who married local women in the coastal
and river ports of the Upper Guinea zone, to their offspring, to traders emulating their
business model, and also to Portuguese outsiders who adopted African ways. The lana-
dos were branded as outcasts from the early 1500s owing to their refusal to recognize the
authority of the Portuguese Crown but also because the forcibly converted Sephardim
called Cristos Novos or New Christians in the Iberian peninsula were prominent among
322 philip j. havik
Creoles and Sephardic traders, these private traders fanned out across the
region, directly negotiating with representatives of ruling African lineages
in strategic goods such as gold and slaves while employing Christianized
slaves and freepersons on their ventures. It was they who established the
first stranger-footholds on the continent in trade settlements such as So
Filipe and Buguendo on the Cacheu River, Porto de Santa Cruz on the Rio
Grande, the port of Geba (upstream on the Geba River), and later Cacheu
itself, which were transformed into Portuguese garrison towns or praas
in the 1500s. During the seventeenth century, the ports of Ziguinchor (on
the Casamance River), Farim (upstream on the Cacheu River), and Bissau
(at the mouth of the Geba River) were also incorporated as enclaves by
the Portuguese Crown, forming two capitanias (captaincies governed by
resident officials, capites-mores), in an attempt to reap the benefits of
the relay trade network. Towns such as Cacheu and Bissau (with their
hinterland ports of Farim and Geba respectively) were essentially Atlantic
entrepts where European shipping took on slaves and regional commod-
ities, initially transporting them via the Cape Verde Islands and, from the
seventeenth century, directly to American and Caribbean destinations.20
them. Some associate the term tangomo with an African priestly lineage in Sierra Leone
and thereby with initiation (Brooks, Landlords and Strangers, 19192), while others hold
that it has an Arabic root, meaning interpreter (Richard Lobban, A Short History of Islam
in Guinea-Bissau, a paper given at Brokers of Change: Atlantic Commerce and Cultures
in Pre-Colonial Guinea of Cape Verde, Birmingham, UK, June 1113, 2009). If the latter
interpretation is accurate, the term might derive from the word turgimo meaning inter-
preter, which was used in early modern Portuguese sources with reference to West Africa.
The terms turgimo and tangomo were originally used for Africans captured on the coast
who were then taken to Lisbon, taught Portuguese, and sent back to the coast to serve as
go-betweens; see Jeanne Hein, Early Portuguese Efforts to Communicate while Opening
the Sea Route to India, unpublished conference paper, The Society for the History of Dis-
coveries, London, September 1987. The first references to the Guinean Creole or Kriol term
tangoma or tungum date back to the 1570s, used it to depict free Christianized women
from coastal ethnic groups who were recruited by lanados or tangomos to aid them in
the riverine relay trade in the region. It came to be applied in the 1600s to the free Kriston
women who lived in the coastal trade settlements. On the tangomos see Maria da Graa
Garcia Nolasco da Silva, Subsdios para o estudo dos lanados na Guin, pts. 14, Boletim
Cultural da Guin Portuguesa XXV, no. 97 (January 1970): 2540; XXV, no. 98 (April 1970):
21732; XXV, no. 99 (July 1970): 396420; and XXV, no. 100 (October 1970): 51360; Rich-
ard A. Lobban, Cape Verde: Crioulo Colony to Independent Nation (Boulder, CO: Westview
Press, 1998), 23; Philip J. Havik, Missionrios e Moradores, 22362; Havik, Silences and
Soundbites, 13035, 361.
20The importance of the relay trade for connecting different ecosystems was originally
argued by authors such as Allen Howard, The Relevance of Spatial Analysis for African
Economic History: The Sierra Leone-Guinea System, Journal of African History XVII, no. 3
(1976): 36588. Ralph Austen and David Northrup subsequently focused upon the spatial
significance of the riverine relay trade along the West African coast and along the rivers
Thus Cacheu depended on the port of Farim, approximately 100 miles fur-
ther upstream, which was located at the limit of the tidal reach, and lay
within an area populated by Mand-speaking groups (the Sonink and
Mandinga) and administered by the Kaab federation, an offshoot of the
powerful Mali empire which had gained autonomy by the 1500s.21
While the private traders were at first dispersed along the regions many
rivers and creeks, they gradually formed small nuclei by the mid-sixteenth
century, although mobility remained fundamental to their trade and life-
style. The diasporic paradigm they initially adopted for commercial rea-
sons was also associated with the persecution and exile of the so-called
New Christians or Cristos Novos22 by the Inquisition in Portugal from
the early sixteenth century.23 But this paradigm also and chiefly applied
of Cameroon and in the Niger River delta respectively; see Austen, African Economic His-
tory: Internal Development and External Dependency (London: James Currey, 1987); Austen
and Derrick, Middlemen of the Cameroons Rivers; Northrup, Trade without Rulers. More
recently, George E. Brooks has developed a broad scheme that encompasses topographi-
cal, climatological, and historical evidence for the existence of a multi-regional trade nexus
based upon inter-ethnic and Luso-African networks operating in the region and interact-
ing as well with the Cape Verde Islands. On this see Brooks, Landlords and Strangers.
21Kaab, whose borders extended from the Gambia River in the north to the Futa
Djallon mountains in the South, was to dominate trade and politics in the Guinea Bissau
regions hinterland until its fall at the hands of rival Fulbe groups in the mid-1800s. On
Kaab see Mamadou Man, Contribution lhistoire du Kaabu, des origines au XIXme
sicle, in Bulletin de lInstitut Fondamentale de lAfrique Noire (BIFAN), srie B, 40, no. 1
(1978): 87159; Djibril Tamsir Nian, Histoire des Mandingues de lOuest (Paris: Karthala/
ARSAN, 1989); Carlos Lopes, Kaabunk: Espao, territrio e poder na Guin-Bissau, Gmbia
e Casamance pr-coloniais (Lisbon: Comisso Nacional para o Centenrio dos Descobri-
mentos Portugueses/CNCDP, 1999). Towns such as Farim and Geba formed the terminals
of long-distance trading networks run by the itinerant Mand speaking djilas, controlling
the supply of slaves and gold from the Upper Niger river basin.
22On the New Christians, see Antnio Jos Saraiva, Inquisio e Cristos Novos (Lisbon:
Ed. Estampa, 1985); Herman Prins Salamon, The Marrano Factory: The Portuguese Inquisi-
tion and Its New Christians, 15381765 (Leiden: Brill, 2004). On the conversos, see H. Beinart,
Los conversos ante el tribunal de la Inquisicin (Barcelona: Riopiedras Ediciones, 1983), and
on crypto-Jews in Mexico, see Seymour B. Liebman, The Jews in New Spain: Faith, Flame
and the Inquisition (Miami: University of Miami Press, 1970).
23For the archives of the Portuguese Inquisition with regard to the activities of New
Christians in Lusophone possessions in Africa, see Filipa Ribeiro da Silva, A Inquisio em
Cabo Verde, Guin e So Tom e Prncipe (15361821): Contributo para o estudo da poltica
do Santo Oficio nos territrios africanos, 2 vols. (MA thesis, Universidade Nova de Lisboa,
2002); Peter Mark and Jos da Silva Horta, Two Early Seventeenth Century Sephardic
Communities on Senegals Petite Cte, History in Africa 31 (2004): 23156; Tobias Green,
Further Considerations on the Sephardim of the Petite Cte, History in Africa 32 (2005):
16583; Green, The Role of the Portuguese Trading Posts in Guinea in the Apostasy of
Crypto-Jews in the 17th Century, in Philip J. Havik and Malyn Newitt, eds., Creole Societ-
ies in the Portuguese Colonial Empire, Lusophone Studies 6 (Bristol: University of Bristol,
2007), 2539.
324 philip j. havik
to Kriston actors, such as the grumetes and tungums, who formed an

internal African trading diaspora that scouted the coast for commodities,
while building and mediating extensive patron-client relations with local
African elders and chiefs along its shores. Their strong ties with African
societies (such as the Pepel, Baun, Biafada, and Mandinga) by marriage,
wardship, and kinship reinforced these cross-cultural bonds, which they
would skillfully explore in the riverine relay trade. Through their bonds
with private, stranger-traders they established connections between this
local context and transatlantic networks extending to Brazil, Spanish
America, and the Caribbean. While private traders were seen by Portu-
guese and Spanish authorities alike as a threat to royal monopolies in stra-
tegic commodities such as gold and slaves, but for a few exceptions, the
Kriston were largely ignored in sources until the mid-1600s, despite their
close association with the former.24
The few references to Cacheu in the sixteenth century are limited to raids,
for example by British traders in the 1560s.25 But at the same time Euro-
pean sources also refer to the growing need for protection against attacks
by African chiefs, above all those spearheaded by the Pepel, that led its
inhabitants to build fortifications in the 1580s. The fortification of the town
of Cacheu thus reflects increasing tensions in the region as African sup-
pliers became more demanding, increasing barter exchange rates as they
attempted to gain greater control over the coastal trade. Although the lat-
ter conceded the usufruct of certain sites for trade settlementscharging
taxesdaxa or dash for the supply of basic necessities (water, firewood,
food), and for the mooring of vessels and their cargoprevailing condi-
tions were not exactly favorable for resident traders. The control African
24The penalties were applied to those who launch themselves among the negroes of
Guinea, i.e. the lanados, and implied the loss of all property; see Resgates na Guin e
Serra Leoa para Santiago e Fogo, Almeirim, 12-16-1517, in Antnio Brsio, ed., Monumenta
missionria africana, 2a srie, vol. 2, 15001569 (Lisbon: Academia Portuguesa da Histria,
1963), 14243. Capital punishment awaited those who settled and traded among the
negroes, while royal decrees authorized African rulers to execute lanados and confis-
cate their assets (Ordenaes Manuelinas, 28-6-1514, in Monumenta missionria africana,
vol. 2, 7992; Ordenaes Manuelinas, 15-3-1518 in Monumenta missionria africana,
vol. 2, 14950).
25The plundering and burning of the town during John Hawkinss raid on Cacheu in
15671568 served as a warning to its inhabitants of the changing power relations in the
Atlantic trade (see below). On the history of the town of Cacheu, see Resumo histrico
de Cacheu desde a sua fundao em 1589 at ao Ano de 1671, Boletim do Arquivo Histrico
Colonial 1 (1950): 87107; George E. Brooks, Cacheu: A Papel and Luso-African Entrept
at the Nexus of the Biafada-Sapi and Banyun-Bak Trade Networks, in Mansas, escravos,
grumetes e gentio: Cacheu na encruzilhada de civilizaes, ed. Carlos Lopes (Bissau: INEP,
1993), 17397.
rulers retained over key supplies meant that brokerage was a way of life
for Cacheus inhabitants. Whenever Pepel rulers or djagras entered into a
conflict with port officials, the former would cut off supplies and threaten
to burn down inhabitants houses. Thus, despite attempts by authorities
in Lisbon in the early 1600s to incorporate these settlements into Portu-
gals overseas empire and secure them from the increasing incursions by
rival Dutch, British, and French competitors, they were essentially part
of an Afro-Atlantic universe, in which governance and trade was shared
by settlers and their African overlords.26 Indeed, although the Portuguese
may have succeeded in fortifying Cacheu with a wooden stockade, this
did not provide a barrier against the process of acculturation and African-
ization induced by the riverine relay trade, which rendered them depen-
dent on African societies and on unions and partnerships with African
elders and chiefs and with local African and Kriston women.27 Acting as
slave and commodity traders themselves, the governors or capites-mores,
appointed by the Crown and subordinated to the Portuguese adminis-
tration in the Cape Verde Islands, had to build up their own bargaining
position in relation to resident traders and neighboring chiefs. They did
this with the aid of the Kriston, who provided privileged access to local
African chiefs and to knowledge of local customs and trades.28 Given the
notorious lack of resources provided by the Cape Verdean administration
and the metropole, Cacheus governors gained their own livelihoods
and personal wealthby means of the revenues generated by trade, just
like all other outsiders and settlers. Their only capital asset was their own
privileged access to Atlantic commodities, on the one hand, and the mari-
time and riverine mobility of their slaves, servants, and clerks in concert
with their proximity to African suppliers, on the other.
The control exercised by African societies over human and mate-
rial resources also meant that these officials ended up by entering into
relations of concubinage with African women for the duration of their
26This situation would continue until the end of the nineteenth century, following the
1884 Berlin Conference when military campaigns intensified and succeeded in breaking
the resistance of African societies.
27In this the Portuguese in the Upper Guinea and Cape Verde zone did not differ from
their counterparts in Lower Zambezia. On this see the contribution by Jnia Ferreira Fur-
tado in this volume.
28In the absence of any outside control, the capites-mores, who concentrated military,
political, fiscal, and judicial powers in their person, could give free reign to their bad or
good instincts and the administration exclusively depended upon the moral and personal
qualities of the appointees; Joo Barreto, Histria da Guin, 14181918 (Lisbon: Authors
Edition, 1938), 102.
326 philip j. havik
commission in order to expand and consolidate their commercial dealings

with African clients. These flexible and often polygynal marriage arrange-
ments (marriages la mode du pays) mainly involved African women
from neighboring ruling lineages and Christianized women living in these
ports.29 The fact that many capites-mores were actually degredados, con-
demned to exile for crimes committed in Portugal or in its overseas pos-
sessions, meant that their bonds and allegiance to the Crown were already
tenuous. As a result, officials in effect emulated the lanados whom they
were held to oppose and combat.
This is not to say, however, that Crown and Church made no efforts
to control or prosecute the private traders. Indeed, the Lisbon Inqui-
sition soon intervened after its establishment in 1536. In the course of
the sixteenth century, a number of denunciations and trials involved
these private traders, some of whom were brought before the Inquisi-
tion.30 But these efforts had mixed success. The first governor of Cacheu,
for example, noted that it would be unwise for him to proceed against
local people, many of whom were Sephardic exiles, without care as some
possessed private slave armies.31 Additionally, these traders generally
maintained their businesses and assets in neighboring ports under Afri-
can governance, i.e. beyond the control of Portuguese authorities. In the
case of Cacheu, for example, ports such as Buguendo, Bichangor, and
Guinguim in Baun controlled areas on the right bank of the Cacheu River.32
Owing to these complex dynamics, persecuted traders whose marital
practices and diasporic strategies made them highly mobile did not lack
alternative communities in which they could and often did take up resi-
dence. So Portuguese efforts may only have reinforced their dispersion
rather than countering it.33 The flexible structure of households and ports
29The most influential Kriston women traders were generally related by kinship to
ruling lineages of African communities living in the vicinity of ports such as Cacheu and
Bissau; see the case studies of Crispina Peres and Bibiana Vaz below.
30Instituto dos Arquivos Nacionais da Torre do Tombo (IANTT), Lisbon, Inquisio de
Lisboa, Processo 233, 1564. Also see Da Silva, A Inquisio, 15961, 16294.
31Baltasar Castelo de Castelo Branco, Cacheu, 4-18-1616, Arquivo Histrico Ultramarino
(AHU), Conselho Ultramarino (C. U.), Guin, Cx. 1.
32Havik, Silences and Soundbites, 182.
33See Peter Mark and Jos da Silva Horta, The Forgotten Diaspora: Jewish Communities
in Africa and the Making of the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2011). Many Sephardic/New Christian traders based in Cacheu maintained close relations
with fellow traders in ports such as Rufisque, Joal, and Portudal along the Petite Cte in
neighboring Senegal. For case studies of Sephardic traders and their Afro-Atlantic net-
works, see also Tobias Green, Masters of Difference: Creolization and the Jewish presence
with a mobile population served the private traders well, for these Afro-
Atlantic trade settlements were essentially tabankas, villages composed
of groups of fenced compounds (moranas) surrounded by a ditch and a
wooden stockade, that differed little from African villages. Populated by
slaves, free Christianized Africans, and a few Atlantic outsiders, they were
subjected to the close scrutiny of African dignitaries with ancestral claims
to the territory.34 Their location in littoral areas on riverbanks did not,
however, conform to existing patterns of African settlement. Maritime
dependence demanded that trading posts be accessible from the sea or
via rivers; trading lineages and communities therefore tended to live close
to the sea or river-front, given that supply lines were essential. Funku or
slave houses were located outside traders compounds, with time giving
rise to wards where captives and free persons, mostly sailors, pilots, and
domestic personnel, lived.
One result of the process which established these hybrid trading post
communities was that Kriston women gained increasing influence in riv-
erine and coastal entrepts (and their hinterlands), on account of their
kinship relations with the former and partnerships with stranger-traders
and officials in the latter. In the case of Cacheu this process had, by the
mid-1600s, crystallized into a modus operandi involving a notable measure
of cultural relatedness between Atlantic and African suppliers, built round
the riverine relay networks, and the emergence of trading lineages or gan
in riverine trade settlements such as Cacheu. While captives, who formed
the mainstay of the populations of trade settlements, generally remained an
indistinct native stratum in written sources and largely hidden from view,
certain local actors began to appear in official sources. Besides the cabo da
povoao or corporal of the settlement, an indigenous military commander
who was responsible for representing and keeping law and order in the
Kriston neighborhoods,35 the grumetes (gurmetu, Kriston rowers, pilots,
interpreters, and petty traders) and tungums (free Kriston women traders)
begin to make their mark on seventeenth-century sources. Both acted
simultaneously as traders and brokers, negotiating with African and Atlan-
tic actors, whose existence therefore depended and thrived on making
in Cabo Verde, 14971672, (PhD diss., Centre for West African Studies, University of Bir-
mingham, 2006), 20740.
34See Havik, Silences and Soundbites, 5766.
35Later renamed juizes do povo or peoples judges, they acted as leaders and spokes-
men for the Kriston communities, officially recognized by governors of trade settlements
such as Cacheu and Bissau; see Havik, Silences and Soundbytes, 13536.
328 philip j. havik
themselves indispensable for all interested parties. At the same time, the
term tangomo, associated with male private traders, largely disappears
from official sources by the mid-1600s, so the rise of the tungum demon-
strates a shift in the gendered dynamics of Afro-Atlantic trade and settle-
ment as well as increased Kriston importance.36
Afro-Atlantic traders such as the tungum were not the only women to
emerge as brokers in the coastal and riverine trade on the Upper Guinea
Coast. As we have demonstrated elsewhere, similar processes of female
empowerment also took place, for example, in Gore, St. Louis, on the
Petite Cte, and in the Gambia and Sierra Leone.37 However, the case
of the region under consideration here differs from the Senegambia or
Sierra Leone on account of the fact that these gendered role patterns and
womens position as traders in their own right were underpinned by the
existence of well-entrenched Kriston communities which occupied a key
position in the relay trade.38
Tungums and Grumetes:

The Social Stratification of Trade and Settlement
The growing Kriston communities in Atlantic and riverine ports formed

part of the rapidly expanding territory occupied by contact zones on the
imperial periphery, which thrived upon cross-cultural trade. The projec-
tion of port communities in sources on the region was aided by the new
36The first reference to the term tangomo is found in the compilation by Valentim
Fernandes, Descripo da Costa Ocidental de frica de Senegal ao Cabo do Monte (n.p.,
1506) in Antnio Brsio, ed., Monumenta missionria africana, 2 srie, vol. 1, 13421499
(Lisbon: Academia Portuguesa da Histria, 1958), 737. For a discussion of the term, see
Antnio Carreira, Cabo Verde: Formao e extino de uma sociedade escravocrata, 1460
1878 (Bissau, Guinea-Bissau: Centro de Estudos da Guin Portuguesa, 1972), 6162; Brooks,
Landlords and Strangers, 19192. For early references to the term tungum/tangoma see
note 19. The term first appears in de Almada, Tratado breve dos rios de Guin de Cabo
Verde, 98, and is used only for the African women who assisted the lanados in the coastal
and riverine trade. The early use of the term indicates that Guinean Creole or Kriol had
already developed in certain locations along the Guinea Bissau region in the last quarter
of the sixteenth century.
37See Havik, Silences and Soundbites, 19098. In ports such as St. Louis and Gore,
women traders such as the signares played an important role in regional networks; see
below.
38On the affinity that the Sephardim had for their diasporic identity, admittedly more
pronounced in northern European Sephardic communities, see Miriam Bodian, Hebrews
of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (Bloom-
ington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999), 617.
statistical tools that the eighteenth century brought.39 Although the avail-
able statistics are mere estimates, they are noteworthy for pinpointing
the numerical importance of Christianized strata and the feminization of
trade settlements.40 The composition of the population which emerges
from these figures allows for a glimpse into Cacheu and other ports social
stratification by including social status, skin color, and sex-specific infor-
mation. The 1731 census underlines distinctions between social categories
such as whites, mestizos, blacks, and slaves, as well as introducing age
sets and civil status into the equation.41 Almost half of the population in
these ports was enslaved, which would account for the difference with the
1727 census, which probably omitted captives. The free inhabitants were
therefore in the majority, but while 4 percent were white or mestizo, more
than half of the towns populace was free black, thereby illustrating the
importance of the Kriston stratum. With regard to sex ratios, the data
show that African women formed the large majority of the free and cap-
tive population that inhabited coastal and riverine ports. Thus, while men
were in the majority in the case of the tiny white community (which only
numbered thirty-six individuals, of which eleven were women), female
majorities were the rule among mestizos, free blacks, and slaves. Amongst
the free Africans in these ports, on average, for every single man, there
were 2.5 single women, which throws some light on the numerical impor-
tance of locally born, female residents in these towns. Significantly, based
on statistical averages for all ports, this notable presence of women was
highest among the Kriston as compared to other strata (whites, mestizos,
and slaves). Although one might surmise that polygyny would account for
this feminization of trade settlements, this cannot be taken for granted
given that a variety of sources indicate that many tungums were in all
probability themselves heads of households and house owners.42
39For an account of the demography of these ports on the Upper Guinea Coast, see
Havik, Silences and Soundbites, 5785; Havik, Mary and Misogyny Revisted: Gendering the
Afro-Atlantic Connection, in Philip J. Havik and Malyn Newitt, eds., Creole Societies in the
Portuguese Colonial Empire, 4163.
40Demographic figures varied considerably owing to seasonal trading sorties and out-
migration, as well as epidemics and famines.
41Note that the original term in the Portuguese sources is mestio(s), but the more
familiar term mestizo(s) is used here and elsewhere in the chapter for audiences less famil-
iar with Portuguese.
42The above statistics come from the 1731 census cited above. For a discussion of the
tungums as household heads see below.
330 philip j. havik
High female surpluses were also the rule for the slave population, which
again underlines the importance of women in the gendered division of
labor in these Guinean ports. Just like the daughters of the neighboring
Pepel, slave women were said to serve in the houses, walk in the streets,
go to the market, fetch water and firewood.43 What is interesting in this
respect is that the ratio of women to men for adults was much higher
than among children, for whom the ratio was almost balanced amongst
the Kriston and captive segments of the population. In the case of the
free black adults, for example, Cacheu boasted the second highest sex
ratio (186.3) after Geba (222.7), i.e. significantly above the regions aver-
age (156).44 There are several explanations for these figures, one of them
being that male Kriston, the grumetes, were generally employed as sailors
on ships or kept their own canoes, and acted as pilots (pilotu), interpret-
ers (xalonadur), or sales clerks (kaixa), and were often away on business
for several months at a time, especially during the dry season (October to
May). Some acted as auxiliary soldiers on a temporary basis in the service
of traders or local officials. Women were generally employed in traders
households as cotton spinners (finadra) or washerwomen (labadra) in
households, but also as hawkers (kulkadra, currently bidra) selling their
wares in local and regional markets and roaming the rivers with a variety
of commodities. The most influential among them were the ara (Kriol;
from Portuguese senhora or lady), commonly addressed as a, addressed
affectionately in Kriol as mam (Portuguese: me or mother), who owned
canoes or vessels but also ran slave households and controlled trading
operations and sometimes full-blown trading houses from these ports.
It should be borne in mind here that the tradition of sex-segregated
household budgets was the rule in these settlements just as it wasand
still isin sub-Saharan African households in general.45 Female auton-
omy was a characteristic of non-Islamized, segmentary, and mostly matri-
lineal groups in littoral regions where the main coastal entrepts such as
43See J. B. Labat, Nouvelle relation dAfrique Occidentale (Paris: Guillaume Cavelier,

1725), 68.
44Antnio Carreira, Os portugueses nos rios de Guin (15001900) (Lisbon: self-pub-
lished by the author, 1984), 11517; 14548. The authors calculations were checked and
corrected.
45On this issue, see Amanda Sackur, The Development of Creole Society; Clara Fay-
orsey, Ga Womens Autonomy: A Critique of the Concepts and Economy of the House-
hold and Family, African Anthropology 2, no. 1 (March 1995): 91130; Onaiwu W. Ogbomo,
Esan Women Traders and Precolonial Economic Power, in African Market Women and
Economic Power, eds. Bessie House-Midamba and Felix K. Ekechi (Westport, CT: Green-
wood Press, 1995), 122.
Ziguinchor, Cacheu, and Bissau were located. Flexible marriage arrange-

ments were common in these and other ports along the Upper Guinea
Coast, allowing free women to operate relatively uninhibited by age- and
gender-based constraints that would have been imposed upon them in
rural societies, thereby giving them considerable opportunities for the
accumulation of economic, social, and cultural capital through partner-
ships with Atlantic traders.46 The existence of trade lineages or gan largely
run and controlled by women provided tungums with a solid socio-
economic and cultural base, as will be demonstrated below.
The 1778 census, which set the total number of persons of all sexes
and ages at 4,430a significant rise compared to the previous onealso
contains the first survey of households in the region, showing that average
membership rates (i.e. estimated household size) were highest (twenty) in
Cacheu.47 These figures not only reflected polygynous marriages, but also
the importance of kriason or wardship. The aforementioned trade lineages
were composed of concentric circles of relatedness, the core including the
lineage head and his or her children and collateral kin, followed by affines
and wards, free ladinu (Guinean Creole for Christianized and trained) ser-
vants, and finally household slaves (djoo).48 It was common among trader
households in these ports to foster children sent by relatives in the interior
who were taken in as apprentices and treated as part of the extended family.
In the words of Bishop dom Vitoriano Portuense: the natives who have
a Christian relative, always give them a child to be baptized, and are very
proud of it.49 These mininus di kriason structured the interdependency
between rural and urbanized Africans, who wouldand still doplace
their children with kin, thereby reinforcing mutually advantageous rela-
tions between in-laws (kuadundadi) and with clients (kamaradia).50
Kriston women played an important role as mestras or tutors of these
46See Frances E. White, Sierra Leones Settler Women Traders: Women on the Afro-Euro-
pean Frontier (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1987) on the Krio women in
Sierra Leone and Sackur, The Development of Creole Society and Culture, on the signares
of St. Louis and Gore.
47Antnio Vaz de Arajo, Cacheu, 11-2-1778, Relao das Praas que Sua Magestade tem
na Costa da Guin, AHU, C. U., Guin, Cx. 11.
48For a version of a concentric model, based on activities rather than kinship, see
Carlos Rui Ribeiro, A sociedade crioula na Guin Portuguesa (19001960), (MA thesis,
ISCTE, Lisbon, 1986).
49D. Vitoriano Portuense, Santiago, Cape Verde, 7-25-1694, in da Mota, As viagens, 73.
50The importance of in-lawship can be surmised from the following saying in Kriol:
Kasamentu i kaba, mas kuadadia ka kaba, i.e. marriage may end, but the relation
between in-laws does not.
332 philip j. havik
wards, educating them in urban ways, which included commercial skills,

ritualized knowledge, and Guinean Creole, all central to success in envi-
ronments where trade was the key to survival and upward social mobility.
The mestras would bring up their wards until they attained marriageable
age, receiving the brideprice from the new in-laws as a reward for their
services. They were therefore key brokers in the context of social inter-
action between port communities and African societies in the interior,
while guaranteeing the assimilation of cognates, including matrilineal or
patrilineal kin, and of affines into trade settlements.
Kriston women traders, the tungums, were first singled out in official
reports, both secular and ecclesiastical, from the mid-seventeenth cen-
tury when Portuguese authorities made them the focus of political and
religious intervention in the Guinean region. Whereas in the last quarter
of the previous century they had been depicted as the loyal servants of
Cacheus itinerant private traders, they were now portrayed as Jezebels.
This highly critical discourse focused on the relationships of concubinage
between Portuguese officials and traders with African women, which were
regarded as morally deviant and a potential threat to the control and sta-
bility of garrison towns. In contrast to their predecessors, the Franciscan
missionaries who were sent to replace the Jesuits in 1642 maintained strong
links with the Portuguese Inquisition and focused on women in trade
settlements from the 1660s.51 This shift was associated with the growing
influence of Kriston women in ports such as Cacheu, where, as we have
illustrated above, they gained a prominent position in economic, political,
social, and cultural networks.52 But Portuguese inquisitors were not alone
in their condemnation of womens roles in these towns; their Spanish col-
leagues did the same. The presence of Capuchin missionaries from Castile
with strong ties to the Spanish Inquisition on the Upper Guinea Coast and
Sierra Leone from 1646 led not only to the condemnation of the presence
of Sephardic traders in the region, but also of widespread practices of con-
cubinage and mixing between converted Christians and non-Christians.53
51On the Portuguese Inquisition and the Franciscans ties to it, see Francisco Bethen-
court, Histria das inquisies: Portugal, Espanha e Itlia (Lisbon: Crculo de Leitores,
1998).
52Also, the Franciscan mission erected a hospice in the town of Cacheu, which pro-
vided them with a permanent base there, thus becoming well acquainted with local cus-
tom and culture. On the rise of women traders in the wider Senegambian region, see
Brooks, Eurafricans, 12260, and Havik, Silences and Soundbites, 19099.
53In the ports they visited on the Petite Cte, now part of Senegal between Dakar
and the Gambia River but also further south, Spanish missionaries found some white
Christians and a majority of mulattoes, who are called creoles, and other Negroes, who are
Two cases have been singled out below involving Cacheu-born women.
The first deals with the Inquisition trial held in the 1660s against Crispina
Peres, a Kriston woman trader accused of heresy, apostasy, and witchcraft,
the main issues being religious. Owing to the extensive hearings in this
case, which involved a large number of Cacheus inhabitants, the proceed-
ings also offer fascinating insights into the society of the port itself. The
second case study focuses on the secular trial against Bibiana Vaz and
her political role in an uprising by Cacheus traders in the early 1680s;
the focus here is on governance and the rise of the local, Cacheu trading
stratum. The accuseds connections with Cape Verdean merchants and
the role played by her own close relatives who pertained to her trade lin-
eage brings into perspective the broader, regional context in which these
women operated. These cases highlight to what extent Kriston womens
social, religious, economic, and political roles in port communities were
all interrelated: their skilled management of Afro-Atlantic connections, of
their bonds of relatedness, of mutual aid, and of trade networks allowed
them to exert authority and control over strategic resources in these
coastal and riverine settlements on the edge of empire.
Crispina Peres: Healer and Entrepreneur
The denunciation against a Roman Catholic priest from the Cape Verde
Islands, who had been based on the Guinean mainland and whom the
Franciscans accused of concubinage with local free women, would form
the starting point for the denunciations made against Crispina Peres,
only Christians for having received the baptismal water, because they live like savages;
from the letter by the Capuchin missionary Gaspar de Sevilla to Fulgencio de Granada,
provincial of the province of Guinea, Kingdom of Gambia, 2-6-1647 in Buenaventura de
Carrocera, ed., Misiones Capuchinas en frica, vol. 2, Misiones al Reino de la Zinga, Benn,
Arda, Guinea y Sierra Leona, ed. P. Mateo de Anguiano (Madrid: Instituto Santo Toribio de
Mogrovejo, 1957), 267. They went on to expose what they saw as deviant Christianity or
self-styled Christian communities on the coast, describing them as the monster that had
been engendered by the illicit intercourse of Christians with gentile women, who by their
concubinage, had with mestizos in their bodies brought forth monsters of the faith, pre-
tending to baptize their sins by having their concubines baptized...as a result of which
this monster was born with the face of a Christian, hands and feet of an atheist, heart and
all of gentility. The fact that people were able to bury these monsters and savages in
the church of Cacheu, under pressure from Christians as well as heathen kings, illus-
trated the miserable state of affairs in the region; Letter, Capuchin missionaries Francisco
de la Mota, Angel de Fuentelapea and Buenaventura de Maluenda, Bissau, 6-1-1686, to
the king of Portugal, in Misiones Capuchinas, vol. 2, 277. Please note that the above are my
translations of the texts in question.
334 philip j. havik
a tungum from Cacheu.54 By pinpointing the presence of Kriston women

and their roles in port communities, the Inquisition trial against the priest
served as a prequel for the one brought against Crispina Peres two years
later. The minutes of the priests trial contain testimonies of female slaves
and freeborn Kriston women, acknowledging not only their presence and
influence in port communities but also their personhood. In addition, a
number of individuals were mentioned, residing in ports such as Cacheu
and Farim, further upstream, including Crispina Peres father, Rodrigo
Peres, her husband, Jorge Gonalves Francs, his brother, and other well-
known traders. The same visitador or religious inspector who testified
against the priest also did so in Crispina Peress trial, having learned of
her alleged idol worship through witnesses accounts. In order to set an
example for the inhabitants of the town of Cacheu, she was accused of
heresy, apostasy, and witchcraft, eventually arrested and imprisoned and
put on trial before the Inquisitions Lisbon court.55 This case, which was
to have a great impact upon the relations between the port of Cacheu and
the surrounding Pepel and Baun communities, and create serious ten-
sions with their influential chiefs or djagras,56 with hindsight, clearly put
Kriston women on the regional map in a new way. However, given that
Inquisition files were secret and only became accessible in the late 1800s,
the main impact of the case at the time was local, with rumors traveling
fast on the grapevine or bokasiu.57 The trial showed just how important
Kriston women had become in the garrison town that was Portugals main
foothold and slave port in the region at the time, that annually accounted
for 3,000 exported slaves.58 It was also significant that the trial, like the
one against the aforementioned priest, broke with the traditional accusa-
tions of Judaization and blasphemy that accounted for the majority of
54See IANTT, Inquisio de Lisboa, Processo 8626, Lus Rodrigues de Almeida (1662).
55IANTT, Inquisio de Lisboa, Processo 2079, 1664.
56The Pepel djagras retained influence until their defeat in 1915 at the hands of Portu-
guese and African mercenary troops. Their involvement in the slave and commodity trade
in which they served as middlemen tied them to the ports and inhabitants of Cacheu and
Bissau. Havik, Silences and Soundbites, 10712; Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of
the Atlantic Slave Trade, 14401870 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), 61, 34041.
57On hearsay and rumour in the Guinea Bissau region, see Wilson Trajano Filho, Out-
ros rumores de identidade na Guin Bissau (Working Paper, Srie Antropologia, Braslia:
Universidade de Braslia, 2000).
58Gonalo Gamboa de Ayala, capito-mor, Cacheu, 6-29-1647, AHU, C.U., Guin, Cx.
1.; see also Linda A. Newson and Susie Minchin, From Capture to Sale: The Portuguese
Slave Trade to Spanish South America in the Early Seventeenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2007),
6162.
denunciations brought before the Lisbon court. The relevance of the trial
also lay in the fact that the accused was married to the son of a New
Christian trader and former governor of Cacheu, indicating that the trial
had wider, politico-economic implications.
The case against Crispina Peres forms part of an increasing number
of reports submitted by religious inspectors or visitadores before and
after the trial which contain references to baptized African women in
ports being punished for moral and religious deviance.59 What most con-
cerned these clergymen was their worshipping of heathen idols (chinas
or rnias), which they allegedly kept in their houses or visited within or
beyond the perimeter fence of Portuguese ports such as Cacheu. These
denunciations fit into a pattern associated with Guineas reputation for
sorcery and witchcraft, for which inquisitors coined the term African or
heathen rites.60 However, the ecclesiastical proscription of these prac-
tices focused not on men but on baptized African women, whose prox-
imity to heathen traditions was seen to interfere with the conversion of
African populations. Nor was Crispina Peres without company, given that
altogether more than twenty Kriston women were denounced for witch-
craft during the hearings; however, only a Crispina was put on trial after
the initial hearings held in Cacheu.61 The reasons for this decision were no
doubt related to her prominence in the Cacheu community, her descent
from a chiefly lineage, and her close kin relations with African dignitaries.
Her marriage to a wealthy and influential New Christian/Sephardic trader,
captain Jorge Gonalves Francs, whose father had been persecuted by
the Portuguese and Spanish Inquisition, also played a role here.62 These
59The first regimento, or captains brief, for Cacheu refers to the presence of many
Christian women living in these parts...and in liberty amongst the heathen, to the detri-
ment of the crowns trade by weaving panos [cotton cloth]; Regimento de Joo Tavares
de Sousa, Lisbon, 12-29-1614, AHU, C. U., Guin, Cx. 1.
60See Philip J. Havik, La sorcellerie, lacculturation et le genre: Le perscution religieuse
de lInquisition portugaise contre les femmes africaines converties en Haut Guine
(XVIIme sicle), Revista Lusfona da Cincia das Religies III, nos. 5/6 (2004): 99116. For
similar cases in the Black Atlantic, on the distinct treatment of African and creole healers
in colonial Mexico by Spanish inquisitors, see, for example, Noem Quezada, The Inquisi-
tions Repression of Curanderos, in Cultural Encounters: The Impact of the Inquisition in
Spain and the New World, eds. Mary Elizabeth Perry and Anne J. Cruz (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1991): 3757.
61On the general background of the context in which the trial took place and the shifts
in the Inquisitions prosecutorial tendencies see Da Silva, A Inquisio, 141, 146, 159. The
primary trial record is IANTT, Inquisio de Lisboa, Processo 2079, Crispina Peres.
62Her father-in-law, lvaro Gonalves Francs, a Sephardic Jew from Cabea de Vide
in Portugals Alentejo region, had been the target of the Inquisition for many years until
336 philip j. havik
close bonds of relatedness with the Sephardic diaspora and its crypto-
Jewish New Christian and converso descendants, regarded as particularly
suspicious at the time, as well as her and her husbands success as entre-
preneurs, marked a Crispina out from other inhabitants, allowing the
Inquisition to tap into existing rivalries in the port community.
It was no accident that the visitador who denounced her was himself
a wealthy slave trader, empowered by the Portuguese Crown to improve
Cacheus defenses against European competitors such as France and
Britain.63 In this respect, the accusation against a Crispina was also a
means of undermining the position of her husband who maintained good
relations with rival European powers and was a powerful player himself in
the local and regional slave trade. Her close kin- and clientship relations
with ruling Pepel and Baun64 lineages who formed the mainstay of the
family business also played a role in prompting the denunciation.65 And
finally the growing influence of the Cacheu trading community, which
had succeeded in gaining the upper hand in the rivalry with Cape Verdean
merchants and obtained royal consent in 1647 for trading directly with
the Americas, served as a backdrop for these regional rivalries.66 While
economic interests provided a strong incentive for denunciations, in the
statements obtained from witnesses and the accused, personal enmities
also emerged as grounds for denouncing their fellow inhabitants.67
his death in 1635. He was part of an extensive Sephardic network that traded slaves, ivory,
and beeswax in the Atlantic between northern Europe, the West African coast, the Carib-
bean, and Latin America; for more details on the Gonalves network see Green, Masters
of Difference, 20722. On a Crispinas ties to these interests, see IANTT, Inquisio de
Lisboa, Processo 2079, Crispina Peres, 18.
63On the visitadores and their role in the matter of fortifications see, for example, Maria
Lusa Esteves, Gonalo de Gamboa de Aiala, capito-mor de Cacheu, e o comrcio negreiro
espanhol (16401650) (Lisbon: Instituto de Investigao Cientfica Tropical, 1987), 49. For
references to the political and trading activities of the visitador in question, see Antnio
Brsio, ed., Monumenta missionria africana: frica Ocidental, 2a srie, vol. 6, 16511684 (Lis-
bon: Academia Portuguesa da Histria, 1992), 724, 15960, 17172.
64At the time, the Baun maintained extensive trading networks from the Gambia
River on into Guinea-Bissau and participated actively in the slave trade and related trade
activities in the region until their nineteenth-century decline. On the Baun see Brooks,
Landlords and Strangers, 8795; Havik, Silences and Soundbites, 99102.
65These matters emerged during the trial hearings; IANTT, Inquisio de Lisboa, Pro-
cesso 2079, Crispina Peres, 23234.
66Royal Decree on Trade between West Africa and Brazil, Lisbon, 6-1-1647, AHU,
C. U., Guin, Cx. 1.
67Carta Rgia aos Moradores de Cacheu, Lisbon, 1-6-1647, in Antnio Brsio, ed.,
Monumenta missionria africana, 2a srie, vol. 5, 16001610 (Lisbon: Academia Portuguesa
da Histria, 1989), 488; Royal Decree, Lisbon, 11-22-1644, AHU, C. U., Guin, Cx. 1; Peter
Mark, The Evolution of Portuguese Identity: Luso-Africans on the Upper Guinea Coast,
Journal of African History 40 (1999): 17391, esp.17383; M. D. D. Newitt, A History of
No doubt the court envisaged a considerable sum to be obtained from

seizing a Crispinas assets, but although the courts final verdict included
the confiscation of all her assets, practically none were impounded. Most
of Cacheus traders kept their assets out of reach of Portuguese authori-
ties; Crispinas father-in-law kept his with relatives in ports such as Joala
along the Petite Cte.68 This failure was associated with the accuseds
kin-based networks spread out across the region. Indeed, testimonial
evidence from denunciations and trial hearings show local traders in the
Rivers of Guinea traveling with their family and corporate kin on ves-
sels and ships along the regions rivers and Atlantic shores. a Crispina
learned the tricks of the trade accompanying her father, Rodrigo Peres
Baltasar, who fetched slaves from the port of Geba, where he was based
over sixty miles upstream from Bissau, as well as from the Bijags islands
off the Guinea coast. They used the cotton cloth or bandas produced in
the Cape Verde Islands as moeda franca for the purchase of slaves. Father,
mother, Domingas Pessoa, daughter, and son-in-law also traded in kola
nuts from Sierra Leone, which were taken together with salt from Bissau
and Cacheu to the ports of Geba and Farim, while beeswax was collected
from the Casamance region north of Cacheu and shipped to Europe. Based
in Cacheu, a Crispina mainly conducted trade operations on the Cacheu,
Casamance, and Gambia Rivers, and on the many creeks that linked them.
In order to do so, she skillfully used her connections with local dignitaries
and worked as well with grumetes from the ports of Cacheu, Ziguinchor,
and Farim.69
Her second husband, the aforementioned Jorge Gonalves Francs,
former commander of the Cacheu garrison, managed transactions with
European tradersabove all those from Castile where he had lived
and regularly visited Cacheu, especially during the period of Spanish
dominance in the region (1580s1660s).70 Working in close partnership
with his wife, he also traveled the coast in the company of his adopted
P ortuguese Overseas Expansion, 14001668 (London: Routledge, 2005), 17779; Thomas, The
Slave Trade, 21031; Lobban, Cape Verde, 2529; B. Barry, Senegambia from the Sixteenth
to the Eighteenth century: Evolution of the Wolof, Sereer and Tukuloor, in General His-
tory of Africa, vol. 5, Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century, ed. B.A. Ogot (Paris:
UNESCO, 1992), 268272; Havik, Silences and Soundbites, passim; Havik, Missionrios e
Moradores.
68Diniz Eanes da Fonseca, Petition, 4-20-1635, AHU, C. U., Guin, Cx.1.
69Letter of the governor of Cacheu, 5-8-1647, AHU, C. U., Guin, Cx. 1; IANTT, Inquisio
de Lisboa, Processo 2079, Crispina Peres.
70His sister was married to a Spanish trader, Joo Nunes Castanho, in the Cape Verde
Islands; IANTT, Inquisio de Lisboa, Processo 2079, Crispina Peres, 43.
338 philip j. havik
son to ports in Sierra Leone and the Nunez River further south. Petitions
submitted to the Lisbon court by local traders show that, in the absence
of Portuguese ships, they argued that they had no option but to sell slaves
to incoming Spanish vesselswhich otherwise would deal directly with
the nativesin order to sustain their trade and families.71 The practice
of trading with foreigners, which had first emerged in connection with
the lanados, would continue to challenge and undermine the Portuguese
Crowns putative monopoly on strategic goods. In the latters eyes, the
culprits were clearly to be sought among the trading communities that
inhabited the Rivers of Guinea, whose biological and cultural Africaniza-
tion had allegedly impeded their conversion and provided an incentive
for their disloyalty to the Crown.72
However, a Crispina was not about to let herself be used as a scape-
goat or an example for the whole Kriston community, in circumstances
which in her view were not of her own making. Inquisitors insistent
questioning of the accused on her religious beliefs, in order to make her
confess deviant heathen practices, brought to the fore the generalized
nature of African rites, which was not limited to Christianized Africans.
The lengthy hearings in the town of Cacheu conducted by Franciscan
priests and missionaries showed that both Old and New Christians com-
monly had recourse to local healers and to indigenous rituals, and main-
tained close relations with African actors from slaves to chiefs. As the full
breadth of her extensive commercial and social network came into view,
including her relatives, neighbors, clients, and slaves, the extent of con-
demnable phenomena gained substance, as did the notion that she was
only one of many inhabitants of this nominally Portuguese port on trial
here. The repeated interrogations of the accused once she was caught and
taken to Lisbon, regarding her dabbling in African rites and supersti-
tious beliefs, were met with a defiant attitude and an indignant refusal
71Petio dos Moradores de Cacheu (also signed by Jorge Gonalves Francs, the hus-
band of the accused) Cacheu, 5-19-1655, AHU, C. U., Guin, Cx. 1; Parecer do Conselho
Ultramarino, Lisbon, 8-26-1655, AHU, C. U., Guin, Cx. 1. Fifteen years earlier, a Crispinas
second husband had signed a petition on behalf of Cacheus inhabitants, which was also
underwritten by her father, Rodrigo Peres; Petio dos moradores de Cacheu, Cacheu,
12-9-1641, AHU, C. U., Guin, Cx. 1.
72For travel accounts, see Almada, Tratado Breve, 101102; lvares, Ethiopia Menor, 15.
For additional background see also Nolasco da Silva, Subsdios pt. 2; Rodney, A History
of the Upper Guinea Coast, 20022; Boulgue, Les Luso-Africains, 5160; Brooks, Landlords
and Strangers, 18896; Mark, The Evolution of Portuguese Identity; Brooks, Eurafricans,
12260; Havik, Silences and Soundbites, 17984.
to admit to having committed any sinful act or crime, not in the least
because everybody in Cacheu adhered to them.73
Thus, increasingly, the trial hearings and interrogations narrowed their
focus to Crispina Peres domestic context. The statements made by her
foster son and her Christianized slaves allowed inquisitors to exploit their
anger and fear of their mistresss (over)rule, while giving a unique insight
into her household. Those made by her neighbors and friends underscored
the extensive mutual aid networks that linked women such as a Crispina
to one another in these ports, organized in age sets or mandjuandadi, and
revealed the wider demand for their services as well as those of the native
healers for whom they brokered. Importantly, their testimony points as
well to the role of her and her husbands slaves, who were sent out to
shrines or chinas located in the Kriston ward of Cacheu called Villa Quente,
or Hot Town, as well as in the Pepel and Baun villages in the imme-
diate vicinity and across the river, such as Matta, Guinguim, Buguendo,
Buj, and Saral, with which the Kriston from the town maintained close
relations.74 Although all Kriston women from Cacheu were mentioned
by witnesses for keeping shrines in their houses, on which they poured
palm wine and spirits in the company of heathen natives for a variety of
ceremonies, a Crispina was singled out.75 These shrines were consulted
for curative purposes, when, for example, a Crispinas younger daughter
Leonor fell ill, and for divinatory purposes, in order to guarantee the suc-
cess of business ventures. a Crispina herself was accused of having had
goats sacrificed by grumetes and slaves pour the animals blood around
the masts of ships in order to bless their voyages, and was said to have
ordered animal blood to be sprinkled on the sea for curative purposes.76
And last but not least, she had allegedly put a spell on her husband to
73IANTT, Inquisio de Lisboa, Processo 2079, Crispina Peres, 314.

74The so-called Hot Town was separated from the Cold Town or Vila Fria, which
was inhabited by traders and officials, by a street, two musket shots in length; a Jesuit
missionary preferred to remain silent about the meaning of Hot Town, adding that
the popular explanation was in bad taste. He thereupon contrasts the glittering life-
style and the two-story houses, or sobrados, of the merchants in Cold Town to the round
huts of the common carpenters and sailors in the neighboring Hot Town. See lvares,
Ethiopia Menor, ch. 4.
75IANTT, Inquisio de Lisboa, Processo 2079, Crispina Peres, testimony of Sebastio
Vaz, Cacheu, 1-3-1661.
76IANTT, Inquisio de Lisboa, Processo 2079, Crispina Peres, testimony of Pro Correa
Tavares, Cacheu, 1-17-1661.
340 philip j. havik
make him marry her, an accusation that was repeated by a number of

witnesses, including her own slaves.77
The Inquisitions crusade against perceived heresies and witchcraft,
aided and abetted by local intrigue, not only unearthed a series of local
deviant practices, but also pinpointed the broad participation of women
in them.78 Besides the tungums, slave women were also in great demand
in the town of Cacheu. Among them one finds household slaves (escra-
vas), servants (criadas), and child minders (amas), who testified during
the hearings. This is illustrated by the Gonalves and Peres households,
which maintained a large number of male and female baptized slaves
who would regularly accompany their masters to mass in the local cha-
pel. Their female slaves were particularly coveted by fellow traders who
sought to marry them to their own servants for being ladinu, i.e. smart
or well-educated and fluent in Portuguese and Guinean Creole dialects.
Female slaves in port households were also important given their close
relations with the people from surrounding villages, where they would
be sent to perform ceremonies for their masters, but a Crispina was
also seen to have visited the huts of her slaves where she too conducted
native rites.79 Some female slaves were described as being very knowl-
edgeable on the subject of indigenous customs and remedies, for which
they were much sought after in the town. The trial records also referred
to amorous relationships among slaves, revealing a world of sentiments
otherwise omitted from official sources; one of a Crispinas slaves, for
example, testified against his mistress for having attempted to end his
affair with a Cape Verdean woman employed in her household.80
77IANTT, Inquisio de Lisboa, Processo 2079, Crispina Peres, testimonies of Gaspar

Vogado, Cacheu, 1-8-1663; Pro Pais, Cacheu, 2-10-1663; Sebastio, freed slave, Cacheu,
3-15-1663.
78IANTT, Inquisio de Lisboa, Processo 2079, Crispina Peres, testimony of Francisco
Corra Tavares (cousin of the accuseds husband), Cacheu, 2-9-1663.
79IANTT, Inquisio de Lisboa, Processo 2079, Crispina Peres, 1664, testimony of Gas-
par Vogado, Cacheu, 111661. For a discussion of the background and implications of the
trial, see Havik, Silences and Soundbites, 14962; Havik, Walking the Tightrope: Female
Agency, Religious Practice and the Portuguese Inquisition on the Upper Guinea Coast
(Seventeenth Century), in Bridging the Early Modern Atlantic World: People, Products and
Practices on the Move, ed. Caroline A. Williams (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 17391.
80IANTT, Inquisio de Lisboa, Processo 2079, Crispina Peres, 1664, testimony of
Sebastio, freed slave, Cacheu. For perspectives on similar cases for Brazil see Laura de
Mello e Souza, O Diabo e a Terra de Santa Cruz: feitiaria e religiosidade popular no Brasil
colonial (So Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1994); James Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture,
Kinship and Religion in the African-Portuguese World (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North
Carolina Press, 2003), ch. 8, 16188 on the Inquisition and the role of Afro-Portuguese
a Crispinas role as a patron and consumer of the services of indig-

enous healers also emerges from the trial. She was said to worship at a
shrine in her house while her slaves kept all kinds of ceremonial artifacts
under their beds. Moreover, she was accused of calling upon healers or
djambaks of Baun extraction as well as itinerant Islamized Mandinga
murus or marabouts and Mandinga women to cure all kinds of ills and
afflictions.81 Witnesses said, for example, that the accused had called heal-
ers to her residence who had taken one of her daughters to the huts of her
slaves where she was subjected to gentile ceremonies.82 a Crispina and
her eldest daughter Cassilha wore charms known as guarda di kurpu (also
called gris-gris in neighboring francophone areas and bolsas de Mandinga
in an Afro-Atlantic context) quite openly.83 These they believed would
protect them against the evil eye and from disease. a Crispina her-
self revealed to the inquisitors that in the case of women these amulets
were also used to facilitate childbirth, while men used them to protect
themselves from being wounded or killed in battle.84 One of the persons
treating her with these charms was the husband of her fellow Cachean,
Bibiana Vaz de Frana, who provided assistance during the birth of one
of her children, using techniques he had learned from his personal healer,
a Mandinga woman.85
Nor was a Crispina unusual in embracing these practices. During the
trial, fellow inhabitants concluded that all tungums (...) used shrines
and heathen ceremonies in which they believe.86 Indeed, they were con-
sistently singled out in witness testimony for their adherence to heathen
ceremonies, emphasizing the precarious nature of their faith. The many
examples given by witnesses demonstrate that this common phenome-
non in Cacheu was actively encouraged by a predominantly female net-
work consisting mostly of free women, but also of captive go-betweens
women in Brazil; for Mexico see for example Kathryn Joy McNight, Blasphemy as Resis-
tance, 22953.
81IANTT, Inquisio de Lisboa, Processo 2079, Crispina Peres, testimony by Pro Pais,
2-10-1663.
82IANTT, Inquisio de Lisboa, Processo 2079, Crispina Peres, testimony by Joo Nunes
Castanho (brother-in-law of the husband of the accused), 4-29-1663.
83IANTT, Inquisio de Lisboa, Processo 2079, Crispina Peres, testimony of Ambrsio
Gomes, 3-28-1663. On the bolsas de mandinga, see Sweet, Recreating Africa, 18186.
84IANTT, Inquisio de Lisboa, Processo 2079, Crispina Peres, testimony of the accused,
8-23-1667.
85On Bibiana Vaz see below.
86IANTT, Inquisio de Lisboa, Processo 2079, Crispina Peres, testimony of Francisco
Corra Tavares (cousin of the accuseds husband), Cacheu, 2-9-1663.
342 philip j. havik
who mediated key events in the daily life of the population in this Afro-
Atlantic port. Their agency showed just how deeply social, cultural, and
economic aspects of peoples lives were interwoven, and to what extent
womens mutual aid networks or mandjuandadis formed the dynamic
interface that connected and supported them. The recourse to divinatory
practices, including the casting of spells and garnering blessings, was even-
tually conceded by the accused, but cast in the context of the ports com-
munity and culture. In addition, she squarely laid the responsibility for
condoning these practices on Portuguese priests, including the visitador
who denounced her, who also had recourse to these methods.87 Towards
the end of the trial she admitted that she felt cheated, given that the thera-
pies applied by local healers, despite their promises, had failed to cure her
younger daughter.88 With the admission that her parents had urged her
not to follow the rites of the non-converted heathen, she was sentenced
as an apostate heretic, excommunicated from the Church, and ordered
to publicly confess her sins and undergo ministration in the faith to save
her soul as well as confess her sins and receive holy sacraments, above
all during the main Christian celebrations.89 Upon her return to Cacheu,
her priest and confessor stated that she had zealously complied with the
courts sentence. In one of her last statements, she reported that her (sec-
ond) husband had died during her detention in Lisbon, and that she was
very ill suffering from high fevers, which was confirmed by Cacheus
physician.90 The tenacity of Kriston women under duress will be further
demonstrated by another case which occurred two decades on, involving
one of Crispina Peres contemporaries, Bibiana Vaz de Frana. Her career
would overshadow that of her co-Cachean, owing to the greater visibility
of her actions and their wider political implications.
87IANTT, Inquisio de Lisboa, Processo 2079, Crispina Peres, Lisbon, 9-10-1667, testi-
mony of the accused, 9-2-1667, 314 and 331.
88IANTT, Inquisio de Lisboa, Processo 2079, Crispina Peres, Lisbon, 9-20-1667, 340.
89IANTT, Inquisio de Lisboa, Processo 2079, Crispina Peres, Cacheu, 8-3-1668, 389.
90IANTT, Inquisio de Lisboa, Processo 2079, Crispina Peres, Cacheu, 8-3-1668, 390.
Crispina Peres returned to Cacheu at the age of 53 in June 1668 after spending three years
in the Inquisitions dungeons in Lisbon. The last known reference to Crispina Peres is made
in Janurary 1670 when her confessor declared that he heard her confession at Christmas
[1669]; op. cit. Manuel Fernandes, Cacheu, 1-16-1670, 390.
Bibiana Vaz de Frana: Rebels and Power Brokers
The above-mentioned trial, and the hearings on which it was based,

brought up an issue which was particularly unsettling for authorities in the
Cape Verde Islands and Portugal: the political ramifications of the social
and economic influence that the Cacheu trading community exercised in
the town and the surrounding region. Once the Portuguese-Spanish Crown
tried to gain a foothold on the Upper Guinea Coast towards the late 1500s,
its lack of control over these communities and their leaders became abun-
dantly clear.91 Despite efforts to prohibit transactions with foreign, i.e.
non-Portuguese interests, private traders carried on unperturbed, trading
with the enemy, above all Castile and France.92 Accusations of smuggling
were mainly leveled at the New Christians, such as a Crispinas husband
and others like him, who were said to be in control of the towns trade.
Cacheu regularly came under attack from neighboring villages owing to
the chronic instability of relations with the Pepel, in which Portuguese
commanders and some traders appear to have been involved.93 In one
case a commander was imprisoned and put on trial for having sent the
son of a Pepel chief or djagra into slavery, who then had to be repatriated
from the Americas in order to avoid the loss of the town.94
From the middle of the seventeenth century, local trading commu-
nities feature prominently in Portuguese secular and clerical sources.95
91In early dispatches, Portuguese commanders of Cacheu inform the Crown that the
inhabitants of Cacheu showed no respect or obedience towards them; e.g. Francisco de
Tvora, Cacheu, 6-14-1622, AHU, C.U., Guin, Cx. 1; Gonalo Gamboa de Ayala, Commander
of Cacheu, letter, Cacheu, 6-29-1647, AHU, C. U., Guin, Cx. 1.
92See for example the concern voiced by authorities, here the Conselho Ultramarino
or Overseas Council that advised the Crown on Portugals overseas possessions, about the
lack of traders in Cacheu, the wealthiest of whom were spread out across the region and
negotiated directly with African suppliers and European merchants; Conselho Ultrama-
rino, on the fortification of Cacheu, 9-26-1670, AHU, C. U., Guin, Cx. 2.
93On this situation, see the report by the governor of Cape Verde on his visit to Cacheu,
denouncing its lack of defences which would not impede the Negroes to set fire to it;
Antonio da Fonseca de Ornelas, Cacheu, 3-6-1662, AHU, C. U., Guin, Cx. 2. Also see the
petition signed by a number of the foremost Cacheu-based traders denouncing the oppres-
sion by the heathen (rulers) who treat them like slaves, and who enter their houses and
take what they have, being subjected to their barbarous laws, Cacheu, 6-25-1707, AHU, C.
U., Guin, Cx. 4, which illustrates the worsening situation in the port.
94Such cases were rare given the serious conflicts they provoked with African ruling
lineages, which were at the same time key suppliers. See reports by Francisco de Tavora,
6-12-1622, 6-14-1622, 6-18-1622, AHU, C. U., Guin, Cx. 1.
95See for example, Rodney, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 20022; Brooks, Land-
lords and Strangers, 16796.
344 philip j. havik
Once the Crown conceded the right of Cacheus traders to ship slaves
directly to Brazil without having to pay duties in the Cape Verde Islands,
the position of the Kriston strata shifted.96 They went from acting as
local and regional go-betweens to operating as Afro-Atlantic traders in
their own right, and they made a point of demonstrating and affirming
their authority.97 Far from being a vaguely defined comprador class,
stranger-settlers, or Luso- or Eur-Africans, these private traders were
steeped in and strongly identified with Kriston culture and its insti-
tutions while playing a key role in settlement and regional politics.98
A junta composed of Cacheu-born inhabitants was suspected of traffick-
ing slaves and de facto dominating the town. They were accused by famil-
iares, i.e. the Inquisitions official but secret informants, resident on the
coast, of being unsympathetic and unreliable in relation to the Crown.99
Townswomen married to officials were alleged to be of infamous repute
and faced accusations of having caused their husbands to stray from
the right path that coincided with a campaign led by the Portuguese
and Spanish Inquisition against gentile women who married Christian
men.100 Although French travelers confirmed the common practice of
the Portuguese keeping various African concubines, they did not con-
demn them for it, expressing instead admiration for the womens finesse
and the prestige they enjoyed locally.101 Here again the case of a Crispina
is instructive as it shows how views differ in accordance with the sources
in question, which nevertheless coincide with regard to their influence
and authority. Witnesses in the trial against her reported on the political
influence she and her husband wielded in the town of Cacheu, where the
latter had occupied the post of commander in the 1650s. The capture of
the accused had provoked great tensions locally and between the town
96See Carta Rgia aos Moradores de Cacheu, Lisbon, 1-6-1647.

97Royal Decree, Lisbon, 11-22-1644, AHU, C. U., Guin, Cx. 1.
98For the landlord-stranger paradigm, see Vernon R. Dorjahn and Christopher Fyfe,
Landlord and Stranger: Change in Tenancy Relations in Sierra Leone, Journal of African
History 3, no. 3 (1962): 39197; William A. Shack and Elliott P. Skinner, eds., Strangers in
African Societies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). For terms such as stranger-
settler, Luso-Africans, and Eur-Africans on the Upper Guinea Coast, see Brooks, Landlords
and Strangers, 13540; Brooks, Eurafricans, 68101. For a portrayal of these traders as a
comprador class, see Rodney, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 20022.
99Paulo Barradas da Silva, Cacheu, 9-20-1644, 10-25-1646, 10-12-1646, AHU, C. U., Guin,
Cx. 1. The said commander of Cacheu was also a familiar or local agent of the Lisbon Inqui-
sition, and maintained strained relations with many local traders.
100Manuel Dias Quatrim, Commander, Cacheu, to Court in Lisbon, 1-11-1662, AHU, C.
U., Guin, Cx. 2; Francisco da Mota, Angel da Fuente and Buenaventura Maluenda, Bissau,
6-1-1686, AHU, C. U., Guin, Cx.
101P. Cultru, Premier voyage du sieur de la Courbe fait a la coste dAfrique en 1685 (Paris:
duard Champion/Emile Larose, 1913), 202, 228, 232, 234.
and the surrounding Pepel and Baun communities, who threatened to

burn and ransack it.102
One of the inhabitants to testify at a Crispinas trial, Ambrsio Gomes,
the wealthiest slave merchant in the region, had been acting commander
of Cacheu and an administrator of the Companhia de Cacheu, a trading
company erected with private capital in 1676.103 Just like his rival, Jorge
Gonalves Francs, he had Sephardic-New Christian roots on his fathers
side, and African descent on the side of his mother, who was a famous
healer. His wife, Bibiana Vaz de Frana, already mentioned in the con-
text of the trial of her fellow tungum, Crispina Peres, was also a filha da
terra of Cacheu, and related to the Pepel in the Cacheu area, and to the
Baun further north in the Casamance. She traded with the peoples of
the region, mainly in slaves, but also in beeswax, ivory, hides, and kola
nuts, and greatly expanded her business after her husbands death in
1679. Despite the petitions and protests of her husbands firstborn, she
ensured her inheritance rights to the exclusion of her stepson.104 As a
result she gained control of all the assets of their partnership, including
its share in the revenue of the Companhia de Cacheu, thereby bolstering
her political position and that of her trading lineage or gan.105 Acting as
the doyenne of the Kriston community and traders of Cacheu, she impris-
oned the Portuguese commander, in whom imperial authority was vested,
and who had prohibited all trade with rival European nations.106 Sources
102The situation was defused by a Crispinas husband, who succeeded in appeasing

Cacheus angered Pepel neighbors by showering them with gifts. See IANTT, Inquisio
de Lisboa, Processo 2079, Crispina Peres, petition by Jorge Gonalves Francs, Cacheu,
6-16-1665.
103On the company, see Daniel Pereira, A Fundao da Companhia de Cacheu, in
Mansas, escravos, grumetes e gentio, ed. Lopes, 199247. The private company established
by officials and traders for a period of six years exercising a monopoly on all commerce
with Cacheu aimed to rebuild Cacheus fortifications, maintain the garrison, and engage in
the slave and goods trade along the Upper Guinea Coast. It was also exempt from paying
customs duties while paying only half the regular duties in Portugals ports. While the con-
tract proposed that its directors would be nominated as commanders of the town, thereby
enhancing its control over local trade, this condition was seen by Lisbon as a guarantee
of maintaining control over the lucrative Cacheu trade. Ambrsio Gomes, Bibiana Vazs
husband, who played a leading role in the Cacheu trading community, is mentioned in this
respect as a future commander of Cacheu. See Pereira, A Fundao, 24447.
104Petition, Loureno Mattos Gomes, Cacheu, 9-2-1682, AHU, C. U., Guin, Cx. 3.
105Rodney, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 20912 provides a brief overview of her
career; a more detailed discussion of her rise to power is to be found in Havik, Silences
and Soundbites, 16368.
106The latent conflict between the commanders of Cacheu and local traders regarding
the thorny issue of the prohibition of trade with other European nations, which the then
commander had vowed to enforce, would precipitate the irate reaction of neighbouring
Pepel djagra and the coup by the triumvirate that challenged the Portuguese Crowns
346 philip j. havik
clearly identify her as the leader of the rebellion supported by the private
traders of the town, which put a triumvirate in power after deposing the
local Portuguese authorities. Addressing the crowd gathered in Cacheu,
she, significantly, carried the staff of the commander, thereby emphasiz-
ing her authority and control over the main Portuguese slave port in the
Rivers of Guinea.107 The triumvirate composed of a Bibiana, her younger
brother, and her cousin sent a list of demands to the Portuguese king,
refusing to accept any Portuguese commander or the Companhia de
Cacheus previous contract with the Crown, and claiming the exclusive
rights to trade with the regions African suppliers. By relying on trade with
their French and English clients, the new masters of the port, the leaders
of the Cacheu republic as they styled themselves, openly defied Portu-
guese claims to the spoils of the Guinea trade. At the same time, a Bibi-
ana took care to entrust the Vaz-Gomes gans material assets to her lineal
and collateral kin, far beyond the reach of Lisbons agents.
Once the metropoles command over the town was restored and the
rebel leaders were caught, the enquiry report identified a Bibiana as the
undisputed leader of the rebellion, while at the same time emphasizing
the complicity of her brother and cousin. The descriptions contained in
the report not only show just how well-connected she and her relatives
actually were in the region, but also testify to the authority a big woman
actually exercised over the people of the town.108 Official reports empha-
sized the distinction between the triumvirate and the people in order to
(by then, virtual) monopoly. See the petition by Cacheus traders, Petio de Todos os
Moradores desta Praa de Cacheu, 3-20-1684, AHU, C. U., Guin, Cx. 3. a Bibiana kept the
commander in question prisoner in her residence in Farim, over sixty-two miles upstream
from Cacheu, for fourteen months, until he escaped and returned to Cacheu; see Man-
uel Lopes de Barros, Relatrio da Sindicncia sobre os Acontecimentos em Cacheu, Rio
Grande, 8-18-1691, AHU, C. U., Cabo Verde, Cx. 7-A.
107Manuel Lopes de Barros, Relatrio da Sindicncia, 8-18-1691.
108The term big woman or mindjer garandi in Kriol is commonly used in West
Africa, where women exercise considerable authority and power in the market trade.
There are similarities with the male equivalent of om garandi which in Kriol means big
man, while birempon has a similar meaning in the Gold Coast region of Lower Guinea. On
the former see Havik, Silences and Soundbites, 358, 360 and on the latter see Ty Reeses
contribution to this volume. But owing to gender asymmetries, the terms are not synony-
mous. The literature on big women typically associates them with (matrilineal) West
African societies; see, for example, Toyin Falola, Gender, Business and Space Control:
Yoruba Market Women and Power, and Felix Ekechi, The Case of Igbo Market Women
of Eastern Nigeria, in African Market Women and Economic Power: The Role of Women in
African Economic Development, eds. Bessie House-Midamba and Felix. K. Ekechi (West-
port, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), 2340, 4158.
strengthen the case against the leaders of the republic, whose actions had
allegedly ruined trade at Cacheu and left their fellow Cacheans poverty-
stricken.109 At the same time, Spanish meddling was also seen behind the
coup in the figure of a Castilian missionary who had allegedly instigated
the conspirators to rebel against his arch-enemy, the Cacheu commander.110
The control a Bibiana and her fellow conspirators exerted over transac-
tions was matched by their influence over their fellow Kriston. The subse-
quent enquiry acquitted the peoplewho had supposedly taken part in
the rebellion out of fear and ignoranceof responsibility for the rebel-
lion. According to the enquiry report, the only real difference between
them was that the accused obtained much more revenue from trading
with the French and English than their co-Cacheans.111 The thirteen ships
that they loaded with slaves, beeswax, and ivory during the triumvirates
existence (all told, fourteen months) testified to their control over trans-
actions in the port and their privileged relations with local dignitaries
and European merchants.112 Whenever they suspected any metropolitan
intervention, the leaders of the republic fled to the interior where they
remained until the storm had passed.113 Thus the alliance between Cach-
eus main trading lineages and between the towns big women and big
men served to highlight the formers now unassailable position in the
coastal and transatlantic slave and goods trade, not as middle-(wo)men
but rather as powerful, autonomous political and economic actors and
decision makers.114

112One of the English merchants was John Castle, chief factor of the Royal African
Company on James Island in the Gambia, who traded in ivory and beeswax in Cacheu,
while providing loans to the towns traders; see Rodney, A History of the Upper Guinea
Coast, 208209.
113Manuel Lopes de Barros, Relatrio da Sindicncia, 8-18-1691; Barreto, Histria da
Guin, 11112; Rodney, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 20912; Peter Karibe Mendy,
The Tradition of Resistance in Guinea Bissau: The Portuguese-African Encounter in
Cacheu, Bissau and Suas Dependncias, 15881878, in Mansas, escravos, grumetes e gen-
tio, ed. Lopes, 13569, and in particular 14244, on Bibianas coup in Cacheu.
114Some authors such as Rodney (A History of the Upper Guinea Coast), Mendy (The
Tradition of Resistance in Guinea) and Brooks (Landlords and Strangers) regard the Afro-
Portuguese, Luso-Africans, or Eur-Africans as (mere) intermediaries. These episodes
clearly demonstrate that this notion does not apply to these powerful trading lineages
or gan, which had attained a pre-eminent position in the region by the mid-1600s, and
certainly not to figures such as Bibiana Vaz and Ambrsio Gomes, and some of their
co-conspirators.
348 philip j. havik
The official sent from Lisbon to take stock of the situation and solve
it was obliged to seize a Bibiana from the residence of a native chief,
where he received a very hostile reception.115 Accused of rebellion,
trading with foreigners, and tax evasion, she was imprisoned with her
younger brother and another co-conspirator and taken to the Cape Verde
Islands, the seat of the Portuguese government in the region, given that
the Cacheu prison was not deemed secure. While her brother and sister
were arrested, her nephew, a wealthy private trader in Tancrowale on the
Gambia River, escaped in a vessel belonging to a Bibiana.116 Upon the
arrival of a Bibiana and her brother in Ribeira Grande, the capital of
the Cape Verde Islands, however, the most influential merchants of the
isles put up bail for them, ensuring their release and thereby preventing
their transport to Lisbon.117 Although the authorities intended to make
them pay compensation for damages, all attempts to seize a Bibianas
assets failed given that, as in the case with a Crispina, they were hidden
in the land of the heathen with members of her network. In fact, once
her capture became known, irate kings demanded her release while for-
eign (i.e. English) ships from the Gambia River were apparently sent to
Cacheu to free her.118
The stalemate which ensued made apparent the weakness of the Por-
tuguese position in the region, as well as the formidable negotiating skills
and influence of their opponents, the Cacheu traders. According to the
agreement the parties made, in order to receive a royal pardon a Bibiana
was expected to pay an indemnity to the Crown in kind in two install-
ments, first by rebuilding the palisade and fort of Cacheu, and then by
erecting fortifications at Bolor, which lay across the river opposite the
town in Felupe/Djola territory.119 Once back in her hometown, a Bibiana
proceeded to continue the negotiations to obtain a better deal. She claimed
that on account of being a woman and having lost a significant part of
115Verissimo de Carvalho da Costa, Santiago Island, Cape Verde, 6-17-1687, AHU, C. U.,
Cabo Verde, Cx. 7-A.
117This was an important gesture, given that the Cape Verdean trading community had
strongly objected to the royal decree for Cacheus traders to bypass the islands and trade
directly with the Americas (see above, notes 96 and 97) as well as against the formation of
the Companhia de Cacheu; see Carta dos Moradores de Santiago, Ribeira Grande, 1-1-1673,
in Pereira, A Fundao, 23233.
118Verssimo de Carvalho da Costa, Ribeira Grande, 6-17-1687, AHU, C. U., Cabo Verde,
Cx. 7-A.
119Promessa e Obrigao que fez Bibiana Vaz de Frana, viuva de Ambrsio Gomes,
Cacheu, 4-20-1691, AHU, C. U., Cabo Verde, Cx. 7-A.
her assets during her absence from the mainland, she was unable to pay
the agreed-upon indemnity until her nephew returned with her assets.
Skillfully using the inner workings of the trade lineage to her advantage,
she argued that she also required the presence of her younger brother in
order to run the family business. The sindicante or investigator appointed
to the case advised the king to concede, given that, as Bibiana Vaz was
very determined to secure the release of her brother, any attempt to pres-
surize her into more concessions would cause everything to be lost,120 i.e.
the Guinea trade. In the end, not only did a Bibiana succeed in obtaining
a royal pardon after leading a coup against the crowns representative,
she also negotiated the release of her younger brother without complying
with the agreements express conditions.121
The tactics developed by this very old woman who was very ill when
arrested122placating the Crown and its agents, carefully limiting dam-
ages as well as repositioning herself within her gan, the Cacheu trading
community, and the regionillustrate the political skills that had made
tungum like a Bibiana big women in their own right. Whereas in the
earlier stages of the conflict she had been depicted by the Portuguese
authorities as that woman, who had taken her stepsons rightful share
of his fathers inheritance, smuggled slaves and embezzled royal revenue,
acted in cahoots with rival nations, and led a rebellion,123 within a few
years she was hailed as a loyal subject of the Portuguese Crown who was
voluntarily performing good works in Cacheu in gratitude for the royal
pardon she received.124 Officials complimented themselves upon having
succeeded in averting the worst scenario, i.e. the loss of Cacheu, which
would have meant a serious setback to Portugals Atlantic ambitions, after
having secured the support of a Bibiana, the Jezebel from Cacheu.125 But
120Manuel Lopes de Barros, Relatrio da Sindicncia, 18-8-1691. This is a key passage of

the report which showed the lack of leverage of the Portuguese Crown on the coast, and
the skillful deployment by a Bibiana of her kinship and trading connections.
121One of the main reasons for the pardon was a Bibianas willingness to invest in
Cacheus fortifications, which constituted a considerable concern for the Lisbon authorities,
who had attempted from the mid-1600s to find sponsors for the project; see, for example,
the case of the visitador Gaspar Vogado, who denounced Crispina Peres and had a contract
with the Crown for the rebuilding of the towns defenses: report of the commander of
Cacheu, 2-21-1657 in Antnio Brsio, ed., Monumenta missionria Africana, vol. 6.
122See medical report by Antnio Gomes de Azevedo, physician, Ribeira Grande, Ilha
de Santiago, Cape Verde, 6-12-1687, AHU, C. U., Cape Verde, Cx. 7-A.
123Sebastio Cardoso Sampayo, Cacheu, 1-10-1687, AHU, C. U., Guin, Cx. 3.
124See Copia das Promea e Obrigao que fez Bibiana Vaz de Frana, viuva de
Ambrzio Gomes, Cacheu, 4-20-1691, AHU, C. U., Cabo Verde, Cx. 7-A.
125See letter, Antnio de Barros Bezerra, Cacheu, 6-7-1688, AHU, C. U., Guin, Cx. 3. The
governor of Cape Verde, Diogo Ramos Esquivel, who also figures as a familiar or official
350 philip j. havik
in doing so, they ended up by highlighting the power and authority of

an eighty-year-old woman, who almost single-handedly exposed the fic-
tive nature of Portuguese claims to the port of Cacheu and the Guinea
Bissau region.
Matronage on the Upper Guinea Coast
As becomes clear from the cases discussed above, the few dots on the
map indicating the existence of trade settlements which underpinned
Portuguese claims to the area, were little more than tiny commercial
enclaves of mostly African inhabitants separated from the African societ-
ies surrounding them by a simple ditch and a fence or earthen wall and
thus steeped in Afro-Atlantic culture.126 Indeed, the Overseas Council had
poignantly reminded the Crown of Portugal of its weak position on the
Guinea coast after more than two centuries since first contact: Although
of late Your Highness calls himself Lord of Guinea, you do not possess
more than a tiny patch of land in the whole of Guinea...while paying trib-
ute to the negro King by means of the commander of Cacheu.127 Neither
were these ports similar to the heavily fortified European coastal enclaves
such as the forts of Portuguese and later Dutch Elmina on the Gold Coast,
the British Bathurst in the Gambia or Freetown in Sierra Leone, and the
Dutch and later French Gore, or St. Louis in Senegal.128
What seventeenth-century accounts make clear is that free women
exercised a notable measure of control over commercial and care net-
works in these ports, as well as in other outposts of the Portuguese
empire.129 It is precisely their pivotal role in networks of female and
informant of the Lisbon Inquisition, was largely responsible for the diffusion of Bibiana
Vazs bad reputation in his correspondence with Lisbon; his death in 1690 would facilitate
the resolution of the conflict.
126For an overview of the basic issues here see da Mota, Contactos Culturais Luso-
Africanos na Guin do Cabo Verde; Brooks, Landlords and Strangers, 22644; Brooks,
Eurafricans, 6978; Rodney, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast.
127Consulta do Conselho Ultramarino, 7-26-1670, AHU, C. U., Guin, Cx. 2.
128For an overview of the basic issues here see da Mota, Contactos Culturais Luso-
Africanos na Guin do Cabo Verde; Brooks, Landlords and Strangers, 22644; Brooks,
Eurafricans, 6978; Rodney, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast.
129For a discussion of women and trade in the pre-colonial Lusophone context in
Africa, see Havik, Mary and Misogyny Revisted, 4163, which discusses Charles Boxers
Mary and Mysogyny: Women in Iberian Expansion Overseas, 14151815: Some Facts and Per-
sonalities (London: Duckworth, 1975).
male support, heading residential kin-aggregates and acting as heads of

households themselves while controlling resources of social and eco-
nomic importance that secured the place of these women in the con-
text of Afro-Atlantic settlements.130 Matrilineal traditions within coastal
communities, bilateral kinship and matrifocal households in Atlantic and
riverine ports, as well as flexible marriage arrangements, the segregation
of female and male domains, considerable spatial and social mobility, and
cosmological responsibilities had fomented the growth of these relations
and bolstered their positions and status in trading communities. Such kin-
ship and clientship practices, which have been described as relations of
matronage, allowed women in this milieu to strategically engage, bargain,
and interact with existing institutions and actors such as Portuguese secu-
lar and religious authorities. The female icons of relations of matronage
in Cacheu during the 1600s were undoubtedly Crispina Peres and Bibiana
Vaz, who gained notoriety in Portuguese sources owing to their key roles
in events that occurred in the coastal port of Cacheu. While the major-
ity of Kriston women were depicted as mammies and jezebels in accor-
dance with the prevalent gender and racially biased mythology of slavery,
such role models do not appear to apply to the protagonists of the present
essay.131 Indeed, they not only confounded contemporary secular and cler-
ical authorities, but also challenged the dominant paradigms of the era.132
In the process, their determined stance and forceful personalities came
through, which led them to be depicted as big, powerful, dangerous,
meddlesome, and (head)strong, but also showing great physical stamina
130For this definition of matronage see Philip J. Havik, Female Entrepreneurship in

a Changing Environment: Gender, Kinship and Trade in the Guinea-Bissau Region, in
Negotiation and Social Space: A Gendered Analysis of Changing Kin and Security Networks
in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, eds. Carla Risseeuw and Kamal Ganesh (New Delhi:
Sage, 1998), 20525; also see Havik, Silences and Soundbites, 2930, 189, 220. The definition
of matronage presented here is a modified version of that proposed by Joke Schrijvers in
her Mothers For Life: Motherhood Marginalisation in the North Central Province of Sri Lanka
(Delft: Eburon, 1985), 160.
131For a discussion of the mammy and jezebel paradigm, see Deborah Gray White,
Arnt I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York and London: Norton,
1999), ch. I, 2761.
132Women from these towns were often depicted as morally deviant, sometimes com-
pared to jezebels or prostitutes, but until the 1800s rarely as mothers; see Havik, Silences
and Soundbites, 18589. They were not always marked out as jezebels, however; a Jesuit
missionary does describe in the early 1600s how a poor woman from Cacheu bestowed
her charity upon a Benedictine priest; see lvares, Ethiopia Menor, 19.
352 philip j. havik
under harsh conditions.133 Accusations of witchcraft and black magic

are directly associated with their influence and wealth, thus belying the
alleged subservience of (African) women, who toiled to serve their hus-
bands or masters. This paradigm of womens subaltern position, strongly
infused with the Roman Catholic Churchs moral precepts, was, however,
imbued with a notion of a rebellious and inconstant female strain that
undermined the natural order, one which authorities had already iden-
tified in early modern Europe.134 While the above mentioned cases pre-
sented African women as fomenting disorder and deviance arising from
their alleged feminine weakness, Crispina Peres and Bibiana Vaz proved
beyond doubt that their actions were determined by strength and skill.
In addition, the regular absence of Atlantic male traders, high mortal-
ity rates among mostly male outsiders, and flexible social arrangements
contributed to the emergence of free, baptized African women as an iden-
tifiable social group in the seventeenth century. Guinean Creole or Kriol
provides a local window which reflects upon the asymmetry of gender
relations. The circumstance that the Kriol term tungum remained in use
to designate free women from the coastal towns well into the 1900s, with-
out a male equivalent, demonstrates the durability of womens agency in
these ports and their notable upward social mobility.135 In light of what
Jnia Furtados essay in this volume says concerning the Zambezi donas,
it would seem that the tungums too succeeded in usurping Portuguese
power by absorbing it into the culture they were creating.
In this respect the parallels (and contrasts) between a Crispinas and
a Bibianas cases are striking. Both were married to New Christians,
captured in the residences of African kings to whom they were related,
133Both Crispina Peres and Bibiana Vaz were examined by physicians who found that
they were weakened by illness, above all by malarial fevers, but showed great stamina,
probably having developed a measure of resistance against prevalent tropical diseases
aided by local remedies. On these indigenous healing methods, see Havik, Walking the
Tightrope, 18389. Despite their condition, which was regarded as fragile, they survived
return voyages: from the Cape Verde Islands for Bibiana Vaz, then in her eighties, and
in Crispina Peress case to and from Portugal. See IANTT, Inquisio de Lisboa, Processo
2079, Crispina Peres, report by the surgeon Dionsio da Lomba, Ribeira Grande, 4-23-1665,
and regarding Bibiana Vazs condition upon arrival in Cape Verde, see Antnio Gomes de
Azevedo, Certido, Santiago Island, Cape Verde, 6-12-1687, AHU, C. U., Cabo Verde, Cx. 7-A.
134See Mary Elizabeth Perry, Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990); Georgina Dopico Black, Perfect Wives, Other Women:
Adultery and Inquisition in Early Modern Spain (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).
135Other terms used on the Upper Guinea Coast for women traders from coastal towns
include, for example, signare, from the Portuguese senhora, which emerged in seventeenth-
century Senegambia (Petite Cte) and remained in use until the 1800s.
formed the center of local and regional trade networks, and became the
focus of criminal proceedings. In both cases the Portuguese authorities
could not seize their assets as they were located in the interior, entrusted
to relatives who kept them beyond the reach of Portuguese officials. Both
were seen as bad mothers. Crispina Peres had contributed to the death
of her daughter and both women denied basic rights and assets to their
step-children.136 At this point, however, their destinies parted company.
While a Crispina was eventually sent to Lisbon, a Bibiana remained on
the isles, confined to her residence. While a Bibiana could speakbut
not writePortuguese, a Crispina only spoke Guinean Creole. While the
former was fifty at the time of her incarceration, her fellow Cachean had
reached the respectable age of eighty, which may go some way to explaining
the clemency applied. Although both were described as powerful women
who were respected and feared by their peers, a Bibiana appeared to
enjoy better Atlantic connections than a Crispina, which probably saved
her from imprisonment in a Lisbon jail. Whereas a Bibiana claimed spe-
cial treatment on account of her sex, a Crispina never did, although her
husband pleaded with the Inquisition using that same argument.137 In fact,
a Bibiana employed gender-based arguments in her favor in order to
successfully persuade authorities to release her brother given that she as
a woman could not handle the family business on her own.138 The sheer
determination of a Crispina, far removed from her native Cacheu, who
held her own during the inquisitors interrogations in faraway Lisbon and
lived to tell the tale, also testifies to the capacity of a tungum to argue her
case. In fact, she was able to attenuate a sentence from witchcraft to apos-
tasy, although the inquisitors eventually obliged her to do penance and
receive additional religious education in mainland Guinea, to improve
her knowledge of the faith and cleanse her soul of the sins committed.139
Her return, and the demonstration of the long arm of the Inquisition, was
thus of more value to the court than her possible demise in prison or on
136On Crispina Peres daughter see above. On the question of Crispina Peress problem-
atic relationship with her adopted stepson and Bibiana Vazs exclusion of her stepson from
inheritance rights, see Havik, Silences and Soundbites, 158, 1656.
137He claimed clemency for his wifes disadvantage of being a woman, and for not
having benefited from a religious education; IANTT, Inquisio de Lisboa, Processo 2079,
Jorge Gonalves Francs, Petition, Cacheu, 6-16-1665.
138Promea e Obrigao que fez Bibiana Vaz de Frana, viuva de Ambrsio Gomes,
Cacheu, 4-20-1691, AHU, C. U., Cabo Verde, Cx. 7-A.
139IANTT, Inquisio de Lisboa, Processo 2079, Crispina Peres, Acrdo, Lisbon
3-11-1668.
354 philip j. havik
the stake. While the strategy for Bibiana Vazs release and pardon cen-
tered on her excellent connections and economic clout, Crispina Peres
and her supporters played up her humble origins to make her look like a
nave baptized African in need of a better religious grounding. Whereas
the former used her bonds of relatedness to the full in order to gain con-
trol of the port of Cacheu and again to get her out of the crowns clutches,
the latters Afro-Atlantic connections may have unwittingly precipitated
her downfall.
Conclusion
What these trials and tribulations show is that by the second half of the
seventeenth century a shift had taken place which was clearly associ-
ated with the rise of a Cacheu-based trading community and the novel
gendered role patterns associated with it. To the credit of the women
portrayed above, they exposed the intrinsic weakness of metropolitan
authorities and highlighted the power exercised by local trading lineages,
above all by women traders from the port of Cacheu, on the periphery
of the Portuguese empire. The persecution of free women in order to set
examples only served to further diminish what was left of Portuguese influ-
ence in the region and favor rival European interests, showing just how
important these women actually were in the context of local, regional,
and Atlantic networks. The lack of moradores, or inhabitants nominally
regarded as Portuguese, in the port of Cacheu, who preferred to carry on
their trade in the interior, was a direct snub at the Crown, its policies,
and local representatives.140 However, while the Crown sometimes repri-
manded officials for having acted rashly and tactlessly, no such reactions
were forthcoming with regard to the Inquisitions intervention.141 While
the strategy of persecuting alleged witches and destroying shrines proved
to be counterproductive, so too was the attempted imprisonment of
rebel traders and the impounding of their assets. Without material
returns, the costs of these operations proved to be too high for Portuguese
civil and ecclesiastical authorities, whose position in the region had been
140Antnio de Barros Bezerra, Cacheu, 6-7-1688, AHU, C. U., Guin, Cx. 3.

141The author of the enquiry into the deposition of the commander of Cacheu accuses
the latter of being overzealous and suffering from a lack of intelligence; Manuel Lopes de
Barros, Relatrio da Sindicncia, 8-18-1691.
weakened since the early 1600s, not only by European rivals but above all
by its putative Lusophone inhabitants. By the mid-1600s it was clear that
the transformation of the port of Cacheu into an outpost of empire had
failed; the fact that those who defied the Crown and the Church were
(African) women was a new factor in an already complex situation regard-
ing Portuguese interests on the Upper Guinea Coast.142
Their cases demonstrate that the notable impact of Kriston women on
trading communities in Cacheu and other ports in the region was actu-
ally enhanced by the crowns policies and its representatives on the coast.
The fact that these communities and the women within them strategi-
cally engaged European imperial interests illustrated their empowerment
through their strong bonds with a myriad of African and Atlantic networks
which lay beyond the control of Portuguese agents.143 While a Bibianas
intervention obliged the Crown to act and investigate the impact of its
policies, a Crispinas testimony revealed the contradictions and ineffec-
tiveness of Roman Catholic missions and the limits of the Inquisitions
powers on the coast. Each in her own way succeeded in heightening
authorities awareness of local realities, in effect teaching them a lesson in
terms of their faulty perceptions of realities on the ground and the impli-
cations of their ill-informed policies.
In both instances, reports reveal that the metropole was confronted
with situations it had difficulty comprehending and could not control.144
Rival European nations which had already gained a dominant position on
the coast, and Portuguese commodities which could no longer compete
in quantity and quality with them, had essentially generated a free trade
zone.145 Crown and Church, unable to impose their policies on the coast,
were forced to negotiate with the Cacheu trading community, a prelude
142The permanent loss of Gore (1617) and Elmina (1637) to the Dutch illustrates the
wider panorama of the growing weakness of Portuguese positions on the West African
coast in the 1600s.
143For the concept of strategic engagement, see Heidi Gengenbach, What My Heart
Wanted: Gendered Stories of Early Colonial Encounters in Mozambique, in Women in
African Colonial Histories, eds. Jean Allman, Susan Gieger, and Nakanyike Musisi (Bloom-
ington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002), 1947.
144Both the Portuguese Crown and the Portuguese Roman Catholic hierarchy lacked
the means to intervene on the coast, a situation which is well illustrated by the former
abandoning the garrison town of Bissau between 1703 and 1746, while the latter never suc-
ceeded in responding to denunciations made of womens alleged deviant practices after
Crispina Peress trial, it being the last one to be held with regard to the Upper Guinea
Coast.
145See Rodney, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 12251; Brooks Eurafricans, 68101;
Carreira, Os portugueses, 3860.
356 philip j. havik
to future tensions and altercations with the populations of this and other
ports in the region. What is striking about these cases is the social, eco-
nomic, and political leverage that some women were able to accumulate
and exert within local trade lineages, which essentially began to operate
as regional and transatlantic mercantile firms during the 1600s. In the pro-
cess, they left an important legacy in the form of their lives and careers
and those of their fellow inhabitants, which in the case of a Bibiana still
survives in Cacheus local collective memory today. Indeed, the powerful
images they projected of female personhood, commercial and political
influence, and authority embedded in local institutions but also in wider
networks, were to be emulated by some of their female successors in the
Guinea Bissau region. Thus womens notable roles in the region which a
Crispina and a Bibiana forged and embodied would continue to hold
sway on the gendered configuration of power, trade, and brokerage in the
region until the late nineteenth century.146
146By the nineteenth century, when the scramble for Africa was in full swing, the dis-
tinction between mammies and jezebels had shifted to include women traders married
to Cape Verdean or European officials or tradersregarded as allies against the encroach-
ment of French and British interests in the regionin the first category, while those solely
operating in local, African networks, were often regarded as witches and jezebels. See
Brooks, A Nhara of the Guinea Bissau Region: Me Aurlia Correia, in Women and Slavery
in Africa, eds. Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein (Madison, WI: University of Wis-
consin Press, 1983), 293319; Philip J. Havik, From Pariahs to Patriots: Women Slavers in
Nineteenth Century Portuguese Guinea, in Women and Slavery: African, the Indian Ocean
World and the Medieval North Atlantic, eds. Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers and Joseph C.
Miller (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2007): 209333.
HOUSEKEEPERS, MERCHANTS, RENTIRES: FREE WOMEN OF COLOR
IN THE PORT CITIES OF COLONIAL SAINT-DOMINGUE, 17501790
Dominique Rogers and Stewart King
Over the last forty years, studies of the Atlantic port cities of the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries have proliferated.1 Nonetheless, studies
of urban life and socio-economic conditions in the ports of the French
Antilles have been rare, and those regarding the particular case of womens
lives in ports even rarer.2 In French Saint-Domingue, the only women of
the port cities whose lives are well studied are the free women of color, and
they too had until recently remained veiled in stereotype. Male observers
in the eighteenth century presented them essentially as avid priestesses
of Venus, concubines and courtesans for white men, and historians long
retained this image.3 Over the last decade, a growing number, among whom
are Paul Butel, David Geggus, and Susan Socolow, have called attention to
the presence and dynamism of large numbers of women of color in the cit-
ies of Saint-Domingue. They have pointed out the role free women of color
played in the urban economy: in urban and rural real estate investment,
in the buying and selling of slaves, and in the sale of luxury or everyday
products. Although they have suggested that free colored women had an
important role in the dynamism of the urban economy, they have not yet
1Jean Meyer, Larmement nantais dans la deuxime moiti du XVIIIe sicle (Paris:
SEVPEN, 1969); Paul Butel, Les ngociants bordelais, lEurope et les les au XVIIIe sicle (Paris:
Aubier-Montaigne, 1974); P. Butel and L. M. Cullen, eds., Cities and Merchants: French and
Irish Perspectives on Urban Development 15001900, Proceedings of the Fourth Franco-Irish
Seminar of Social and Economic Historians September 1984 (Dublin: Trinity College, 1986);
Franklin W. Knight and Peggy K. Liss, eds., Atlantic Port Cities (Knoxville, TN: University
of Tennessee Press 1991); Pedro L. V. Welch, Slave Society in the City: Bridgetown, Barbados,
16801834 (Kingston and Miami: Ian Randle Publishers, 2004); James Robertson, Gone Is the
Ancient Glory: Spanish Town, Jamaica, 15342000 (Kingston and Miami, Ian Randle Publish-
ers, 2005); Patrick OFlanagan, Port Cities of Atlantic Iberia c. 15001900 (Ashgate: Aldershot
and Burlington, 2008).
2For works dealing with women in the French Lesser Antilles, see mile Hayot, Les
gens de couleur libres du Fort-Royal 16791823 (Paris: Socit franaise dhistoire doutre-
mer, 1971); Anne Protin-Dumon, La ville aux les, la ville dans lle, Basse-Terre et Pointe--
Pitre, Guadeloupe, 16501815 (Paris: Karthala, 2000).
3The classic statement here is C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (New York: Vintage
2nd edition, 1989), 73.
358 dominique rogers and stewart king
explored the connection, if any, between the port and the activities of
women of color in these cities.4
The authors of this article will explore the economic roles of women of
color in the port cities, discussing in particular the unusual set of oppor-
tunities and challenges the ports of Saint-Domingue created for the free
women of color who resided in them.5 In addition, they will evaluate the
social repercussions of the dynamic role played by free colored women,
with particular attention to the examples provided by two wealthy widows,
Anne Rossignol and Marie Scipion, who both traced their path to Saint-
Domingue from Africa, one by way of voluntary migration from Gore
and the other by way of forced migration via the transatlantic slave trade.
While our conclusions should only be seen as provisional, the case of
Saint-Domingue suggests that whether they were comfortable, rich, or
more modest in means, Dominguan women of color appear to have been
eminently dynamic actors in the economic life and social structure of the
colonys port cities. Moreover, in a time when tradition would have pre-
ferred women to have been confined to a more modest position, Domin-
guan urban society appears to have accepted their dynamic role in practice
despite the scandal it represented for many commentators of the day.
I.What Role Did Women of Color Play in the

Economic Dynamism of Saint-Domingues Ports?
In Saint-Domingue, as in many other early modern societies, the role

of women in economic life is difficult to see. Women of whatever color
4See, for example, Butel, Linvestissement des Blancs et des gens de couleur dans les
villes de Saint-Domingue la veille de la Rvoution et dans la priode rvolutionnaire aux
Antilles, images et rsonances, conference paper presented to a multidisciplinary collo-
quium, Fort-de-France and Pointe--Pitre, 1986, annual meeting of the Groupe de Recherche
et dtude des Littratures et Civilisations de la Carabe et des Amriques Noires, Schoelcher,
1986; David Geggus, Urban Development in Eighteenth century Saint-Domingue, Bulletin
du Centre dHistoire des Espaces Atlantiques 5 (1990): 197228; Geggus, The Major Port
Towns of Saint-Domingue in the Later 18th century, in Atlantic Port Cities, 87116; Susan
Socolow, Economic Roles of the Free Women of Color of Cap Franais, in More than
Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas, edited by Barry Gaspar and Darlene
Clark Hine (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), 27997.
5Stewart King, Blue Coat or Powdered Wig: Free People of Color in Pre-Revolutionary
Saint-Domingue (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2000); Dominique Rogers, Les
libres de couleur dans les capitales de Saint-Domingue: Fortune, mentalits et intgration
la fin de lAncien Rgime (17761789), 2 vols. (PhD diss., Universit Michel de Mon-
taigne, Bordeaux III, 1999).
housekeepers, merchants, rentires 359
had neither the academic training nor the social latitude to work in port
administration (or any other government position).6 Nor could they par-
ticipate in the professions directly tied to transatlantic commerce. Ship
captains, sailors, pilots, and large wholesale merchants engaged in long-
distance trade as well as those who built and maintained boats used
within the colony (e.g. acons, passagers, golettes)7 were exclusively male
fraternities.8 In general, for official record-keepers at the time, women
were seen largely as dependent persons: the wife or daughter of so-and-so,
who is a woodworker, carpenter, wigmaker, or mother of such-and-such,
owner of this or that asset of which the woman was only the usufructu-
ary. Their participation in the economic life of the colony appeared to
the official eye as minor, transitory, or even meaningless information that
there was no reason to record. A second problem derives from the fact
that the economic activities of women often took place within a different
framework than those typical for men, notably apart from the formal sys-
tem of occupations and apprenticeships, with the exception of a few pro-
fessions like seamstresses. Many women in Saint-Domingues port cities
worked in traditional service occupations; the unofficial character of this
work makes evaluating their economic role more difficult for the modern
analyst.9 Nevertheless, when two-thirds of the clients of color of notaries
in Cap Franais or Port-au-Prince who sold or bought assets between 1776
6In this respect Saint-Domingue ports mimicked the metropole, but the military pres-
ence and the role of the exclusif (a government-imposed French trading zone in the Atlan-
tic) made the barriers women faced more imposing since administrative power governed
commerce more overtly. Thus, Cap Franais and Port-au-Prince displayed a hierarchy
dominated by military officers and bureaucratic functionaries. For a succinct overview,
see Karol Kimberlee Weaver, Medical Revolutionaries: The Enslaved Healers of Eighteenth-
Century Saint-Domingue (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 1215; Robin Blackburn,
The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 14921800 (London:
Verson, 1998), 28186, 292306, 43156. On womens lack of academic or artisanal training
see, for example, Martine Sonnet, A Daughter to Educate, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, in
A History of Women, vol. 3, Renaissance and Enlightenment Paradoxes, eds. Natalie Zemon
Davis and Arlette Farge (Cambridge, MA: the Belknap Press of the Harvard University
Press, 1993), 10231; Sonnet, Lducation des filles au temps des Lumires (Paris, 1987).
7An acon is a flat-bottomed bark used to transport goods in shallow or restricted
waters. A golette is a cutter, again mostly used for the transport of goods; a passager is
a ferry-boat.
8The culprit here was the highly planned economy in which men provided most of the
labor and mercantile expertise, though, as we will show, women did gain some footholds
on the edge of this world. Weaver, Medical Revolutionaries, 1215.
9For a profile of womens work with respect to guilds and the service sector see
Gayle Brunelle, Policing the Monopolizing Women of Early Modern Nantes, The Journal
of Womens History 19, no. 2 (2007): 1035. Saint-Domingues ports (which were also its
major cities) showed a similar professional profile; see Socolow, Economic Roles, 28182,
28485.
and 1789 were women, one must try to search further to reveal their spe-
cific situation.10
Fortunately, we can sketch several important elements of womens
lives through the notarial archives, classic sources rich in data about the
economy and society of the Dominguan city. For free colored women cli-
ents of Cap Franais and Port-au-Prince notaries public, four broad areas
of activity, mentioned regularly in notarial acts, draw a useful geographic
portrait of free colored womens role in the economic life of the great
port cities of the colony, which are currently the best researched of Saint-
Domingues ports. The first relates to women planters in the surrounding
countryside, and falls outside the scope of this article. The second is the
large domestic service sector. The third relates to the commercial world.
The fourth brings out the role of women, sometimes identified as pro-
prietors, who appear to have lived off the rental of their real estate. We
are not speaking here of four types of women: some of our subjects began
their professional lives in one category and then moved into another,
while others were always involved in a number of these occupations at
the same time. In reality, we are only distinguishing between different
economic activities, not infrequently carried out by the same women. In
the remainder of this section we demonstrate that free women of color
played an integral role in Dominguan port economies, in no small part
due to the structural advantages the ports provided them. Our findings,
while tentative, also suggest some specialization amongst the free women
of color in Dominguan ports, with women in Cap Franais taking on more
commercial roles and those in Port-au-Prince focusing more heavily on
real estate.11
Mnagres, Servants and Providers of Female Servants

The most common economic role for women recognized by the litera-
ture on the subject was that of mnagre, or housekeeper.12 In the com-
mon understanding both at the time and subsequently, such a woman
would keep house for a single white man, and would rapidly become his
10Rogers, Les libres, 1: 103, 109. Even for the short period of 17821784 Susan Socolow
found that free women of color accounted for 56.5 percent of the notarial transactions she
examined for Cap Franais. On this see Socolow, Economic Roles, 280.
11The above is largely a composite sketch drawn from the more detailed individual
lives explored below, which we base primarily on notarial data.
12In French, see especially Arlette Gautier, Les surs de Solitude, la condition fminine
dans lesclavage aux Antilles du XVIIe au XIXe sicles (Paris: Editions Caribennes, 1985),
16668.
concubine and often the mother of his children. The literature on this sub-
ject is abundant, but it conceals a much richer variety of personal services
given both to white men and men of color, and also to families.13 Both
of the capitals of Saint-Domingue, Cap Franais and Port-au-Prince, wel-
comed a large and varied male population that had similar requirements
for domestic labor. Consequently, similar labor practices and labor mar-
kets emerged within them and likely in other Dominguan ports. Alongside
the seamen and captains present on an intermittent basis could be found
the younger sons of creole, white, or free colored families coming from
the surrounding countryside to make their fortunes in town; administra-
tive or military personnel; and finally merchants and artisans responsi-
ble for feeding, clothing, housing, and assisting the others.14 As many of
these men were single either de facto or in actual truth, the provision of
feminine domestic personnel was a particularly dynamic sector in which
women of color were especially well placed.
As far as purely bodily pleasures are concerned, in 1777 Hilliard
dAuberteuil noted the presence of more than 3,200 prostitutes, both
white and of color, in the towns of Saint-Domingue, although these figures
might have been exaggerated as some contemporaries such as Dubuisson
have asserted. However, at the end of the eighteenth century, Moreau de
Saint-Mry wrote critically of the tarts and courtesans of color who put
on a great show in Cap Franais to the prejudice of good public morals.15
According to contemporary observers such as Moreau de Saint-Mry,
many female slaves were also put out as prostitutes in the towns by
their masters, but we have little solid information on this subject. Aim-
ing at a somewhat more exclusive clientele, a certain number of houses
of assignation were kept by women of color. At the end of the 1780s,
for example, the free black merchant Jeanne A. Zulima and her white
13Recent treatments of the subject in English in which one can see the development
of historians understanding of the topic include King, Blue Coat; John D. Garrigus, Before
Haiti; Race and Citizenship in French Citizenship (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006);
and Doris Loraine Garraway, The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Carib-
bean (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
14Garrigus, Before Haiti, 11128, 17576.
15Michel Ren Hilliard dAuberteuil, Considrations sur ltat prsent de la colonie Fran-
aise de Saint-Domingue. ouvrage politique et lgislatif, prsent au ministre de la marine
(Paris: Grang, 1777); Pierre-Ulric Dubuisson, Nouvelles considrations sur Saint-Domingue,
en rponse celles de M. H. D. (Paris: Cellot et Jombert, 1780); Moreau de St. Mry, Descrip-
tion topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie franaise de lisle
de Saint-Domingue, 1797, new edition, eds. B. Maurel and E. Taillemite (1958; repr., Paris:
Socit Franaise dHistoire dOutre-Mer, 1984), 1: 107.
partner Pierre Michel Maugendre ran a public bath house in Cap where
the activities were no doubt more diverse than the simple name would
lead one to suppose.16 Referring to the public bath house established
in 1778 by Sieur Lartigau de Loustonneau and the multresse libre Rose
Ledoux, in the Quay Saint-Louis neighborhood in southern Cap Franais,
Moreau de Saint-Mry had no doubt that
in these establishments, there is no severe discipline enforced as there is
in Paris, where the sexes are separated: Here husband and wife, or those
who can pass for such, can go to the same bath, and even to the same tub
(a feature that attracts many devoted customers).17
Some women of color also owned dance halls frequented by a lively and
mainly white clientele.18 Between 1782 and 1786, the multresse libre
Suzanne known as Bellanton or Caill was even the proprietor of the fash-
ionable Vauxhall of Port-au-Prince.19
For ordinary household services or cooking, the market was more
complex. According to current historiography, in many cases these ser-
vices would have been provided by free women of colorthe famous
mnagres.20 Interestingly, the salaries these women could command
made them inaccessible to the majority of clerks of the Dominguan
administration or company-grade officers in the army, as well as the many
other poor white passengers newly arrived from Europe. In 1778, Franois
Siriery, a white man and a merchant in the port of Cap Franais, resident
in the neighborhood of Petit Carnage, gave a certain Hlne known as
Piquery one slave in return for two years of service as housekeeper. This
amounted to a salary of at least 900 livres per year, to which must be
added the costs of her food, housing, clothing, and medical care in case of
16Archives Nationales dOutremer, Dpt des Papiers Publics des Colonies, Notariat
de Saint-Domingue (hereafter: ANOM, Notsdom for notarial acts and simply ANOM for all
other source types from this archive), vol. 1637, lease, January 30, 1788.
17Moreau de St. Mry, Description, 1: 312.
18Moreau de St. Mry, Description, 1: 109, 2: 456.
19ANOM, Notsdom, 1687, lease, January 13, 1787. A Vauxhall was a pleasure garden
with performance space for musicians and other entertainers, and food and drink service.
These kinds of establishments were very popular in France in the eighteenth century and
in Saint-Domingue during the last third of the century.
20Hilliard dAuberteuil, Considrations, 2: 45, suggests that concubinage, which only
linked them very tenuously to white women, was more convenient for their projects; they
were less hampered in their enterprises. See also Pierre Pluchon, ed., Histoire des Antilles
et de la Guyane, (Toulouse: Privat 1982), 17273; Girod Franois, La vie quotidienne de la
socit crole de Saint-Domingue au XVIIIe sicle, (Paris: Hachette, 1972), 101103.
illness.21 These figures are in keeping with the ordinary salary of a house-
keeper, which was around 1,000 livres, while that of a servant was 600, and
it cost 2,400 for a female butler (gouvernante) who was to have complete
responsibility for household management.22 They are comparable to the
salaries of low-ranking administrative or military personnel of the time.
In 1780, a highway maintenance worker (ouvrier-voyer or voyer particulier)
could only hope for 1,200 livres per year.23 In 1779, a captain of the Royal
Grenadier Corps only earned 2,800 livres a year, as well as his rations and
the cost of maintaining his uniform.24 In 1788, Jean Antoine Massi barely
made 2,400 livres for his work as a clerk in the courts.25
Thus, only the wealthiest could hope to employ a free woman of color
as a housekeeper. Indeed, despite the somewhat simplistic vision of
the role of the housekeeper that is prevalent in primary and secondary
sources, even if the women of color who chose this sort of employment
occasionally became concubines, in Saint-Domingue they were always
employed under a contract and had real duties to perform.26 Women of
color who were sexually harassed or otherwise mistreated by brutal, inso-
lent, or otherwise excessively demanding employers did not hesitate to
quit and sue them to obtain payment of the remainder of their contracted
salary.27 In fact, the position of housekeeper was merely a life-cycle stage
21All amounts of money in this paper unless otherwise indicated will be quoted in
livres coloniales, which was a money of account used in the colony. The livre coloniale was
worth about of a livre tournois. A new slave off the boat cost between 1,000 and 2,000
livres, while 1,000 livres a year was the salary for a mid-level government clerk or estate
manager. ANOM, Notsdom, 1085, employment contract, December 18, 1778.
22Rogers, Les libres, 1: 180.
23ANOM, C9a 150. The salary of a supervisor (voyer principal) was 3,000 livres.
24ANOM, C9a 147, letter, March 12, 1779. In the Royal Chasseurs (a unit in which the
enlisted men and non-commissioned officers were men of color, while the officers were
whites, in contrast to the Grenadiers, all of whose members were white), a captain only
made 2400 livres.
25Gabriel Debien, La socit coloniale aux XVIIe et XVIIIe sicles: IV. Petits blancs des
les, Annales des Antilles 7 (1959): 337.
26The common view of the mnagre as a well-paid provider of sexual services has
a long pedigree. Among the eighteenth-century commentators Moreau de Saint-Mry
(Description, 1: 104, 107) is notable for taking this tack. The most notorious among the
historians who treated the free colored housekeepers with disdain was C. L. R. James.
On this see James, The Black Jacobins, 73. It is important to note that Saint-Domingue
employers may have been somewhat unique in offering contracts to mnagres. No such
contract has yet been found either in Guadeloupe or in Martinique. For a contract from
Saint-Domingue see the previous paragraph.
27ANOM, greffe 136, page 32 verso, complaint of Jeannette dite Mongis, November 29,
1779; ANOM, greffe 136, page 139 recto verso complaint of Sieur Dasset jeune, 1784.
for these young women. In many ways, their situation is comparable to

that of many young single women throughout northern Europe who were
hired out to a neighboring wealthy farmer or townsman as housekeepers
to earn a dowry that would permit them to marry. Like many of them,
most of the Dominguan free colored mnagres used the capital earned
to start a business.28
Moreover, there was an additional market for domestic help that is
important to our story. The strong demand for domestic help among
less wealthy white men, or those not desiring such an independent and
highly-skilled employee, led to the development of a market for the rental
of female slaves.29 Free women of color who possessed slaves responded
to this demand and were quite active in this area. The ordinary price
was in general around 10 percent of the value of the slave, or about 200
livres a year for a woman in Cap Franais or 200 to 270 in Port-au-Prince
where the supply of slaves was less.30 In this area as well, women of color
were particularly well-placed to respond to this specific demand because,
although two-thirds of all slaves imported to Saint-Domingue were men,
most slaves owned by women of color were female.31 There are numer-
ous examples of the role played by free colored women in this sector of
the economy. In 1788, Adlade Poublanc, a free woman of mixed lineage,
rented out a black slave woman from the African nation of Nago and a
young boy from the African nation of Congo to Jean Lesage, surgeon at the
military hospital of Port-au-Prince.32 In 1784, Sanithe dite Peyrac, a quar-
teronne who was free from birth, rented out a black woman from the Ibo
nation and her two creole children (two-year-old Jeanne and fifteen-year-
old Louis-Jean) to the Maison Bastide et compagnie, merchants in Port-au-
Prince, for 300 livres per year.33 Taking advantage of supply and demand,
the free colored women of Cap Franais made good profits on these ser-
vices, going so far as to rent servants and laundresses at between 300 and
576 livres a year, or as much as 28 percent of their estimated value, despite
28For a basic overview of this kind of start-up capital accumulation in Europe see
Olwen Hufton, The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe, 15001800
(New York: Vintage, 1998), 7398.
30King, Blue Coat, 115; Rogers, Les libres, 1: 120.
31David Geggus, Slave and Free Colored Women in Saint-Domingue, in More than
Chattel, eds. Hines, et al., 259; Socolow, Economic Roles, 286; Rogers, Les libres, 1: 122.
32ANOM, Notsdom, 1678, Tach, lease, June 12, 1788, (act no. 125).
33ANOM, Notsdom, old code, 1375, Michel, lease, May 7, 1784, (act. no. 50).
the fact that they did not require very sophisticated training.34 In Port-au-
Prince, this practice was more exceptional, except, naturally, for rentals of
short duration which were everywhere much more expensive and that, for
instance, could reach forty-eight livres a month for a laundress in 1781, and
sixty livres a month for a wet-nurse in 1788.35 Wet-nurses were exception-
ally valuable because they allowed other female employees to return to
work more rapidly. Finally, women of color also rented out male slaves, of
course, and sometimes for very high rents if those men had unusual skills.
The purchase of a ship carpenter by Marie Claire, a free black woman; of
a mattress-maker by the multresse libre Franoise Mrida; of a mason by
the free black laundress Flore Zabatha of the Mondongue nation; and
of a butler (matre dhtel) and jelly-maker by the free black Pauline for,
respectively, 6,000, 3,000, 1,800, and 5,280 livres shows in a dramatic way
the profitable nature of these investments.36
Women in the Retail and Commercial Sector

In the port cities of Saint-Domingue, as elsewhere in the Atlantic world,
a large number of women worked in a wide range of activities linked
to commerce. Some were simple itinerant vendors with a basket walk-
ing the streets and docks or the surrounding countryside. Others were
the wives or widows of small artisans selling the catch of the day or the
products of their gardens in nearby neighborhoods. Still others owned
shops or worked in the service sector offering food service, clothing,
hair care, or in the grocery trade. These were modest businesses that only
appear from time to time in the notarial records of the port towns, making
a complete understanding of their scope more challenging to arrive at, but
we find more of these women in Cap Franais, the colonys economic pow-
erhouse, than in its administrative capital Port-au-Prince. For example, in
1777, the Port-au-Prince griffe Marie-Agns Pillard kept a shop to sell salted
meats, renting for the purpose a slave as well as a single room and a closet
that were part of a private house.37 In 1779, as many widows of tradesmen in
34Rogers, Les libres; ANOM, Notsdom, old code, 1624, Tach, December 23, 1778.
35ANOM, Notsdom, old code, 179, Bordier jeune, lease, November 26, 1781; ANOM,
Notsdom, old code, 200, lease, February 2, 1788.
36ANOM, Notsdom, 542, sale, January 9, 1783; ANOM, Notsdom, old code, 186, Bordier
jeune, sale, June 28, 1784; ANOM, Notsdom, 169, sale, November 3, 1777; ANOM, Notsdom,
old code, 200, Bordier jeune, sale, February 18, 1789.
37Rogers, Les libres, 1: 19397. For Marie-Agns Pillard, ANOM, Notsdom, old code,
435, Degranpr, November 18, 1777.
metropolitan France had always done, the merchant Louise Camoin,

widow of Sieur Gripire, sold the fish caught by their son, the Cap Franais
multre Louis-Alexandre Gripire, in return for 50 percent of the profits,
and participated in the development of his business by giving him use of
two of her slaves.38 In 1780, Thrse, widow of Hyppolite, and her part-
ners, the free black men Jean-Baptiste Deville known as Tossa and Jean-
Baptiste Belley known as Timbaze, wig-makers in Cap Franais, opened
a fat and tallow shop.39 A few cases also suggest subsidiary activities,
where women of color combined land development and small business.
Modeste, a free colored woman in Port-au-Prince, for example, managed
the boutique of her renter, the white merchant Etienne Delisle.40 In 1785,
Elizabeth Aumay was the tenant of a bakery on the rue de Vaudreuil in
Cap Franais.41
Although most of these women of color were involved in small domes-
tic, craft and commercial activities of the town sector of the urban
economy and not in the transatlantic port sector, some historians of
the French colony of Saint-Domingue have discovered some substantial
female merchants who can truly be called major economic actors, most
of them active in Cap Franais. Evidence for their status comes from the
size of the deals they were involved in and the frequency of their resort
to the notarial system. In the commercial world of the French Caribbean,
they were exceptionally major players. The largest operation owned by a
free colored woman merchant in Pointe Pitre or Basse-Terre, on Guade-
loupe, was worth 26,400 livres, as opposed to almost 100,000 livres for the
largest free colored woman merchant of Saint-Domingue.42 Among these,
only Zabeau Bellanton has been profiled in recent and detailed studies.43
However, Dominique Rogers study of the careers of Genevive Zoquoe,
Thrse Bosq, and Genevive Dupr has yielded a wealth of data on the
diversity of economic activities pursued by these women of commerce
38ANOM, Notsdom, 176, old code, donation, August 28, 1779. On the widows in Metro-
politan France see Brunelle, Policing, 18.
39Rogers, Les libres, 1: 218. ANOM, Notsdom, 1452, society, April 22, 1780.
40ANOM, Notsdom old code, 1378, Michel, lease, March 29, 1785.
41ANOM, Notsdom, 1628, sale, October 11, 1781.
42Protin-Dumon, La Ville, 443.
43Socolow, Economic Roles, 28789; King, Blue Coat, 8184, 95, 11819; Dominique
Rogers, Russir dans un monde dhommes: Les stratgies des femmes de couleur libres
du Cap-Franais, Journal of Haitian Studies 9, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 45.
and of the level of comfort and even luxury offered by their boutiques.44
The case of Anne Rossignol, one of the wealthiest female notarial clients
of color in Cap Franais, allows us to examine an important sub-group
among these women, voluntary African migrants. Although acknowledged
as an important element of the African diaspora in the French Caribbean,
the details of these womens stories have proven difficult to find in the
extant archives and as a consequence often remain all but unknown in
current historiography except in French Guiana thanks to the recent
PhD work of Barbara Traver. Therefore, telling Anne Rossignols story
affords a more expansive view of the diaspora and its impact on the com-
plexity of free Caribbean communities of color. For it shows that even
though her case is so far unique among Saint-Domingues community of
color, she still managed to import the customs of practice of Gore into her
new home.45
Anne Rossignol, like Genevive Dupr and Zabeau Bellanton, was a
multresse libre, but she was not a native of Saint-Domingue, having been
born on the island of Gore in Sngal.46 She was one of the signares
of Gore, the businesswomen who played such an important role in the
development of the French colony of Sngal.47 She first appears as a client
of the notaries of Cap Franais starting in 1776, at a time when numerous
Gore natives were encouraged to migrate to the Americas, most espe-
cially to French Guiana.48 Judging from the slaves she gave her daughter
44Rogers, Russir, 4051.

45Although the voluntary emigration of creoles from Gore to French Guiana is known,
nothing had been said on their social insertion in Saint-Domingue and very little con-
cerning their insertion in French Guiana. See Yvan Debbasch, Couleur et libert: Le jeu du
critre ethnique dans un ordre juridique esclavagiste, vol. 1, Laffranchi dans les possessions
franaises de la Carabe (Paris: Dalloz, 1967), 55; Mirot Sylvie, Population de la Guyane
franaise au XVIIIe sicle jusqu la rvolution, (MA thesis, cole Nationale des Chartes,
1954), 110 ff; Barbara Traver, After Kourou: Settlement Schemes in French Guiana in the
Age of Enlightment, (PhD diss., Washington State University, 2011), ch. 6, 193240.
46Jean Delcourt, Gore, six sicles dhistoire (Dakar: Editions Clairafrique, 1984), 5152;
Joseph-Roger de Benoist and Abdoulaye Camara, eds., Histoire de Gore, (Paris: Maison-
neuve & Larose, 2003), 12122.
47On the signares see James F. Searing, West African Slavery and Atlantic Commerce:
The Senegal River Valley, 17001860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 93128;
George E. Brooks, Eurafricans in Western Africa: Commerce, Social Status, Gender and Reli-
gious Observance from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Athens, OH: Ohio University
Press, 2003), 20621; Amanda Sackur, The Development of Creole Society and Culture
in Saint-Louis and Gore, (PhD diss., The School of Oriental and African Studies, 1999),
passim.
48On Annes first appearance in the notarial records, see King, Blue Coat, 18889. On
the migration of Gore inhabitants to the Americas that began after the Seven Years War
in 1769, see Debbash, Couleur et libert, 55; Traver, After Kourou, 193240.
upon her marriage in 1786, one of whom was said to be born at sea,
aged 14, we can assume that she came to Saint-Domingue in 1772.49
We do not know a great deal about the fortune Anne brought with
her when she arrived in the colony, although in the Gore census of 1767
in which she is mentioned she was reported to possess thirty captives
and had three unrelated free persons, presumably servants, living with
her.50 Her business sense and wealth, however, became apparent soon
after her arrival in Saint-Domingue. In 1776, she appeared in the census
record of Cap Franais as the owner of a building on the Rue du Conseil
in Cap Franais that was worth about 10,000 livres.51 In 1778, when her
son Armand wanted to return to Gore to marry, she put at his disposal
four adult slaves, among whom were his former wet-nurse, a forty-year old
woman of the Serer nation, and her two children, natives of Gore, aged
twenty and twenty-four.52 Eight months later, Anne bought another house,
located in a neighborhood that was to grow, the Petit Carnage.53 Her
investment of 7,848 livres for the purchase of a house of wood planks, with
three bedrooms, a hallway, and a lot in one of the better streets of this
section of Cap Franais, the Rue Picollet, was a remarkable sum when
compared with other real estate transactions recorded during this period
in the neighborhood. Nonetheless, the gamble paid off when, in 1789, this
small suburb of fishermen and workmen was formally incorporated as the
eighth section of the city of Cap Franais, and the increasing rents permitted
good profits.54 By 1786 she owned two large lots in the Rue Ste Catherine.55
Finally, in 1786, when her daughter Marie-Adlade Rossignol married, she
offered the young woman an enormous dowry of 78,908 livres coloniales,
much larger than the dowries of most young women in the colony, even of
whites.56 In Paris, by contrast, only 7 percent of marriage contracts observed
by Jacques Lelivre had dowries of greater than 40,000 livres tournois, the
49ANOM, Notsdom, 195, Bordier jeune, sale, August 21, 1786.

50ANOM, C6/15, folio 101, Census of Sngal, 1767; Stewart King, Family Strategy and
Entrepreneurship in Colonial Cap Franais: A Woman Merchant of Color and Her Times,
paper presented to the American Historical Association Annual Conference, January 8, 2008.
51ANOM, G1 495a, Cadastral record for Cap Franais, June 27, 1776.
52ANOM, Notsdom, new code, 783, gift, February 14, 1778.
53ANOM, Notsdom, 1547, sale, October 17, 1778.
54On the development of the Petit Carnage neighborhood, see Rogers, Les libres,
ch. 2.
55ANOM, G1, 495b, 1786, Cadastral survey of Cap Franais.
56ANOM, Notsdom, 195, contract of marriage, August 31, 1786.
equivalent of about 60,000 livres coloniales.57 Similarly, when Pierre-Jean

Van Hoog-werff married Elizabeth Belin, daughter of one of the most impor-
tant merchants of La Rochelle, she only brought a dowry of 45,000 livres
tournois. But this capital, which was enough to permit Pierre-Jean to enter
the high bourgeoisie of La Rochelle, was only the equivalent of 67,500 livres
coloniales.58 In Saint-Domingue, it was normally only the great free col-
ored planters who reached this level: when Julien Raimond, for example,
married for the first time in 1771, his wife brought a dowry of 60,000 livres.59
When he re-married in 1782, the goods of his bride, the rich widow Fran-
oise Dasmard Challe, were evaluated at 177,000 livres.60
The description of the property of Marie-Adlade allows us to get an
idea of the lifestyle of these great merchants. Along with six domestic
slaves (among whom were a cook, a wigmaker, and a seamstress), the
notary mentions a house built of masonry evaluated at 50,000 livres. The
notary also noted 3,434 livres of jewelry and about 12,400 livres in per-
sonal effects. The new furniture offered by the mother of the bride was
evaluated at 3,573 livres, that is to say almost the price of two slaves. The
marriage bed was made out of mahogany, with a straw sub-mattress and
two mattresses, a bolster and fine decorative woodwork, bedposts with
mosquito netting made out of muslin, and curtains of Indian cotton. The
chamber also contained a small mahogany dresser, twelve chairs, two
straw armchairs, a fine armoire in flecked mahogany with double doors
decorated in copper, with key, and a small mahogany table. The trousseau
was completed by four sets of linen, two table cloths and twelve assorted
napkins, four table settings in silver and a dozen plates, bowls, and coffee
cups in earthenware, a pottery salad bowl and teapot, and, in addition,
a dozen wine glasses, twelve pottery goblets, and finally a saucer and
57Jacques Lelivre, La Pratique des contrats de mariage chez les notaires de Paris de
1769 1804 (Paris: ditions Cujas, 1959). Lelivre found that at the end of the eighteenth
century, 50 percent of Parisian marriage contracts had a total value of between 100 and
1,500 livres tournois, 43 percent between 1,600 and 40,000 livres, and the remainder were
above 40,000 livres.
58Jean-Marie Deveau, Les Affaires Van Hoogwerf Saint-Domingue de 1773 1791,
in Commerce et plantations dans la Carabe XVIIIe et XIXe sicles, Actes du Colloque de
Bordeaux des 15 et 16 mars 1991, ed. Paul Butel (Bordeaux: Maison des Pays Ibriques,
1992), 16982.
59ANOM, Notsdom, 998, marriage contract, September 2, 1771.
60John Garrigus, Blue and Brown: Contraband Indigo and the Rise of a Free Colored
Planter Class in French Saint-Domingue, The Americas 50, no. 2 (October 1993): 23363.
serving bowl in silver-plated copper.61 All these items evoke the lifestyle
of the French upper bourgeois or rich craftsmen rather than what one
normally associates with a racial underclass in the colonies.62
Women Investors in the Field of Real Estate

The third category of economic activity concerns women of color who
appeared to draw their income from rental property. They were less
dynamic economic actors than the merchants, even if they sometimes
had more capital. Once they had invested their capital, often for long
periods of time, they would disappear from the notarial record. Some of
them owned rental property because it allowed them access to credit used
in other occupations. Others, sometimes qualified as landladies, were
women whose principal money-earning activity was real estate invest-
ment. The latter were particularly common in Port-au-Prince, where free
women of color gravitated more towards real estate as a means to mak-
ing a living. Free women of color in Port-au-Prince also had more need
of the first kind of investment due to the lower availability of cash in the
administrative capital, as we will discuss.63 Most free women of color in
Port-au-Prince were heiresses, almost always of a white father; in Cap
Franais they were more commonly the successors of a free colored father
or husband.64 A third type of real estate investment connecting inves-
tors to commercial ventures again seems to have been more prevalent in
trade-oriented Cap Franais, while women across all ports for which we
have evidence invested in rural real estate, the fourth and final real estate
arena that attracted free women of color.
Like other, male city-dwellers, all these women were involved in sup-
plying the housing needs of the numerous migrants, either temporary or
long-term, who had been attracted by the wealth of Saint-Domingue and
of its cities.65 As a general rule, women of color owned residences (cabinets
61Rogers, Les libres, 2: 54748, 553; ANOM, Notsdom, 195, contract of marriage,
August 31, 1786.
62Annick Pardailh-Galabrun, La naissance de lintime: 3000 foyers parisiens, XVIIe
XVIIIe sicle (Paris: PUF, 1988), passim.
63Although not enough work has been done on the ports of Saint-Domingues south-
ern province, John Garriguss work on Les Cayes suggests that, as in Port-au-Prince, free
women of color in the southern province invested heavily in real estate. See Garrigus,
Before Haiti, 176.
65At the end of the 1780s, many of the hundreds of white creole or European passen-
gers who arrived in Saint-Domingue to try their luck remained in the towns because of
for slaves or poor people; rooms, apartments, or houses for wealthier per-
sons) as rental property. In Port-au-Prince, they appear to have focused on
up-market rentals, while in Cap Franais their clientele was more diverse
both ethnically and socio-economically. In Port-au-Prince, the rents were
as high as 6,000, 7,000, or even 10,000 livres a year, which is to say that as
pieces of property they were worth from 60,000 to 100,000 livres.66 For
6,000 livres a year, the quarteronnes Marie-Thrse and Anne offered a
house at the corner of rue Dauphine and rue des Miracles. The house had
four rooms along the street with a gallery, four rooms in the rear, a gra-
nary with staircase, an annex in the courtyard (presumably for servants
quarters), a well and a fence.67 For only 3,639 livres, Henriette Sophie
known as Mimi offered to rent a house to a white man named Perdereau
jeune in which she reserved an apartment for herself, but which had in
addition two rooms on the rue Royale, a salon, and two smaller rooms.68
Unusually, the principal rooms had been wallpapered.
In Port-au-Prince, these lodgings were clearly intended for rich clients,
among whom we have found no person of color. There were some busi-
nessmen (tobacco merchants, sheep dealers, innkeepers, small shipping
businesses), some members of the professions (many surgeons and law-
yers) and numerous members of the colonial administration (the governor
of the royal prisons, the keeper of the royal warehouses, the director of the
hospital of Port-au-Prince, the chief of the local office of the War Depart-
ment, a judicial services officer, an accountant in the public finance depart-
ment, and the superintendent of the rural police).69 These sorts of rentals
could be rather speculative long-term investments that were sometimes
carried out on a large scale. Between 1783 and 1789, for example, the free
black woman Suzon Ide rented many apartments and buildings for a total
income of 11,308 livres.70 Many women of color appear in the notarial acts
of Port-au-Prince with the title of propritaire, which suggests that this
their lack of any agricultural experience. Many had hoped to become conomes, or plan-
tation managers, but in fact many found work in merchant establishments or in colonial
administration. See, for example, Garrigus, Before Haiti, 118, 176; Pierre Pluchon, Histoire de
la Colonisation franaise (Paris: Fayard, 1991), 1, 39395.
67ANOM, Notsdom, old code, 1379, Michel, lease, August 6, 1786, (act no. 58).
68ANOM, Notsdom, 6, lease, June 4, 1789.
70ANOM, Notsdom, old code, 1376, Michel, lease, 1783, (act no. 53); ANOM, Notsdom,
1676, lease, 17th March, 1787, (act no. 23); ANOM, Notsdom, 1676, lease, October 15, 1787;
ANOM, Notsdom, 1676, October 19, 1787.
was a long-term activity rather than just an occasional source of income

for them.71
For other free women of color, rental property served more as a means
to access credit, in order to pay for the construction of permanent quar-
ters, for instance. These sorts of transactions were, of course, tied to the
lack of cash in the colony, particularly in Port-au-Prince. Sometimes this
was done in lieu of a mortgage. We can evoke, for example, the case of
the free black woman Anglique Olivier known as Joujoutte, guardian of
the children of the deceased Flicit known as Paleman. She rented to the
white merchant Gatien Lger, of Port-au-Prince, a completely new house
on the corner of rue Bonnefoy and rue Dauphine for 10,000 livres a year
to be paid to the builder, the white developer Getin, until the childrens
debt to him was paid.72
Some women tackled more specialized services such as the rental of
halls, warehouses, and office spaces, which historians have long assumed
to have been an exclusively male sector.73 As the above cast of characters
makes evident, it was not so much a question of gender as of money when
it came to starting a business in urban Saint-Domingue. Anyone who had
sufficient capital to start a development could launch a business. Among
them, women of color were not very numerous, but still present. There
were no gender-specific barriers to women becoming real estate entrepre-
neurs, though most women in this field were relatively small-scale opera-
tors. With access to entrepreneurial capital more likely in Cap Franais, we
find more commercially-oriented real estate investment there among free
women of color. In 1789 the Cap Franais free colored woman Marianne
Lambert previously known as LAurore bought a building intended for use
as a merchants boutique equipped with a strong-box, most likely with
the intention of renting the shop to some white or free colored trader.74
In 1786, Marie-Jeanne and her children rented a property including a very
nice house with four bedrooms, each of twenty square meters, a salon,
an office and a store-room, a set of professional offices including a large

72ANOM, Notsdom, 72, lease, July 13, 1787.
73The work of Pierre Pluchon and Jacques de Cauna is representative of this posi-
tion. For the formers work see Pluchon, ed., Histoire des Antilles, 173, 18284. Jacques
de Cauna, who has written extensively on economic life in Saint-Domingue, has never
assigned any economic role to women, not even in towns. See, for example, Jacques de
Cauna, LEldorado des Aquitains, Gascons, Basques et Barnais aux les dAmrique (Biarritz:
Atlantica, 1998).
74ANOM, Notsdom, 1680, sale, August 20, 1789.
corridor of ten by twenty-two feet with two galleries on either side as well
as two other small lodgings, one with seven rooms and the other with
four, along with two huts for blacks, a kitchen, a cooperage, a lined well,
and a dove-cote to the merchants Martial Laffiteau and Thomas Faure for
9,000 livres a year. This very handsome rent, the largest sum in the sample
for a property owned outright by a woman, was nonetheless much smaller
than the largest observed for a male free colored merchant.75 In 1787, the
multresse Suzanne known as Gauge rented out a warehouse, a room, and
a well for 2,400 livres, whereas in an earlier act, in 1783, she had let it go for
a mere 1,400 livres a year but had asked for 13,000 livres of improvements.76
At a higher level, some women of color invested in even more dynamic
activities without actually working in those fields themselves, having
therefore both a rentier attitude and a more entrepreneurial aim, with Cap
Franais free women of color more in the vanguard here as well. In some
cases, these were fields that were almost entirely dominated by men, such
as inter-island shipping. For example, after the death of her white husband
Gaspar Bas, the free black woman Marie Petit, known as Ouery, seems to
have operated a coastal shipping business. With a white tenant operating
her coasting vessel, and then with another small boat that she bought for
6,600 livres two years later, she appears to have been a participant in the
maritime sector of the economy. The potential profits were often as high
as the potential risks.77 In 1782, in Cap Franais, the free quarteronne Mad-
eleine Desgatires put four slaves and a significant capital of 12,000 livres
at the disposition of Franois Laborde, a white businessman, to develop
his trade in liquor, jams, and candies. After two years, concerned by the
negligence of her partner, she sued and obtained a formal dissolution of
the business, recuperating, in addition to her original capital, 9,000 livres
in profit, for a quite nice return of 37.5 percent per year.78
Finally, a small minority of urban women, often richer and more privi-
leged, made investments that were more prestigious, although often less
remunerative in the short term: purchases of rural land. This type of
investment obeyed a complex logic that revealed itself through the variety
of forms it took: rental or lease, recuperation of natural resources,
75Rogers, Les libres, 1: 198200. In 1785, Jean-Charles Haran, a free quarteron, sublet a
major commercial establishment for 27,600 livres a year.
76ANOM, Notsdom, 1674, lease, May 3, 1786; ANOM, Notsdom, 781, Grard, lease,
December 14, 1787.
77ANOM, Notsdom, 1671 sale, September 28, 1784; ANOM, Notsdom, 1671, lease, 1782.
78ANOM, Notsdom, 1167, sale, October 8, 1784; ANOM, Notsdom, 1099, inventory, Sep-
tember 28, 1784.
or even direct involvement; and it appears to have occurred across all of

Saint-Domingues ports. Among the free women of color involved in these
undertakings, Marie Scipion, whose case we will discuss at length later
on, is characteristic. The only real estate purchase that she made in her
own name took place in 1785.79 This house was located in Haut du Cap
and was apparently purchased as a residence. The high demand for urban
rentals inside the city itself made living outside the city (in the nearby
rural district of Haut du Cap in this case) and renting out ones urban
property more profitable for these free colored families. When it came to
trying to become a cash crop farmer by establishing a coffee plantation or
a market garden, Marie, like many other urban women of color, took on
a male partner, in her case Pierre Guillaume Provoyeur, her companion
after the death of her husband. Moreover, Marie only involved herself in
this transaction through her contribution of 3,700 livres in debts owed her
by the sellers, the Aumay family, that were to be repaid by the sale.80
Did Saint-Domingues Ports Offer Free Women of Color Unique Opportunities?

With the socio-economic structures of Saint-Domingues ports delineated,
we are now in a position to pose a crucial question. Did the ports provide
an arena especially rich in opportunities for free women of color? In other
words, were there substantial numbers of women active in the socio-
economic categories we have been discussing by virtue of their living in
one of the ports? When, in 1787, Zabeau dite A Freteau partnered with a
white navigator, Sieur Joseph Gurin, to establish a shop selling fats and
tallows, and he put up a small capital of 759 livres while continuing to pur-
sue his nautical activities, it seems evident that the constraints of those
nautical activities on Gurins time helped this multresse libre woman
gain greater professional autonomy.81 One understands her autonomy all
the more when we note that she did not know how to write and could not
keep the usual accounting books, and that, in addition, she was appar-
ently not involved in a relationship with Joseph Gurin since their part-
nership was only to last for one year. We should not, however, generalize
too hastily.
If we speak of efficiency and fortune the answer is rather positive. The
income structure for Saint-Domingue is well-known. In Saint-Domingue
79ANOM, Notsdom, 190, sale, May 18, 1785.

80ANOM, Notsdom, 197, sales, January 2 and February 2, 1787.
81ANOM, Notsdom, 1106, partnership agreement, May 15, 1787.
at the end of the eighteenth century, one could be considered affluent if

one disposed of at least 10,000 livres. In the case of free people of color,
this kind of wealth was even more impressive, because their purchases
were mostly on a cash basis. With between 6,000 and 10,000 livres of dis-
posable income, one could be considered on the threshold of prosperity.
For a real fortune, it would be reasonable to count those individuals who
could spend more than 80,000 livres annually, the average revenue of a
sugar refinery in the 1780s. Between 50,000 and 80,000 livres of dispos-
able income, to pick a fairly arbitrary line, we can speak of a moderate
fortune.82
With these income brackets in mind, we can turn to delineating the
sorts of fortunes women of color in Saint-Domingues ports could accu-
mulate. In Port-au-Prince, women of color were consistently more numer-
ous than men of color in the upper echelons of this hierarchy. They were
the only operators whose sales amounted to more than 80,000 livres, and
they comprised 54.5 percent of the wealthiest notarial clients, possessing
between 50,000 and 80,000 livres (6 of 11), 64.47 percent of the moderately
affluent (between 10,000 and 50,000 livres, 49 out of 76), and 63.46 percent
of the clients on the threshold of prosperity (33 of 52). In Cap Franais,
the men were more noticeable among the notarial clientele. There, even
though free women of color made up the majority of notaries clientele of
color, they comprised only 53.84 percent of those at the threshold of pros-
perity (42 out of 78), 50 percent of the affluent (38 of 76), 38.46 percent
of the moderately wealthy (5 of 13), and 40 percent of the largest clients
(2 of 5). Zabeau Bellanton with 107,635 total livres of purchases and sales,
Jeanne Genevive Deslandes with 94,498 livres, and Anne Rossignol with
80,148 livres occupied the summit of the female free colored clientele of
the notaries of the two principal capitals of Saint-Domingue. The first and
third resided in Cap Franais, the second in Port-au-Prince. All three were
multres; the second was described in notarial documents as a rentire,
the other two were called merchants.83
If we speak in terms of the spectrum of professional opportunities
offered to women, the answer is negative. In the Guadaloupean port town
of Pointe--Pitre, where we have detailed census figures for the revolu-
tionary period, women appear to have been as active as men but mem-
bers of only fifteen different trades or businesses as compared to fifty-five

for men.84 In Saint-Domingue, where such census data do not exist, it has
nevertheless been possible to get a brief snapshot of the clientele of color
of the notaries of the two capitals during the colonial period that reveals
the range of occupational designations assigned to the principal actors in
economic and family acts. The 1,415 occupational designations reported in
these notarial acts reveal that women were members of only twelve differ-
ent kinds of trades as compared with fifty-two for men. Nonetheless, there
were some specialized activities that were effectively only present in the
cities, and some of these were open to women: for example, jam and jelly
maker, pastry chef, milliner, or wigmaker.85
In the end, then, the port towns do seem to have been places of eco-
nomic possibility for women because, although the range of activities that
free colored women engaged in was generally the same as that typical of
rural or small-town women, the cities greatly increased the opportunities
for profitable action and the ways those possibilities could be seized. It
should be noted, nonetheless, that each port town had its own dynamic.
As the discussion above has shown, in the administrative capital of Saint-
Domingue, Port-au-Prince, the opportunities offered to women were pri-
marily in the domestic sphere and real estate, while in Cap Franais, the
economic heart of the colony, women were more likely to work in the
commercial field.86 For the southern province John Garriguss work on
the parish of les Cayes suggests that free women of color were indeed active
there, but more as rentiers and landladies than as wealthy and socially
prominent merchants like the ones we have described in Cap Franais
or in Port-au-Prince. In the 1760s and 1780s free women of color in Cayes
were involved in nearly 58 and 43 percent, respectively, of the leases of
urban property in which free colored persons participated.87 Finally, we
should still acknowledge the fact that the absence of detailed urban stud-
ies for the intermediary centers of Logane, Saint-Marc, or Petit Gove,
84Anne Protin-Dumon, La ville, 495, 506.

86We base these remarks on the notarial evidence cited above for the ports and the
work of the following for rural regions and small towns: John Garrigus, Color, Class and
Identity on the Eve of Haitian Revolution: Saint-Domingues Free Colored Elite as Colons
Amricains, in Against the Odds: Free Blacks in the Slave Societies of the Americas, ed. Jane
Landers (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1996), 2043; Garrigus, Before Haiti, passim; King, Blue
Coat; Dominique Rogers, Les ngres libres de la plaine du Nord la veille de la rvolu-
tion, in Jean Casimir, Michel Hector, Danielle Bgot, eds., La rvolution et lindependence
hatiennes: Autor du bicentenaire de 1804, histoire et mmoire, special issue, Bulletin de la
Socit dhistoire de la Guadeloupe 145 (November 2006): 4769.
87Garrigus, Before Haiti, 176.
does not allow us to create a model valid for all the ports of French Saint-
Domingue. Nevertheless, since Cap Franais and Port-au-Prince com-
prised the colonys most prolific ports, we feel confident in saying that
the case studies we explore below, which emphasize Cap Franais but
also compare it to Port-au-Prince, have much to say about the world of
Dominguan ports.
II.What Place Did Women Occupy in the Societies of the

Port Cities of Saint-Domingue?
Whether modest, comfortable, or wealthy, women of color clearly par-

ticipated in the economic life of the port cities of Saint-Domingue. Did
the colonial society recognize their dynamism and accord them a place
commensurate with their investment in the economy? More impor-
tantly, despite the patriarchal cultural practices and the growing racism
of Dominguan society at the end of the eighteenth century, could these
women play a distinctive role in urban port society? In this section,
we will first address the question of the differences between the social
roles assigned to free women of color and their real role in relation to
white society. Then, we will place in evidence some specific examples of
their roles in the port cities through the example of two women of color
of Cap Franais of whom we have already spoken, Anne Rossignol and
Marie Scipion.
Concubines, Companions, or Simply Attentive Neighbors?

According to Moreau de Saint-Mry, it is regrettable that in Port-au-Prince,
as in Cap Franais, the [white] women keep a certain distance in society,
where they could use many means to make it more agreeable. They are too
sedentary, and do not realize that they force men to replace the pure and
sweet pleasures with tastes that they themselves [the women] deplore.88
Moreau de Saint-Mry was a Martiniquan colonial who had also lived for
a long period in France. He was also a careful observer of the colonial soci-
ety of Saint-Domingue. As a product of the Enlightenment as well as of his
colonial experiences, for him good society and civility required the pres-
ence of women who were cultivated or at least courteous, who could keep
salons as in Paris or in provincial cities in France or at least keep up their
88Moreau de Saint-Mry, Description, 2: 105455.

end of a sophisticated conversation.89 Clearly for him only white women,

ordinarily better educated than women of color, were capable of fulfilling
this role. Nevertheless, Moreau de Saint-Mrys complaint reveals to us
that the taste of his male white contemporaries was different and that
free women of color played an important and, to some degree, accepted
role in this society. This was partially due to the fact that male inhabit-
ants of French Saint-Domingue were not as interested in the elegant and
intellectual kind of life of which Moreau de Saint-Mry spoke so highly.
In the port cities, learned societies struggled to grow, as Franois Regourd
and James McClellan have shown, although the Freemasons were more
dynamic.90 By contrast, gambling, theater, and dances were particu-
larly popular.91 In general, men privileged simpler relational modes with
women where free colored women, even less educated or frankly illiter-
ate, could play a part.
Contemporary observers struck an often-outraged tone in their remarks
on the courtesans and concubines of the ports of Saint-Domingue. In the
view of Moreau de Saint-Mry, those of Cap Franais had pushed fur-
ther than any others the taste for luxury at the cost of great expense and
effrontery.92 Like insatiable goats, they appeared as predators who were
only interested in avenging themselves with the weapons of pleasure, and
who were condemned to depravity.93 Traditionally, these relationships,
generally short and/or informal, were often stigmatized by elites and have
often been seen by historians as of secondary importance. However, a very
handsome letter, written as an annex to a power of attorney in 1782, and
addressed to one Rosette Chateauneuf, serves as a good example of the
complexity of the situation for both the mnagres and their companions.94
89On the education of white women and women of color, see Rogers, Les libres, 2:
51128.
90James McClellan, Colonialism and Science: Saint-Domingue in the Old Regime (Balti-
more: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Franois Regourd, Sciences et colonisa-
tion sous lAncien Rgime: Le cas de la Guyane et des Antilles franaises, XVIIeXVIIIe
sicles, (PhD diss., Universit de Bordeaux III, 2000).
91Jean Fouchard, Les Plaisirs de Saint-Domingue, notes sur la vie sociale littraire et
artistique, vol. 4, Regards sur le temps pass (1955; repr., Port-au-Prince, Hati: ditions
Henri Deschamps, 1988); Bernard Camier, Musique coloniale et socit Saint-Domingue
dans la seconde moiti du XVIIIe sicle, (PhD diss., Universit des Antilles et de la Guyane,
2004).
92On the relationships of Moreau de Saint-Mry with women of color, cf. Dominique
Rogers, Entre lumires et prjugs: Moreau de Saint-Mry et les libres de couleur de Saint-
Domingue, in Moreau de Saint-Mry ou les ambiguts dun crole des Lumires, ed. Domin-
ique Taffin (Fort-de-France, Archives dpartementales de la Martinique, 2006), 7793.
93Moreau de Saint-Mry, Description, 1: 3738.
94ANOM, Notsdom, 876, annex to 876, letter, February 22, 1782, (act no. 163).
All throughout this letter, Chateauneuf, the male partner, keeps on

complaining about Rosettes silence. Commenting on the lack of letters
from her he wrote I fear I do not know you any more my dear Rosette.
Three mail deliveries have not seen a letter from you, and then again no
single letter from you, please let me know if you are ill. In one passage, he
even seems jealous when he observes here it is almost three months that
I have been separated from you. It seems that Port-au-Prince amuses you
since you dont have the time to write to me. However, he ends the let-
ter with a more forgiving tone, begging for news: Write to me, I beg you
(...) Adieu...three months always the best of your friends. Despite the
strained emotional appeals, this could just as easily be a letter from a car-
ing husband to a beloved wife, as that of a worried lover to a concubine. In
fact, the letter also contains a mixture of practical matters, minor house-
hold details which usually characterize a steady and peaceful relationship.
Chateauneuf evokes, for example, the buckles of Peters shoes brought
by Capes and mentions some of Rosettes personal papers lost or mis-
placed. He also touches on the money she might need after three months
of absence. The money I gave you when I left Mle Saint-Nicolas must be
gone by now. My intention was never to let you lack for anything. To tell
you the truth, I didnt expect that my voyage would take so long. Here he
seems to express regret for his long stay away from home.95
The public recognition of their relationship that this letter expresses,
which runs contrary to what is usually assumed, can easily be explained
by the characteristics of concubinage in Saint-Domingue. In Europe or in
the Lesser Antilles, a concubine would often be a mistress, i.e. the rival
of a legitimate and official wife. In Saint-Domingue, because of the very
small number of white women, women of color in the port cities were
most commonly a mans only female companion.96 For this reason, in
Saint-Domingue, women of color do not seem to have been marginal-
ized in the same way that they would have been in those parts of the
Francophone world more in tune with the metropoles gender norms,
and, in some ways, concubinage appeared to be an acceptable state of
life. Far from staying in the kitchen, then, like the household managers
of the metropole, or in a bedroom or apartment apart, Saint-Domingues
95All quotes in the paragraph come from: ANOM, Notsdom, 876, annex to 876, letter,
February 22, 1782, (act no. 163).
96For the basic demography of Saint-Domingue see Pluchon, Histoire de la colonisation
franaise, 39697.
urban free women of color appeared as the regular companions of their

men quite openly and publicly.97
The official economic responsibilities given by Chateauneuf to Rosette
in the letter illustrate even better this public recognition. In the following
passage Chateauneuf describes a series of transactions involving slaves in
which Rosette had an important role:
I received a letter from Victoire Duvivier who made me some foolish propo-
sitions about the slaves. I replied to her letter and ordered her to give you
back the slaves and to pay you what she owes on the rental. You will be able
to find out how much she owes by means of the receipts that she has from
me and what I have received over three years of the 1200 livres a year she
owes. You will put these together with the four slaves coming from Saint
Lucia and see monsieur Ponce to whom I will write so that he will do me
the favor of putting them up for rent through the court. Get your money
from Mamant (sic) Victoire and if she will not pay, then issue a summons
for her.98
Going far beyond her role as his mnagre, Chateauneuf is asking her to
manage part of his servile capital: at least six slaves, of whom some were
rented out already and others for whom rental deals still had yet to be
made. The sums in play are not negligible and the business deals to be
carried out are important, because they could also involve going to court
and getting a sentence against a recalcitrant debtor if necessary. The pow-
ers given to Rosette made her an official legal representative of the Sieur
de Chateauneuf before other white colonists and also before the notary
and the judges. No clause in Rosettes commission foresees giving her any
additional salary for the extra duty, which suggests potentially not only
a relation of trust but also long-term common interests. In the country-
side, concubinage took place in a more informal manner, with written
contracts less common and involving less important sums. In the town,
on the other hand, in a much more highly monetized economic context,
mnagres were seemingly more attentive to their own interests. To avoid
unpleasant surprises, some, like Marie dite Marinette, were careful over
the course of years to claim formally before a notary the goods that they
had gained through trade, the loans that they had made to their employer,
97On the situation of concubines in the Lesser Antilles and Europe see Pluchon,
Histoire des Antilles et de la Guyane, 171173, 180184; Protin-Dumon, La ville, 711715;
Sabattier Jacqueline, Figaro et son matre: Les domestiques du XVIIIe sicle (Paris: Perrin,
1984).
the presents that they had received from them, and so forth.99 More aware
of financial realities, they could also invest in the business affairs of their
partners, as we have seen.
Finally, the reality of the integral place of this man in this family of
color is here documented by the existence of a relational circle larger than
just the couple; regards are sent to Rosettes mother and greetings are
sent from two other free colored friends or relatives who lived in Cap
Franais, Mari Louise and Mariejane.100 In the same period, the wills of
other white men mentioning female legatees belonging to the family of
the writers companion of color suggest all the conviviality of daily life. In
1781, for example, Sieur Eugne Mehuel, principal clerk at the post office
of Port-au-Prince, rewarded Sanithe Dubreuil (a free quarteronne and the
sister of Mehuels companion, Suzette Dubreuil), who had taken care of
him in his illness and rendered him numerous services besides.101 In 1779,
Sieur Deodoard mentioned in his will that his heirs must repay a little
loan of 1,200 livres from Marie-Thrse A Petit, mother of his companion
Marie-Rose A Petit.102
The relations we have described here, from the evidence, could have
existed in the countryside. However, the urban environment gave them
a particular character due to the public nature and diversity of finan-
cial operations and by the necessity they put on the men and women
involved to make all sorts of requests and official statements to colonial
administrators. In their daily life, these women (and men) appear to have
defied resoundingly the racist discourses that one part of the elite such as
Moreau de Saint-Mry wished to make dominant.103
The wills made by women of color demonstrate, maybe even more poi-
gnantly, the quality of the relationships between them and their white
partners. Many of them left their property to their companion or to their
former white master. These practices were more common in Port-au-
Prince, where we have seen some fifty cases of women of color between
1776 and 1789, either freedwomen or free from birth, who chose a white
99ANOM, Notsdom, old code, 854, obligation, October 16, 1781, mentioning a con-
tract of 1779 and loans and gifts of the succeeding years; ANOM, Notsdom, old code, 859,
accounting for a debt, May 29, 1787.
101ANOM, Notsdom, old code, 1664, will, July 29, 1781.
102ANOM, Notsdom, 171, will, January 24, 1779.
103For a discussion of Moreau de Saint-Mrys role in these discourses, see above in the
introductory portion of this section; Moreau de Saint-Mry, Description, 1: 83111. On those
debates, see also in particular Garrigus, Before Haiti, 141225.
man as the executor of their will.104 Even if we can agree with their con-
temporary critics that some of these women were clearly concubines,
in contrast to those same critics we note that their choices affirmed the
authenticity of their lived relationships. For some, perhaps newly manu-
mitted and still a little isolated in society, perhaps the only relationship
with the dominant group(s) in Dominguan society that they had was with
their former master or the benefactor (bienveillant), white or free colored,
who had helped them escape from slavery. When Sieur Jean-Baptiste
Dussan, clerk of the judicial office of Port-au-Prince, was designated as
executor or universal legatee of seven different free women of color, one
has difficulty believing that he was the lover of all seven!105
Even more important, moreover, an attentive reading of these wills,
donations, and marriage contracts of men and women in the Dominguan
port cities confirms the fundamental role of women of color in the social
life of the port communities, which extended far beyond any sexual rela-
tionships that they might have had. In the wills of the white bachelors of
Saint-Dominguan port communities it is not uncommon to find women
other than their female companion and her family mentioned. Some lega-
tees were simply employees, free or slave, whose fidelity or good service
the testator wanted to reward. For Marie, a multresse libre woman, or for
the free black women Catherine and Marie Jeanne Dieronbon dite Moi-
gnon, modest gratuities of between 300 and 1,000 livres would permit their
survival after the testators death while they were searching for another
employer.106 No need to believe that there was love here, it appears to
us, but simply esteem for a woman who had done her work well. Some
other free colored women were also mentioned for the generosity they
had shown to the testator at a much earlier stage of his life. In 1786, Sieur
Longuet, geographer in Port-au-Prince, left two young slave girls to Dem-
oiselle Minette, granddaughter of the free colored woman Daguin, free
quarteron. He explained that she was the only person who helped me
in this country where I had no family where I would not have failed to
die given the nature of my illness.107 The same year, Sieur Jacques David,
planter at Gnipayer, made a bequest of 2,000 livres to Madeleine Clark.

106ANOM, Notsdom, old code, 176, will of Sr Jean Loiseau, prsident du Conseil
suprieur du Cap, 1778; ANOM, Notsdom, old code, 176, codicil of Sieur Jacques Aubourg,
February 7, 1780; ANOM, Notsdom, old code, 1554, will of Sieur Quirot., April 19, 1788.
107ANOM, Notsdom, 917, will, April 20, 1786, (act no. 1415).
He said it was for good service that she gave me when I lodged in her
house [in Port-au-Prince].108 Certain contemporary observers, daring to
contradict the segregationist diktats, echoed these sentiments. Alexandre
Stanislas de Wimpffen wrote around 1787 of the free women of color that
they were intelligent household managers, had enough moral sensibili-
ties to attach themselves invariably to one man, and great goodness of
heart. More than one European man, abandoned by his egotistical fel-
low whites, found among the women of color more tender care, more
constancy, and a more generous humanity, without any other interest
than goodwill.109 Certain white womens wills also confirm this picture.
In 1786, for instance, Dame Marianne Saget left a small sum of 500 livres
to Marie-Claire Logement, a multresse libre woman, for similar reasons.
Demoiselle Elisabeth Peignier, widow of Sr Pierre Caumont, creole from
Logane, gave to the multresse libre Marie Toinette seven buildable lots
in Port-au-Prince, four slaves, all her jewels, furniture and silver plates,
and two-thirds of her wardrobe. She also did not forget the free black
LAurore, to whom she left the other third of her wardrobe, her personal
mare, a permanent lodging on the grand case, and eight slaves to be freed
after the payment of a small ransom.110
All these cases suggest that in the port communities, where, as many
observers have noted, everyone seemed to be preoccupied with making
money, women of color seemed to be fundamental and valued interme-
diaries between individuals. In spite of color prejudice they enjoyed rela-
tionships with white men whom they loved and with whom they shared
friendship, or at least conviviality. Simultaneously, they participated in
transforming the port communities into real societies where people could
meet each other as opposed to mere way-stations dominated by relation-
ships of convenience. Apart from children, employees, or work compan-
ions, men of color are much rarer in white mens wills or donations than
are women of color, which suggests that urban women of color were play-
ing a specific social role here.
The cases of Marie Scipion and Anne Rossignol permit us to go a
bit further, notably in understanding what white elite observers rarely
mentioned: the very dominant role of women in the community of color,
108ANOM, Notsdom, will, July 20, 1786.

109Alexandre-Stanislas de Wimpffen, Voyage Saint-Domingue, pendant les annes
1788, 1789 et 1790 (Paris: Cocheris, 1797), 2:14849.
110ANOM, Notsdom, 1553, will, September 28, 1786; ANOM, Notsdom, 1553, will, Sep-
tember 30, 1786; ANOM, Notsdom, 1374, will, November 3, 1781.
especially within Dominguan ports. We have already addressed their lives

in the context of our earlier discussions of free women of color active as
merchants and real estate investors. But by adding to their stories we can
gain a better understanding of how free women of color of their stature
made decisions and interacted with their communities. Anne Rossignol
was the daughter of the signare Madeleine Franoise and of Sieur Claude
Rossignol.111 In 1749, her older sister, Marie-Thrse Rossignol, married
Blaise Estoupan de Saint-Jean, the French commander of Gore from 1747
to 1758. This tied her to Senegals colonial elite as her husbands brother,
Jean-Baptiste Estoupan de la Bre, was governor of Senegal from 1746 to
1758.112 Marie Scipions background is less clear, but suggestive nonethe-
less. Formally, Marie Scipion was called Marie Timbou and sometimes
Mambo.113 She was a creole of Cap Franais, and was probably born there
before 1740. She was born a slave, and the daughter of a central African
woman named Anne about whom we regrettably know very little. She
was freed by her master, a white man named Robert Bessonire (or Bel-
lonire), some time before 1776. At some point which is also unclear she
married Alexandre Scipion, an African-born freedman of the Adia nation,
111There is confusion in the secondary literature and the primary sources as to the
identity of Anne Rossignols father. One thread in the secondary literature (Joseph Roger
de Benoist and Abdoulaye Camara, Histoire de Gore, with contributions from Franoise
Descamps, Xavier Ricou and James Searing (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2003), 99, 103,
12122; Jean Delcourt, Gore, 5152; Marie-Hlne Knight-Baylac, Gore au XVIIIe Sicle.
Lappropriation du sol, Revue franaise dhistoire doutre-mer 64, no. 234 (1977): 45) identi-
fies him as James Rossignol and sees him as hailing from Britain or North America and
having commanded an American brig, the Pallas. We see this as less likely, however. It
relies in part on a bill of mortality (acte de dcs) concerning Annes mother and her
spouse dated 1818. Since Annes older sister was born in 1724 and the minimum age for
a woman to have children can be assumed to have been no earlier than 15, her mother
would have had to have lived at least 109 years and likely 112 for this version of events to
be true. More likely she was the daughter of one Claude Rossignol, who may have had
more than one sojourn in Gore and, unusually for those men like Rossignol who feature
in this volume, may have shipped out with his wife Rene Le Monnier and returned to
France with her and his daughter Anne by the signare Madeleine-Franoise in 1736. See
Jean-Bernard Lacroix, Les Franais au Sngal au temps de la Compagnie des Indes, de 1719
1758 (Vincennes: Service historique de la Marine, 1986), 297; Jean-Luc Angrand, Cleste
ou le temps des Signares (Sarcelles: ditions Anne Ppin, 2006), 5758.
112Angrand, Cleste, 5758; Benoist et al., Histoire, 99; Jean Delcourt, La turbulente his-
toire de Gore (Dakar: Editions Clairafrique, 1982), 46; Delcourt, Six sicles, 41; Lacroix, Les
Franais, 17, 127, 204.
113In her will of November 23, 1778, she is called Marie dite Mambo. ANOM, Nots-
dom, 524, November 23, 1778, as cited in Jean-Louis Donnadieu, Un grand seigneur et ses
esclaves: Le comte de No entre Antilles et Gascogne (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du
Mirail, 2009), 104.
who died sometime before 1778.114 Marie Scipion had no signare upbring-
ing. Nevertheless, she and Anne Rossignol pursued similar strategies and
lived similar lives, suggesting that they could represent a norm for the
community of color in Dominguan ports.
One of the characteristics of these two women that stands out is the
independence with which they conducted their family lives. Each had a
marital arrangement of her own that was different from that prescribed by
Christian morality and the society of the ancien rgime. Anne Rossignol
appears never to have married formally, but only la mode du pays. In
addition, in Gore alone she appears to have had multiple relationships
that produced free offspring, three of whom grew up Christian and one as
a Muslim. It is certain that two of these children followed Anne Rossignol
to Cap Franais: Armand and Marie. In official sources from Gore these
children bear the name of their biological father, one Aubert of Marseille
who worked for the Compagnie des Indes as a quartermaster. But in the
documents arranging their marriages, Anne Rossignol gave these two chil-
dren her own family name and not that of their white father who may not
have chosen to recognize the two quarterons. Additionally, the absence of
any donation by a third party to either child in the Saint-Domingue docu-
ments concerning their marriages is not to be linked to isolation from any
affectionate ties but to a firmly independent position. The marriage of her
daughter and her son was her affair and her responsibility.115
114Donnadieu, Un grand seigneur, 103108, 306307; Donnadieu, Entre Gascogne et

Saint-Domingue: Le comte Louis-Pantalon de No, grand propritaire crole et aristo-
crate gascon (17281816), (PhD diss., Universit de Pau et des Pays de lAdour, 2006),
93113.
115As with Anne Rossignols parentage, there is some confusion in the secondary lit-
erature as to the status of the father of these children. According to Jean-Luc Angrand
and others, she was married to someone named Aubert, storekeeper for the Compagnie
des Indes, with whom she had a son named Louis-Armand Aubert and a daughter named
Marie Adolphe Aubert Rossignol. See Jean-Luc Angrand, Cleste, 58; Benoist, et al., Histoire,
99, 103, 12122; Delcourt, Gore, 5152; Knight-Baylac, Gore, 45. The young woman was
in fact our Marie-Adlade, because she is recorded as having married the same surgeon
of Cap that we mention below, which confirms our rereading of the act of marriage used
by Jean Luc Angrand and others. Nonetheless, neither the marriage contract in the Cap
Franais notarial archive nor the arrangements for Louis-Armands marriage say anything
at all about Aubert. Doubtless his relationship with Anne Rossignol was only a marriage
in the style of the country, that would not have had legal value outside of Gore. For this
rereading and information about Annes other sons see: ANOM, Notsdom, 195, contract of
marriage, August 31, 1786; ANOM, 85 MIOM34, Act of marriage from the parish register of
Cap Franais dated September 11, 1786; ANOM, Notsdom, new code, 783, gift, February 14,
1778; ANOM, C6/15, folio 101, Census of Sngal, 1767; ANOM, Notsdom, 195, contract of
sale, August 21, 1786. It is at least possible that Anne Rossignol had a third daughter named
Marie-Thrse Rossignol who married the son of Annes elder sister Marie-Thrse and
Marie Scipion was, of course, in a slightly different situation because

she had been married and was a widow. Nonetheless, for at least ten years
between 1778 and 1788, she had a stable relationship with a man of color,
the free multre Pierre-Guillaume Provoyeur, called Mirbalizia, without
ever marrying despite the fact that she was the mother of his daughter
Marie-Anne, still a minor in 1782, and remained in a close relationship
with him throughout the period.116 In fact, the state of widowhood seems
to have permitted Marie Scipion an independence that she continually
took advantage of during these ten years. Even though she could have
given management of her affairs over to her companion or to her stepson,
during all these years, Marie kept on taking care of her own business and
making her own contracts, even if she occasionally called on Provoyeur to
guarantee her in more expensive deals.117
We can particularly appreciate this role as independent woman in the
marriage contract of her daughter, Marie-Genevive, where she took the
lead as Anne Rossignol had done where her children were concerned.
Pierre-Guillaume Provoyeur, Marie Scipions companion, was present, but
their relationship is not signaled in any way by the notary and he did not
give the bride any particular gift, even though he had not forgotten her in
his most recent will, in August 1782, and had no doubt contributed to her
upbringing.118 All these elements go together to suggest that concubinage
was, for Marie, a real choice of independence, one motivated perhaps by
the period of slavery she endured at the beginning of her life and in any
case made possible by the multitude of opportunities that the urban envi-
ronment offered her. The work of Stewart King on the rural free colored
elite suggests that this was a much less common situation in the country-
side, where the European matrimonial model appeared to predominate
among well-off women of color.119 It should be noted, however, that these
women were not rejecting marriage as an institution or a desirable state.
her husband Blaise Estoupan St. Jean, but we have not been able to confirm this indepen-
dently as yet (on this see Benoist, et al., Histoire, 99, 103).
116ANOM, Notsdom, old code, 526, November 14, 1778; ANOM, Notsdom, 180, June 23,
1782; ANOM, Notsdom, old code, 181, will, August 5, 1782; ANOM, Notsdom, 189, March
23, 1785; ANOM, Notsdom, 197, contracts of sale, January 2 and February 2, 1787; ANOM,
Notsdom, 202, September 7, 1788, suggest the relationships longevity and Provoyeurs sta-
tus. For further details see Donnadieu, Un grand seigneur, 104, 306; Donnadieu, Entre
Gascogne, 93113.
117See, for example, the purchase of a house in the rue des Boucheries in Cap-Franais
in 1785, ANOM, Notsdom, 189, March 23, 1785.
118ANOM, Notsdom, old code, 181, August 5, 1782; ANOM, Notsdom, 1634, contract of
marriage, October 5, 1786; ANOM, Notsdom, 181, will, August 5, 1782.
119King, Blue Coat, 19499.
Indeed, it was the option chosen for all of their children. Though this
should be subject to further study, assuming the role of an independent
woman appears to have been the most frequent choice among the first
generation to gain freedom.
As independent women, Anne Rossignol and Marie Scipion appeared
both as mothers and as heads of their respective families, even if the
contexts were quite different. This is particularly evident from the great
deference the notary paid them. On the day for the signature of the mar-
riage contract of her child, Marie Scipion signed first among the witnesses,
though in other marriage contracts distinguished godparents or witnesses
would sign ahead of the family. She is also recorded as having given her
permission for the wedding despite the fact that the bride had already
turned twenty-five and thus was an adult and needed nobodys permis-
sion under French customary law. This attitude was reinforced by the
reality of their role in the finances of the young couples. In both cases, the
mothers gave the essential assistance for the newlyweds to begin a sepa-
rate life. We have already shown this in the case of Anne Rossignol. It
should be noted that no father, even illegitimate, came forward to give any
support, either to the bride or to the groom. For Marie-Genevive, the situ-
ation was similar. From her deceased father, she only inherited two slaves,
whereas her mother, Marie Scipion, provided the largest gift to the happy
couple, a large lot on the main street and four slaves. Her gift was worth
approximately as much as the grooms entire fortune and gave the fam-
ily the capital necessary to live comfortably in one of the most expensive
cities in the French empire. Aware of their responsibilities, these mothers
took care of all the details, and notably saw to a good education for their
daughters: both girls knew how to read and write, or at least sign their
names, whereas at least one of the mothers, Anne Rossignol, did not.120
The choice of grooms does not seem to have been made by chance
either, even if the logic underlying the choices appears a bit different. For
her daughter, Marie Scipion respected the endogamous preferences of her
color group and chose Franois Pantalon, a free black like herself.121 How-
ever, it does not appear that his status of freed person or his illegitimacy
were obstacles to a marriage even with a girl who was legitimate and free
120ANOM, Notsdom, 1634, contract of marriage, October 5, 1786; ANOM, Notsdom, 195,
contract of marriage, August 31, 1786.
121We do not have specific documentation that Marie Scipion made the choice for her
daughter, but since her daughter was quite young, we have assumed that Marie Scipion
made the decision.
from birth. In a society where wealth, or at least talent, were fundamen-

tal qualifications, Franois Pantalon had going for him the fact that he
was the owner of a good piece of land in the development of Alban, near
the plantation of his former master Count Louis-Pantalon de No. The
fact that he kept the last name of his former master suggests strong ties
of clientage and therefore the possibility of counting on the noblemans
assistance if needed, which was doubtless an important point in his favor
as a marital choice.122
Anne Rossignol, by contrast, chose a husband for her daughter Marie-
Adlade in obedience to a somewhat different logic, doubtless in part
tied to cultural practices from her homeland on the island of Gore.123 In
1786, she chose a white widower from the southwest of France, the sur-
geon, Sieur Guillaume Dumont.124 In Saint-Domingue, marriages between
mixed-lineage people of different nuances were frequent enough, but
mixed marriages with whites were rarer at the end of the eighteenth cen-
tury, although they were never unknown.125 Moreover, even if poor whites
occasionally married women of color, either free or enslaved, the mag-
nificent dowry of Marie-Adlade was doubtless an important argument
for explaining the acceptance by elites of what would have been called a
msalliance. The assets of the groom were much smaller than those of the
bride. In 1786, he offered his young wife a bridal portion of 7,000 livres, but
his contribution to the community of property established by the marriage
was only 29,386 livres in an assortment of goods: five slave boatmen and
their boat, two servants, 8,000 livres of furniture, 2,850 livres of wardrobe,
and finally 931 livres for his surgical tools and stock of medicines. It was
not enough just to be white to be accepted by families of color. Anne Ros-
signol, like many other mothers in the same situation, took precautions.
Notably, she kept an eye on the couple by giving them a lot next to one
she owned in Petit Carnage. She also inserted in the marriage contract a
122ANOM, Notsdom, 1634, contract of marriage, October 5, 1786; on the holdings of

Count Louis-Pantalon de No see Donnadieu, Un grand seigneur, passim. Rogers Les
libres 16266, 578.
123As in the case of Marie Scipin and her daughter, we assume that because of the
young age of Anne Rossignols daughter, Anne Rossignol made the choice of marriage
partner in this case.
124ANOM, 85 MIOM34, Act of marriage from the parish register of Cap Franais dated
September 11, 1786.
125Garrigus, Before Haiti, 144.
somewhat unusual provision that her daughter would remain the owner
in her own name of the real estate she was giving them.126
Wealthier than most other free women of color, these two women had
the means to facilitate their younger relatives careers. They were even
benefactors to members of their extended family beyond their immediate
circle. In 1786, Marie Scipion gave her two god-daughters, the daughters
of Jacques Bou, a portion of her land in Haut du Cap.127 Likewise, in
1788, Anne Rossignol, who had taken care of her grandson Gabriel Durant,
decided to give him access to three of the most remunerative trades of the
era by placing him as an apprentice to a relative of hers, a roofer-carpenter-
joiner, Jean Charles Floissac.128 Nonetheless, their comportment was very
characteristic of that of other women of Saint-Domingues ports. In Port-
au-Prince, of the 156 donations made before a notary between 1776 and
1788 concerning at least one free person of color, women of color appear
to have been important distributors of goods with more than 30 percent of
the gifts to their credit.129 In terms of affection, wills also demonstrate the
importance of the family, and especially their children, to women of color.
In a specific manner very different from that of their menfolk, the first
theme evoked in the wills of women of color was the social advancement
of their children and grandchildren whom they intended to buy, free, or
educate.130 Here again Anne Rossignol and Marie Scipion were charac-
teristic of their contemporaries in the towns although they interpreted
it in their own specific way. Thus, Marie Scipion appears to have wanted
to keep close spatial ties with her family. Her first acquisition at Haut du
Cap took place at the same time as the first purchase by her stepson Blaise
Scipion dit Ouaky or Brda. She bought a plot of land neighboring Blaises
property. The husband of her oldest daughter lived in the development of
Alban, on the other side of the road, while her younger daughter had a
place nearby on the outskirts of the Daguindeau plantation. Despite the
126ANOM, Notsdom, 195, marriage contract, August 31, 1786; ANOM, Notsdom, 1547,
sale, October 17, 1778.
127ANOM, Notsdom, 1634, donation, September 18, 1786.
128ANOM, Notsdom, 203, contract of apprenticeship, November 16, 1788.
129Study drawn out of the donations recorded by all the notaries of Port-au-Prince
between 17761789: Alotte, Barrault de Narcray, Beaucousin, Degrandpr, Dulaurent,
Filledier, Glandaz, Grandjean, Grenier, Guieu, Hacquet, Loreilhe, Michel, Oger de Bignons,
Thomin, Vausselin.
wounds of slavery, or perhaps because of them, the family seemed to be

all-important.131
The strength of Anne Rossignols family ties was even more impres-
sive because they had a transatlantic dimension. At the end of the 1770s,
she still had ties to a friend or relative in Gore (possibly one Isabelle
Albi)132 who asked her to pass on a slave to her son who was also living
in Saint-Domingue.133 Even more importantly, perhaps, in 1778, when her
son Armand left the colony to return to Gore, she made it necessary for
him to have the agreement of her older sister, Marie-Thrse Rossignol,
and not of any male of the family, for the choice of his future wife. The
wedding gift of four slaves that he received from his mother was condi-
tional on the consent of his aunt, whose proxy is mentioned in the act of
marriage in the parish records of Gore.134 Her decision in 1788 to place
her grandson Gabriel Durant into apprenticeship far away from Saint-
Domingue obeyed the same logic of reinforcing familial ties. The artisans
of color of Cap Franais were highly regarded and even took white boys as
apprentices. There was, therefore, no professional reason to send the boy
to Saint Lucia, except to have him trained by her kinsman Jean Charles
Floissac, an artisan in a highly-respected trade with the ability to make

132There is at least a likelihood that this person may have been a member of the Albis
or Albir family, which was resident in Gore in the 1780s and lived near the building called
Government House (built by Marie-Thrse Rossignol and her husband Blaise Estoupan
de Saint-Jean in 1753). See the plan of the island of Gore made by Evrard Duparel, c.1780,
bibliothque Richelieu, Paris, cited in Angrand, Celeste, 57, 78. In addition, the 1767 census
of Gore mentions Victoria et Marie Albis (or Albia) as living at number 62 and 44: ANOM,
C6/15, folio 101, Census of Sngal, 1767.
133ANOM, Notsdom, receipt, November 16, 1788. The gift, a female slave, was delivered
to Jean-Charles Floissac, multre libre, in 1788. It had been received several years before,
but Anne Rossignol did not know where the young man was to be found; he had in fact
settled in Castries, Saint Lucia. ANOM, Notsdom, 203, contract of apprenticeship, Novem-
ber 16, 1788.
134ANOM, Notsdom, 783, donation, February 14, 1778. The aunt had apparently given
Anne Rossignol the two children in the first place: ANOM, Notsdom, old code, 775, dona-
tion of February 14, 1778. As it happens, Anne and Marie-Thrse Rossignols efforts to
maintain ties to French colonial corridors of power through marriage were rewarded.
On July 21, 177[8], Louis-Armand Rossignol married Marguerite Aussenac, whose sister
had married Pierre Monneron, director of the Commercial Company of Africa, two years
before. See Knight-Baylac, Gore, 45; Delcourt, Gore, 5152; Angrand, Celeste, 58. Please
note that we have assumed that the marriage took place in 1778 on the basis of the dating
of the two notarial contracts created by Anne Rossignol in February 1778, which speak of
Armands future marriage and on the basis of the work of Marie-Hlne Knight-Baylac,
whose work confirms our reading of the historical record. That said, the acte de marriage
for Louis-Armand Rossignol does seem to support a reading of 1777 as the year in which
his marriage took place.
use of the labor of an apprentice.135 Floissac was, as it happens, also a man

of some importance, who had left Saint-Domingue to fight alongside the
American patriots.136
What was the free colored communitys view of these independent
women? In the patriarchal societies of the ancien rgime, peaceful con-
cubinage was doubtless more common than we would think, deafened
as we are by the anathemas and the religious condemnations of simple
fornication. Among people who lived comfortably, and even more among
the nobility, extra-marital relationships were notoriously common, but
followed precise codes.137 Studies of more humble social groups suggest
that this was common and acceptable behavior notably in the towns.138
Nonetheless, it corresponded most commonly with an intermediate step
before a more classic matrimonial project. A truly free union can be seen
mainly in the revolutionary context, and even then many people con-
demned them. In Saint-Domingue, and at Cap Franais in particular, well
before the revolution, the situation was very different.
At the moment of the marriage of Marie-Genevive, the group of people
assembled around her was numerous and from the most influential stra-
tum of Cap Franais free black society. Alongside Pierre Guillaume Pro-
voyeur, the companion of her mother, there were some relatives: Blaise
Ouaky dit Brda, half-brother of Marie-Genevive; the parents of Marie
Scipions two god-daughters, the married couple Jacques and Marguerite
Bou; her stepson Alexis Scipion; and finally Elaine, the mother of the
groom.139 Also present were some of the most important artisans of Cap
135ANOM, Notsdom, 203, contract of apprenticeship of November 16, 1788.

136The act of donation of a slave, ANOM, Notsdom, 203, November 16, 1788, mentions
his service in the Chasseurs-Volontaires de Saint-Domingue. It is possible that he came to
St. Lucia as a member of this unit since survivors of the Battle of Savannah were dispersed
to garrisons around the French Caribbean. See King, Blue Coat, 6668.
137In France, as well as in England and Italy, mistresses from the bourgeoisie, as well as
cavaliere serventi responsible for accompanying women of the nobility for diverse services,
existed in the sight and knowledge of everyone, to say nothing of the very official favor-
ites of the European sovereigns. See Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot, eds., Histoire des
femmes en Occident, vol. 3, XVIeXVIIIe sicle, eds. Natalie Zemon-Davis and Arlette Farge
(Paris: Collection Tempus, 2002), 106109.
138Dominique Godineau, Citoyennes tricoteuses: Les femmes du peuple Paris pendant
la Rvolution franaise (Paris: Perrin, 2004), 3363.
139ANOM, Notsdom, 1634, contract of marriage, October 5, 1786; ANOM, Notsdom, 1634,
donation, September 18, 1786. Her maternal aunt Marguerite Ccilia was absent, as was her
husband, the brother-in-law of her mother, who is the best known member of the gens
de couleur for our period, Toussaint Brda, known to posterity as Toussaint Louverture.
They lived near Marie Timbo, a few miles outside of town at Haut du Cap, but were not
especially well-off, and appeared only rarely in the notarial archives of Cap Franais. For
Franais.140 Some of them, like Jacques Bou, were neighbors from Haut
du Cap, although this roofer worked in Cap Franais.141 Others, like Fran-
ois Janvier Latortue, an important fisherman of Cap Franais, also owner
of a fine plantation of eighty carreaux in the neighborhood of Acul, might
have made a special trip.142
Were these artisans business contacts of the wealthy entrepreneur
Pierre-Guillaume Provoyeur or were they personal friends of Marie Scip-
ion? As the case of Jacques Bou shows, it is difficult to respond defini-
tively to this question, because the relationship between the couple,
which tightly interwove their personal and business interests, was so
close. Thus, the spiritual parentage of the two little Bous, Marie Eloise
and Marie Anne, was confided to the couple, not to Marie Scipion alone.143
If her companion chose executors more often from among the wider com-
munity of Cap Franais artisans (Joseph Rouanet, for example), Marie
was nonetheless equally appreciated as an individual for her qualities
as a manager and her honesty and featured in a range of testamentary
activity.144 She was thus designated the executor of the will of Alexis
Scipion in 1778, Blaise Scipion Ouaky in 1780, and also Pierre Charles
dArgele, a multre libre neighbor in Haut du Cap, in 1784.145
All these pieces of evidence suggest that, at a minimum, the particular
affective situation of Marie Scipion was accepted by the community she
lived in. But it is possible to go further and say that, in a general sense,
the free people of color of Cap Franais appear to have had a high degree
of solidarity among themselves regardless of status or particular nuance
of color, for the supportive network around Marie Scipion at the time of
her daughter Marie-Genevive was the norm in Cap Franais. Fewer than
5 percent of prospective brides and grooms in Cap Franais were alone
when they signed their marriage contract as compared to the 50 percent
background on Provoyeur, Marguerite Ccilia, and Toussaint Brda see Donnadieu, Un

grand seigneur, 100109, 15657, 17980, 306307.
140ANOM, Notsdom, 1634, contract of marriage, October 5, 1786. The notarial archives
show that individuals from this group regularly solicited for each others family acts to be
godparents, executors of wills, guardians of children, or witnesses.
141ANOM, Notsdom, 1634, contract of marriage, October 5, 1786; ANOM, Notsdom,
1634, donation, September 18, 1786.
142On Franois Janvier la Tortue, see Rogers, Les libres, 1: 204.
143For this relationship see the discussion of Marie Scipions donation of land to them:
ANOM, Notsdom, 1634, donation, September 18, 1786.
144ANOM, Notsdom, old code, 526, November 14, 1778; ANOM, Notsdom, 180, June 23,
1782; ANOM, Notsdom, 181, August 5, 1782; ANOM, Notsdom, 176, January 21, 1780.
145ANOM, Notsdom, 175, May 12, 1778; ANOM, Notsdom, 176, January 21, 1780; ANOM,
Notsdom, 187, August 9, 1784.
of brides and grooms in Port-au-Prince who were the only signatories at

this major social event.146
How, then, to explain the atypical case of Marie-Adlade Rossignol
who was only seconded by her mother and the Sieur Bance, common
witness of the parties?147 One simple hypothesis is no doubt that Marie-
Adlade and her mother were foreigners. Newly arrived in the colony,
perhaps they were not yet tied closely to other free people of color, some-
thing that the choice of master for the apprenticeship of Annes grand-
son Gabriel Durant also suggests. Like them, the rest of the 5 percent of
the free people of color who were alone at the signing of their marriage
contracts were either people from the countryside whose family had not
made the trip into town to the notarys, or foreigners (from the Span-
ish part of the island in the case of Juan de Avielles and the quarteronne
Catherine Beille, widow of Sieur Amago).148 This isolation was certainly
temporary, but it also may reflect a specific identity that the two women
had or felt. The signares were women of color who were free from birth
and who had no servile ancestors, unlike the free people of color of Saint-
Domingue. They might have wished their status to be different from all
the rest of Cap Franaiss free colored inhabitants. Therefore, perhaps
they preferred to remain a little apart from the others. As a matter of
fact, on the actual day of Marie-Adlades wedding, the four witnesses
present, Pierre Dordin, Charles Bonel, Joseph Roux, Charles Laroche were
all white inhabitants, contrary to what was ordinarily the practice in the
Cap Franais free colored community.149 It is important to note, however,
that this practice was very similar to what seems to have been usual for
wealthy migrants from Gore in French Guiana.150 Perhaps women like
Anne Rossignol, free colored signares of Gore, thought of themselves as
belonging to a different class, as suggested by their petitions in French
Guiana and this document here.151
146On the different structure of the societies of the two port cities, see Rogers, Les
libres, 2: 57688.
147In the language of the original act: Accord commun des parties. ANOM, Notsdom,
195, marriage contract, August 31, 1786.
148ANOM, Notsdom, 1167, Lamarre, August 19, 1786.
149ANOM, 85 MIOM 34, Act of marriage between Guillaume Dumont and Marie Adla-
de Rossignol, from the parish register of Cap Franais, September 11, 1786. For Cap Franais
free colored community usages concerning marriages, see Rogers, Les libres, 2: 57682.
150See Traver, After Kourou, ch. 6, 23640.
151On the signares position regarding their status and the free people of color in
French Guiana, see ANOM, Dpt des Fortifications des Colonies, Guyane, register 43, 3,
177, 182, 212. See also Traver, After Kourou, ch. 6.
At the end of the eighteenth century, it is difficult to have a clear vision

of the precise degree of recognition that the port societies gave to their
free women of color. There was no municipal self-government in the
French towns of the Americas before the Revolution, which would have
allowed us a rational analysis of their role in the leadership of the city, and
we do not have the archives of the parish councils of the two capitals of
Saint-Domingue, which might have helped to compensate for this lack.152
However, we do believe that free women of color did have a special place
in the ports societies. In 1760, the white residents of Cap Franais mobi-
lized to support the free colored midwife Marie Gurineau, who sought
to continue in her profession despite a new regulation forbidding people
of color to work as midwives.153 In the 1780s, the people of Port-au-Prince,
dazzled by the talent of the mestive opera singer Minette, permitted her
to perform and lead a brilliant career on the Dominguan stage.154 In both
cases, talent and efficiency were thought more important than color. The
women that we have described here were simply loyal employees, efficient
associates, concubines like Rosette Chateauneuf, or attentive neighbors
like Sanithe Dubreuil.155 But, on a much larger scale, all of them helped
expand the diversity of relations between the different groups of color of
Saint-Domingues port cities and helped those groups to understand one
another better, overcoming to some extent the barriers of color prejudice.
This major role of intermediary concerned relations between white inhab-
itants and inhabitants of color, but also relations within the community
of color. Race and status were potential sources of division within the
ranks of free women of color, as black and mixed-lineage, slave and free,
could have family and business ties or colliding interests. The urban port
environments of Saint-Domingue, however, tended to equalize the freed-
person and the person who was free from birth and favored the mixing of
people of different colors, origins, and statuses. In the cities, the friend-
ship between Marie Timbo Scipion, a freedwoman, and Provoyeur, who
had been born free, was not unusual, especially in Cap Franais, contrary
to what happened in the rural areas or in Port-au-Prince. Many women
like Marie Scipion and Anne Rossignol rewove family ties without taking
152In metropolitan France, widows and independent adult daughters could participate
in parish councils where they had the right to vote as heads of household.
153Moreau de Saint-Mry, Description, 1: 388; D. Rogers, Entre Lumires et prjugs, 83.
154Bernard Camier, Minette: Situation sociale dune artiste de couleur de Saint-
Domingue, Gnalogie et histoire de la Carabe 185 (October 2005): 463840.
155See above for their stories.
into account status or origin, although they did pay some attention to
color lines. Finally, all of those women participated in the creation of a
rich network of solidarity among peoples of color, compensating more
often than not for the dilution of patriarchal protective structures.
Conclusion
Numerous travelers or officials passing through Saint-Domingue during

the eighteenth century praised the women of color, all wonderfully beau-
tiful and tempting. If you believe Moreau de Saint-Mry, the most auda-
cious ones were the courtesans of color of the ports, and notably those of
Cap Franais. However, aside from some retail merchants, he suggested
that all the women of color, given the shortage of white women, had given
themselves to prostitution and debauchery. Should we believe these
observers? Moreau de Saint-Mry was an attentive and intelligent observer
of Dominguan society. We know, however, that he was also a defender of
the slaveholding order. He made the choice to vilify the free people of
color in an attempt to maintain a system that the revolution had already
destroyed by the time his Description of the French Part of Saint-Domingue
was complete.156 Even so, the travelers tales of the eighteenth century,
and the correspondence of some officers, seem to adopt a certain exoti-
cism and give evidence to some extent of the fantasies of these men, trou-
bled by the beauty of the Dominguan women of colornaked in the case
of slaves or superbly ornamented with jewels and beautiful clothing for
the free women. It is this exoticism and psychological climate that hardly
allows us to give unqualified credit to their reports. In Saint-Domingue,
as elsewhere in the Atlantic world, one part of the female population of
the ports was in fact composed of prostitutes and courtesans, respond-
ing to the needs of a numerous male population of sailors, soldiers, offi-
cers, and businessmen months or years away from their families, spouses,
or fiances. Nonetheless, the many women of color we have discovered
through the notarial registers of Cap Franais and Port-au-Prince seemed
to support their families, educate their children, free family members still
156Rogers, Entre Lumires et prjugs. See also the introductions by Etienne Tail-
lemite and Marcel Dorigny to Mdric Louis-Elie Moreau de Saint-Mry, Description
topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie franaise de Lisle Saint-
Domingue, new ed., ed. Etienne Taillemite with an introduction by Marcel Dorigny, 3 vols.
(repr.; 1955, Saint-Denis: Socit franaise dhistoire doutre-mer, 2004).
in slavery, and assure their own future through a much larger range of
activities than prostitution. This was made possible by the many oppor-
tunities offered by the port cities economy. These activities were more
likely to be in the urban sector than directly in the transatlantic. In this
context, a minority of rentiers and merchants even managed to reach
ease or wealth. Although we lack the studies on white womens economic
investment in the port cities that would allow us a complete view of the
situation of free women of color, we have found that their economic suc-
cesses, much greater than those of their counterparts in other French or
English Caribbean colonies of the time, confirm their great dynamism and
their high efficiency.157
Before the Haitian revolution, the port societies seemed to have rec-
ognized this situation. White Dominguans appear to have granted these
women an acknowledged place in society and permitted them a great
deal of economic and social liberty. Even those women who might have
been said to be lascivious in the sense that they were involved in infor-
mal relationships with white men, like Rosette Chateauneuf, found that
the urban environment smoothed their path to respectability. The affec-
tive relationship between Rosette and Sieur Chateauneuf, and the public
acceptance of her role, more closely approximated a conventional mar-
riage than a similar relationship of concubinage would have been treated
in most places in the eighteenth-century French metropole. Within the
free colored community, the economic independence of women like
Marie Scipion and Anne Rossignol also helped many of those women to
be respected figures among free people of color in a way that would not
have been possible in the countryside. By contrast, according to Stew-
art Kings work, women who lived independent lives in the countryside
seemed most often either the mothers of mixed-lineage families on plan-
tations, who had to defer at least publicly to their adult sons, or they were
among the poor and excluded.158
Nonetheless the very fact that the majority of these free women of color
in towns, like Rosette Chateauneuf, Marie Scipion, or Anne Rossignol, led
their lives most often independently from a father, a brother, or a husband,
seems to have worried some of their white and even free colored elite con-
temporaries. Those criticisms, which are usually analyzed as expressions
157Welch, Slave Society in the City; Verene A. Shepherd, Women in Caribbean History:
The British Colonial Territories (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1999); Anne Protin-
Dumon, La ville.
158King, Blue Coat, 186201.
of the growing racism of the end of the eighteenth century, could also be
seen as a reflection of the anxiety over what some elite contemporaries
perceived as a dilution of patriarchal rule. But, in fact, when Julien Rai-
mond argued in a memorial to the Minister of Marine that the free people
of color of Saint-Domingue were the colonys real bourgeoisie, he tried to
distinguish between the rural, mixed-lineage, planting elite, from which
he sprang, and the urban free colored merchants, rentiers, and artisans
like Scipion and Rossignol.159 But he may have spoken more truly than he
intended. We can see in the behavior of the urban free women of color
of Cap Franais and Port-au-Prince the true values of the modern bour-
geoisthe importance of family relationships, the priority given to wealth
and talent over traditional markers of social worth, and a willingness to
take advantage of what the market offered regardless of traditional stric-
tures on appropriate behavior for their race and gender. In this respect,
despite matrimonial situations often different from the metropolitan
norm, the women of color of the port cities of Saint-Domingue seem to
us to have built a counter-image of respectability which was accepted by
their neighbors in these urban communities.
159ANOM, F/3/91, Collection Moreau de Saint-Mry, pp. 19092, Troisime mmoire

Monseigneur le Marchal de Castries Ministre et Secrtaire dtat au Dpartement de
la Marine.
CONCLUSION
WOMEN IN THE PORT CITIES OF THE EARLY MODERN

ATLANTIC WORLD: RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT
Noble David Cook
In the past two decades, there has been a flood of studies of women, cov-
ering all aspects of their multifaceted roles, and we see an extension of
much of the best of that work in the chapters in this anthology, both in
theory and practice. Collectively, these essays move scholarship another
step forward in our understanding of the dynamics of the life experiences
of women in the bustling port cities of the Atlantic world. In the editors
introduction and in the notes of the contributors, students have an invalu-
able update on the status of the scholarship, and the nature and avail-
ability of the documentary evidence in their individual geographic and
chronological specialties. The editors set the stage well in their introduc-
tory essay, analyzing recent developments in theory and practice and
their relationship to the topics covered in this anthology. They stress that
there is a wide range of options for women in the port cities, and the
results presented by the contributors clearly show that. The editors point
out that if they suggest that variety while still holding onto what women
in Atlantic ports shared, this project will have been a success; it is in that
spirit that we offer the pages that follow. Indeed, the variety is striking,
as the ports under scrutiny range geographically from northern Scotland
to southern Spain and Portugal, to the southern parts of Africa and South
America, and beyond. Religiously the women may be Christian, Catholic
or Protestant, converts from Judaism or Islam, crypto-Jews, or practitio-
ners of various African belief systems. In the next pages we will exam-
ine some of these variables, while trying to discern the common themes
evolving from a shared experience in the Atlantic crucible.
First a cautionary note regarding chronology. The generations of
women whose life experiences are seen here ebb and flow from the late
fifteenth to early nineteenth centuries, a span of four hundred years. One
needs no reminder that the world of the mid-fifteenth-century naviga-
tors conducting reconnaissance of the West African coast and the Span-
ish and Portuguese settlers of the Atlantic islands of the Canaries, Cape
400 noble david cook
Verdes, Madeiras, and Azores was very different from the Atlantic world
of the Age of the Democratic Revolutions. The early decades of the first
European settlements, whether simple and small trading posts, as in the
case of the Portuguese, the summer fishing and fur trading camps of
the English on the islands off Nova Scotia, or even the first generation of
the Spanish in the Caribbean, provided different challenges and opportu-
nities for women than they experienced in the mature colonial port cities.
One wonders, did the women, both European and native, of the initial
wave have even greater freedom, greater opportunity, than those who
followed in later centuries? The iconic females, whether European or
indigenous, have been portrayed as playing an exceptional role during
the foundational period. Conversely, when the empires became fixed,
settled, did the women in the port cities fall under the same strictures as
imposed in their stable Old World homelands? Or had even their home-
land ports been transformed by the Enlightenment, early industrializa-
tion, and revolution?
Cities provided the space, public and private, and the opportunities
that would be presented to women who either lived in or migrated to
them. In fact, given the generally higher rates of mortality for city popula-
tions during this period, migration of men and women to the cities from
outlying towns and rural districts was more responsible for urban growth
than natural increase. The new settings would lie in either the newly cre-
ated cities on the non-European Atlantic coasts, such as New Amsterdam,
Port-au-Prince, Salvador da Bahia, Montevideo, or the older population
centers that were related to European expansion and the trade associated
with them, such as Aberdeen, Amsterdam, Rouen, Nantes, or Seville. In
general, these urban centers grew rapidly during the period, doubling, tri-
pling, even more, their populations over the centuries. Growth offered new
opportunities for many, for growth provided both challenges and avenues
for mobility at a level that was not normal in traditional, non-dynamic
economies. Opportunities resulted in upward economic and social mobil-
ity for some, and downward for others. The contributors to this collec-
tion highlight the successes. The question is, was positive upward female
mobility and agency during the period the norm, or the exception? The
authors generally note the successes, although there were failures too.
Legal, cultural, and religious considerations played a substantial role in
delineating the accepted boundaries of the possible expression of womens
agency. The laws centering around inheritance, marital property (dowry,
arras, joint earnings) and legal power to act in the courts that protected
conclusion 401
womens rights and privileges allowed Dutch and Spanish women ample
freedom of action and possibility of socio-economic mobility, as pointed
out in the chapters of Kim Todt and Martha D. Shattuck, and Alexan-
dra Parma Cook respectively. Jnia Ferreira Furtado highlights a similar
impact in the Portuguese legal system, both in inheritance and in inde-
pendent action in economic decisions. Dutch women had another advan-
tage in that literacy was stressed, and women in general received a better
foundation in the basics of writing and reading than other European
women. Also, their homeland was more intimately connected to the sea
and to trade than any of the other countries studied. The livelihood of
many families was related to commerce, and girls worked closely with
parents and siblings in the shops in their homes, learning the ways of
buying, selling, wholesaling and retailing, shipping, and accounting. Todt
and Shattuck stress that for the Dutch, marriage was seen as a partner-
ship: The idea of a partnership was a classic idea of a good marriage in
Dutch society. Although legal codes could differ in the provinces of the
Dutch Republic and overseas colonies administered by one of the trading
companies, in the cases presented here, husband and wife joined assets in
marriage. Inheritance also provided equal protection for the girls. As Alex-
andra Parma Cook demonstrates, in Seville the brides dowry, carefully
recorded, as well as the grooms arras that he gave her, legally belonged
to her before any division between the heirs took place. The husband had
custody of the assets, but had to protect them or face potentially unpleas-
ant consequences. Although the basic civil laws of Castile, including those
dealing with marriage and the family, were codified by the Laws of Toro
in 1505, and extended into the Spanish Atlantic and Pacific, separate law
codes (fueros) prevailed in other Spanish kingdoms such as Aragon.
In both the Dutch and Castilian cases if men traveled overseas they
were required to secure spousal permission. Both Dutch and Spanish
women, especially widows, were able to exercise virtually the same legal
authority as men; that is why women often chose to remain single rather
than to submit to marriage which constrained their full exercise of agency.
As pointed out by Todt and Shattuck, with the British takeover of Dutch
New Amsterdam, the legal position of women changed. Now, under com-
mon law, the wife fell under the domination of her husband. But here too,
widows were in a better position than married women, as seen in the sev-
eral cases highlighted in eighteenth-century Philadelphia by Sheryllynne
Haggerty. As she notes, by law women were under male domination, but
as recognized in 1718, whenever the husband was absent, the wife could
act as free agent to conduct the couples business. Yet the author notes a
sharp variation in stipends for similar work, and a very limited number of
fields in which women could engage.
The rule of law and custom functioned with greatest force in places
where the state exercised its authority for a long period. In the European
port cities there was no question of the impact of law and custom on soci-
ety. Old systems might be challenged and even broken, then transformed
in periods of crisis, as happened at the time of the French Revolution, but
this was rare. In firmly established colonial ports of the Atlantic world,
with ample European populations, homeland societal norms were rep-
licated. In the cases where the hinterlands of the ports were not under
European domination, all was in flux. European attitudes of civilized ver-
sus savage, Christian or pagan, surfaced immediately. Women in these
environments, whether European or native, faced very different chal-
lenges and opportunities. European women in general did not fare well
in the new hot and humid environments of equatorial Africa and tropical
America, filled as they were with insects and disease. Although the con-
tributors do not concentrate on these issues, sickness and high mortality
threatened women, as it did European men. Womens responses to the
new environment varied.
Conditions facing European women, particularly the English in Africa,
were exceptionally challenging. Ty Reese, in his analysis of a modest Eng-
lish castle-garrison on the Cape Coast of Africa in the eighteenth century,
presents one of the more compelling examples. He studies various types
of women there: a very small number of European wives or widows of
officials of the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, English women
who may have been felons who were sent to work in the garrison, female
company slaves, and the Fetu and Fante elite women, as well as African
townswomen composed of the same principal groups. One would be hard
pressed to find a more difficult set of conditions for the average middle-
class Englishwoman. Further, African women were very appealing to the
Englishmen. In the first place they offered easy and comfortable sexual
partners, and in the second, if they were elite women, they offered con-
nections with African kin and hence an opening to trade. Since salaries
of the men stationed at the fort hardly covered living expenses, most
engaged in trade, legal or not, as a way to secure advantage. Perhaps the
greatest female agency in this situation belongs to the native elite women,
who quickly became involved in the sale of textiles, especially cottons,
gunpowder, and other items, and, through trade, secured status both with
the English and the Africans. It was not unusual for a company official to
conclusion 403
marry one of the elite women in spite of a prior marriage back home. And
at times some of their offspring would be sent to England for education.
English or French women who migrated to the new ports in the Ameri-
cas often came as wives of administrators or well-to-do landowners or
aspiring merchants. Many more of these women went to America than
Africa, and although the adjustment could be difficult, there were much
greater chances for success in the New World. Natalie Zacek in her exami-
nation of white working women in the lesser British Antilles points to
the traditional paradigm that all the strenuous work was done by slave
women. Yet she finds in the 1753 census of St. John, capital of the island of
Antigua, that over a third of the 701 households were headed by women,
and only a fraction of these can be classified as elite. If these women were
household heads, what did they do for a living, she asks? They could not
all be rich widows, although some were, such as Esther Pinheiro, of Portu-
guese Sephardic origin who took over as major owner and operator of her
husbands shipping group when widowed in 1710. She inherited a small
fleet based in Charlestown, the capital of the island of Nevis, and often
sailed along with her ships on regular trips to England, Madeira, other
islands in the Caribbean, New York City, and Boston. The list of trade
items was impressive: sugar, molasses, timber, and European manufac-
tured goods. But Zacek finds that the majority of female household heads
she examined were less well endowed, and they engaged in more modest
activities, such as room rentals, the sale of dry goods, and the operation of
taverns. In order to run a tavern, one had to secure a license, and it was
expected that English women would be more likely to operate a clean
establishment, rather than a rowdy and dangerous one. In fact, licensing
to white women was fostered, for it was viewed at the time as a form of
poor assistance.
In the North American trading port of Philadelphia, Sheryllynne Hag-
gerty notes that there were more options for working women, given the
size and complexity of its economic base, in comparison to the English
cities in the Caribbean. Philadelphia was after all, in 1783 the largest port
and capital of the United States from 17901800. Its population grew from
about 42,500 to 67,800 during the decade. Some 39 percent of the bound
workforce were women, and between 10 and 20 percent of the household
heads were female. There were plenty of widows, as well as absent men.
There were historical and cultural explanations for a female presence in
the work force, and legal precedents. A 1718 act recognized that if a hus-
band were absent, his spouse could act as free agent to conduct the cou-
ples business. Such women engaged in varied activities in Philadelphia,
including trading, textiles and clothing, lodging and teaching (especially

of girls), nursing, and midwifery. Some were cooks and bakers, and a few
were artisans. Nevertheless, womens activities were substantially con-
strained and Haggerty finds that, in general, women were not as well off
as men; they earned far less for doing similar work and they often held
household jobs with low stipends.
What of working women of color? Exhaustively mining extensive notar-
ial records, Dominique Rogers and Stewart King provide excellent insight
in their reconstruction principally of the port cities of Cap-Franais
and Port-au-Prince in the French colony of Saint-Domingue in the period
17501790. Free women of color were economically important, for as the
authors point out, they made up two-thirds of the clients of color of nota-
ries in Cap Franais or Port-au-Prince who sold or bought assets between
1776 and 1789. Whereas rural black society headed by relatively well-off
black plantation owners was patriarchal, with tight social controls, the
port cities provided for the free woman a space of opportunity that was
unavailable to free women of color in the rural districts. The primary
economic activities they engaged in were in the domestic service sector,
commerce, or real estate, especially rentals. Domestic service could be as
simple as cleaning and cooking for someone, or as complex as running an
entire household, or, on the unsavory side, running a house of ill-repute.
Commerce could range from lowly street vendors of fish and fruit to shop
owners, or even shippers. Renters could range from letting a sole room or
bed, to a wealthy real estate investor. A good example is Anne Rossignol,
a wealthy resident of Cap Franais who was born on Gore in Senegal,
who during her life bought, sold, rented out rooms, houses, meeting halls,
warehouses, and owned a tall masonry house as ostentatious as any of the
best of the bourgeoisie. Although never married, she helped arrange the
marriage of her daughter to a white surgeon from France who worked in
the citys hospital. The authors also find that urban women had greater
mobility than their free black male counterparts. They note that even
housekeepers tried to save enough cash to open a business. And many
free women of color, like Anne Rossignol, owned and rented out slaves. It
can be argued that free women of color possessed freedoms even greater
than those accorded to the white women of the islands: freedom of move-
ment, freedom to make their own choices, and freedom to participate
directly and meaningfully in the creation of the creole society. What they
lacked, just as white women, was political freedom.
We note examples of free women of color who even had agency in cit-
ies in which they were a small minority, as in the case of sixteenth-century
Seville. Ana Ponce, for example, the free morena widow of sailor Luis de
conclusion 405
Caraballo, owned her own home; she also owned a young female slave
whom she freed in her 1599 will, and provided her with an ample dowry
for her wedding to a free black. Ana had taken in and overseen the care of
an orphaned mulatto boy and girl, and provided for the care and training
of each, should she die. People from all classes of society owed Ana Ponce
money for rentals and loans, including an elderly spinster of a wealthy
family with a fleet of ships and who held substantial personal property
of her own.
Many white women did exercise full agency. We have the case of Mar-
garet Hardenbroeck who migrated to New Amsterdam in the 1650s. As
documented by Kim Todt and Martha D. Shattuck, she had originally trav-
eled to the port city acting as an agent for her cousin. In 1659 she married
a wealthy landowner-merchant, and took over his properties on his death
two years later. She went on to marry another rich merchant, and even
under a more restrictive set of rules governing women after the takeover
of the Dutch colony by the English, directed a fleet of up to fifteen ships
engaged in transatlantic trade. Margaret Hardenbroeck, just as Ester Pin-
heiro did from her base on the English island of Antigua a half century
later, even sailed with them to and from New York, Holland, and London
as she engaged in business. As the authors point out, this kind of freedom
ended. It was not the men, the society, or the Dutch law that ultimately
curtailed womens trading rights. It was English control of the colony and
the restrictive English laws that did.
It is clear that in many cases women were not just business partners of
men, but were directly involved in the ownership and day-to-day opera-
tions of the company. Gayle Brunelle, focusing on the activities of the
Portuguese and Spanish conversos who lived in France, points out that
in the mid-seventeenth century Marie Sandelin of Rouen was referred to
in notarial documents as the general director of the business. She could
handle the accounts of the firm, obviously read and write with proficiency,
draw up bills of exchange, and prepare arguments to defend her interests
in case of legal challenges. In similar records in Nantes, Brunelle found six
other Spanish women running their own businesses, dealing in imports of
dye and fish oil, as well as exporting to Spain paper, books, and Breton
cloth. It would not be surprising if they were also importing raw merino
wool from the trade fairs of Medina del Campo, since all six women were
related to the famous banking and merchant family of Simn Ruiz, a resi-
dent of that Castilian market city.
Eighteenth-century Portuguese Maria da Cunha is an example of per-
haps an even more complicated case of agency. Jnia Ferreira Furtado
outlines her trajectory from the time she had to leave her home in coastal
Morocco to travel up the Amazon basin to become a frontierswoman. She

was the widow of a Portuguese nobleman, forced to leave their colonial
Moroccan fortress as a result of centuries of Muslim pressure in 1769. As
part of a scheme of the powerful prime minister, the Marquis of Pombal,
to extend Portuguese control into a wide swath of the Brazilian interior,
she, along with about 1,300 others from the fortress-city, was placed on
board a fleet of fourteen vessels. The intent was to transport the entire
citizenry and found a New Mazago in the basin of the Amazon River.
Each family group was given five slaves as partial payment to use on their
new land. Maria da Cunha was one of the successful ones, becoming a
landowner, farmer, and businesswoman, and supporting herself along
with one daughter and two sons.
In almost all cases, networking was a key to survival and ultimate suc-
cess. Early modern Atlantic port women networked well, through family
and extended kin, as well as through their regional and national ties and
ties to others in the same general profession. As we have seen in several
cases presented by the contributors, African women had especially strong
ethnic networks to function within, as well as their common experience
within a system of slavery. Others such as Sephardic women had one of
the strongest ties of all: a special religious identity as Jews, or as in some
cases, New Christians.
One of the most intriguing cases of networking is seen in the example
of the Frenchwoman Jeanne dEntremeuse, vividly described by Ernst
Pijning. Born in pre-Revolutionary France, she married while quite young
and had at least three daughters before her husbands death. Her family
links to aristocracy and the government bureaucracy, instead of helping
her, proved to be disastrous. She was forced to flee, as a result of the fears
created by the Reign of Terror, to the French Indian Ocean colony of Mau-
ritius, off the southeast coast of Africa. Perhaps witnessing what could
happen to her as a relatively well-connected woman, she decided that the
further away from the Terror in France the better. Jeanne adroitly used
her networks as she quickly engaged in commerce on Mauritius. When
she was able to return to France she had cash and goods valued at one
and one-half times the annual salary of a Brazilian viceroy! The wealthy
widow had commercial connections with merchants in the Spanish South
Atlantic ports of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, and around 1797 consoli-
dated her capital and set sail on the ship of a trader bound from Mauritius
to France, with the intention of stopping to trade in Buenos Aires. There
were a variety of nationalities onboard, and the ship sailed under what-
ever flag seemed most appropriate for the circumstances, suggesting the
conclusion 407
captain was already well experienced in contraband trade. Unfortunately,

instead of landing at the intended destination, they touched shore far up
the Brazilian coast, and were taken prisoner by the Portuguese governor
of Salvador da Bahia. With her charm and petitions as a poor defense-
less woman, the governor let her off the docked ship that was serving
as the prison of the illegals. As Pijning stresses, she quickly developed
friendships with elite women of Salvador, and used those connections to
succeed in a masculine world, [relying] on the cover provided by men
who articulated her transgressive behavior in the acceptable terms of
female weakness and helplessness. In spite of the fact that it was illegal
for her to trade in Portuguese possessions, she did, and was able within
seven months to increase her capital, contract another ship bound for
Montevideo, and set sail with her possessions. Misfortune again struck as
they were shipwrecked in the mouth of the Rio de la Plata estuary. She
managed to salvage enough to begin anew in trading activities in Buenos
Aires and Montevideo. By 1798, working within her business network, she
had amassed enough capital to sail to Rio de Janeiro to engage in more
trade, and within a year was able to set sail for her homeland, by way of
Lisbon. Upon her arrival, Jeanne was arrested. The honor of the viceroy of
Brazil in Rio de Janeiro had been jeopardized by her machinations, and
before leaving the official had sent a secret letter to Lisbon officials accus-
ing her of being a French revolutionary spy. Although she was in a difficult
position, once again, this time by exploiting her Portuguese and French
networks, she was able to secure liberty and continue to France. By skill-
fully using the ploy of feminine weakness, as well as calling on kin and
business and political networks, she not only survived, but also provides
an example of the ways in which agency can be exercised, if not to the
fullest in the absolute sense, at least in ways that pushed the boundaries
of societal constraints.
Many other examples of female agency are seen in the essays in this
anthology. They demonstrate clearly and decisively that traditional ste-
reotypes of women in the early Atlantic world, be they of whatever class
or color, should be set aside. As the authors of these essays show, social
and economic agency as well as geographic mobility are all significant
among women living in port cities. But are the examples provided the
norm, or the exception, skeptics might ask? Close reading of the chap-
ters reveals not one exceptional case, as certainly some of the examples
given above are, but numerous ones, less dramatic perhaps, but ample
to bring to life the realities of female success in a world in which the
legal codes and patriarchy in theory placed limits. In the realm of politics,
the Catholic Church, and military service the stereotype was largely true,
and continued until cracks in these institutions began to appear in the
twentieth century.
In close reading of documents that many past historians have neglected,
especially the hard-to-use notarial records, the parish registers, censuses,
business accounts, and court cases, women abound on almost every page.
In the parish and census documents there are just as many women as
men. And the contributors in this anthology have meticulously extracted
from the various sets of documents ample evidence to reconstruct their
life trajectories. Although they demonstrate that many women were able
to follow paths similar to those of men, this may not have been true in the
rural districts, as some of the contributors indicate here, but there existed
in the port cities the open space where women could and did exercise
those freedoms of action that may not have prevailed in the countryside.
And in migrating from the rural districts to the dynamic port cities, many
women seized new opportunities. The essays in this volume challenge stu-
dents of history to explore further the variety of the experiences of women
in the port cities of the Atlantic world, their similarities and differences.
Certainly we now know much more than we did two decades ago, but
we are still in the earlier stages of investigation of the true nature and
meaning of womens existence in this exciting transformative period of
global history.
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INDEX
Note: Special page references are indicated as follows: n = notes; bold = map reference;
italics = illustration; t = table.
For example, 334n56 means that the information appears in note 56 on page 334, 320
means that there is a map of the subject on page 320, 109t means there is a table with the
information on page 109, and 256 means theres an illustration of the topic on page 256.
Aberdeenix. See also plaiding trade; women in4, 10, 1314, 17, 24, 291314,
Scotland 31556
economy of70, 7477, 79, 8182, 87, African women256. See also Kriston;
8889 women of color
famine deaths in100101 big women346, 346n108, 347, 35152
poor relief in85, 8889 relationships with European
tax assessments in92n125 men300301, 3035, 4023
women in1819, 38 religious practices of33842
Aberdeenshire. See also plaiding trade; stereotypes of3013, 332, 344, 351,
Scotland 351n132, 356n146
dependence on plaiding trade of38, Africans
8182, 87, 96102 Akan17, 292, 29394, 293n5, 295
famine deaths in101 Baun321, 324, 326, 334, 336n64, 339,
poverty of90 34445
women of1819, 38, 69, 71 Biafada324
Abreu e Lencastre, Maria rsula Fante28788, 29293, 4023
de27880 Felupe/Djola321
adultery3023. See also marriage Fetu28788, 29293, 4023
Africa, Eastix Mandinga321, 323, 324, 341
Mozambique22324, 262, 26465 Pepel24, 321, 32425, 334n56, 343, 345
Zambeziaix, 26263 agency, factors in the construction
Africa, Westix, 320. See also Cacheu; of4n9, 924, 233, 26062, 400408
Cape Coast agriculture. See also crop failures;
Anomabu301, 304, 308, 310 plantations
Bissau320, 322 womens participation in199n50, 258,
Elmina291, 315n3, 350, 355n142 26869
Farim317, 321, 322, 323, 323n21, 337 Akan17, 292, 29394, 293n5, 295. See
Gambia308, 350 also Africans
Geba317, 322, 323n21, 330, 337 Alcipe. See Almeida Portugal, Leonor de
Gold Coast29192 Aldana, Mara de5152
Kaab17, 323, 323n21 Alfaro, Ins de4850. See also Luis,
Luandaix, 24, 262n35 Gaspar
Ouidah1617 Almansa, Gernima de4445, 66
Senegambia13, 17, 24, 328 Almeida Portugal, Leonor de, Countess of
Upper Guinea32526, 332, 344 Oeynhausen, Marquise of Alorna246,
development of13, 1617 246n104, 247, 284
gender in4, 1314, 31556 Alorna, Marquise of. See Almeida Portugal,
geography of316, 32021 Leonor de
proletarianization in1819 Amazon River255, 256, 273
trading patterns in13, 1617, 316, 318, American Revolution. See American War
32125, 32628 for Independence
428 index
American War for Independence103, Parnaba259, 260

106, 236 Recifeviii
Amsterdamix, 8, 12, 14, 179, 208 Rio de Janeiroviii, 23435, 251
Sephardic migrants in2223, 156, 157, Salvador da Bahiaviii, 226, 227n41,
160 227n45, 23435, 25152, 400
Andino, Ana de6667. See also Dutch sugar plantations in38, 69,
Almansa, Gernima de 7475, 80, 9293
Angeles, Luisa de los6263 illegal trade with Spanish
Anomabu301, 304, 308, 310. See also America23435
West Africa rebellion in76
Antigua12930, 147, 150, 403. See also reconquest of77
British West Indies Brempon Kudwo. See Caboceer, Cudjoe
arras (grooms marriage gift)47, 49n22, Brew, Richard304
51, 52, 400401 Bridgetown28
assimilation and acculturation British Caribbean. See British West Indies
effects on womens commercial British civil wars (16391660)80, 86
activities151 British West Indiesviii
facilitated by riverine relay trade325 Antigua12930, 147, 150, 403
language as a factor in151, 158, 160, 179 Kingston (Jamaica)28
marriage and159, 16162, 169, 170, Leeward Islandsviii, 3940, 12750
17176, 182, 269 white working class in12729,
resistance to161, 3034 13738
womens role in33132 womens activities in12739, 14245,
Augsburg15 14750, 403
brokers. See tungums
bakers46, 58, 12223, 366, 404 Buenos Airesviii, 234
Bank of North America104, 11112
Baun321, 324, 326, 334, 336n64, 339, Caboceer, Cudjoe29495, 29597.
34445. See also Africans See also birempons
Baptista, Joana27378 caboceers293, 294, 294n11, 296, 304
bath houses36162 Cacheuix, 320. See also West Africa
beaver. See fur trade history and description of315n3, 319,
beer houses119. See also punch-houses; 321, 32223, 339n74
taverns attacks against324, 343
Belmviii, 272. See also Brazil demographics of31718, 329
Bernal, Juana6466 evolution of gender roles in31556
Beverwijckviii, 186n12, 187, 18889, 201. fortification of324, 325
See also New Netherland trading community of336
Biafada324. See also Africans tungums role in24, 288
big women346, 346n108, 347, 35152. See Cacheu River315n3, 321
also birempons cafusos/cafusas273, 273n75, 274, 278
birempons294, 294n10, 346n108 Cap Franais289, 360, 376, 39193. See
Bissau320, 322. See also West Africa also Saint-Domingue
Boa Viagem (ship)22426, 230. See also Cape Coastix. See also West Africa
Tavares, Eleuterio overview of1617, 28788, 29192,
Bordeaux23, 156, 159, 160. See also 3057
France place of women in1819, 28788,
bound labor. See indentured servitude; 291314, 311, 4023
slavery; slaves Cape Coast Castle291, 292
Brazilviii Cape Verde Islandsix, 320, 320n17,
Belmviii, 272 322n20, 325, 337. See also Portuguese
New Mazagoviii, 255, 25759, 260, empire
4056 capites-mores (crown-appointed
Parat229 governors)322, 325, 325n28, 326
index 429
capital. See also social capital in Saint-Domingue289, 36570,

capital, womens access to 37477, 397, 404
in Aberdeen70 in Scotland1819, 69102
in the British West Indies140, 144 in Spain44, 5859, 162n14, 4045
in France161, 162, 16869, 174, 180 in West Africa330. See also
in New Netherland2045, 2047 tungums
in Philadelphia20, 106, 111, 117, 123, domestic service. See domestic service
125 fur trading193, 19899, 2014, 203, 211
in Saint-Domingue372 housekeeping. See mnagres
Capuchin missionaries. See missionaries illegal trading11213, 2034
Carnegie, Lady Katherine, Countess of lodging. See lodging
Erroll9697 merchants. See merchants
Casas, Mara de las54 milliners11315, 117, 376
Castins War (16881697). See War of the networks of. See networks
Grand Alliance real estate investment. See real estate
Castro, Jos Lus de, Count of restrictions placed on1415, 30
Resende (viceroy of Brazil). retail. See retail
See also dEntremeuse, Jeanne; Tavares, shipping372, 401, 403
Eleuterio slave trading. See slave trade
dealings with Tavares230, 230n50 spinning8185
relationship with dEntremeuse230, tavern-keeping. See tavern-keeping
233, 23536, 23839, 24041, 250 textile production. See textile
denounces dEntremeuse224, 241, production
242, 243 trading24, 197, 2056, 317, 33031,
charitable works70, 88n102, 8990, 267 352n135, 4034
charity. See poor relief commoditization35, 70
Charleston28, 107 community of property4748, 19596,
charms341 260, 388
Chateauneuf, Rosette37879, 380, 381 Companhia de Cacheu345, 345n103
chieftaincy24, 262 Company of Merchants Trading to Africa
chronology399400 (CMTA)
cities. See ports and port cities foundation of292
civil death221, 221n19 company slaves of1819, 30710
Civille family17172 interactions with local elites287, 295,
class. See elite women; middle class; poor; 29697
working class relations with employees spouses305,
cloth trade. See textile trade 31011, 402
clothing industry11315, 137 as tenant-patron287, 292, 297300
CMTA. See Company of Merchants company slaves. See slaves
Trading to Africa concubinage. See also marriage;
Code Noir (French legal code)32 prostitution
coffee houses109t, 119, 121, 125 attitudes regarding332, 344, 37980,
commerce2, 8, 109, 17071, 176, 182. 391, 396
See also trade; transatlantic trade in Saint-Domingue360, 37881, 386,
commercial activities of women 391, 396. See also mnagres
in Brazil232 in Upper Guinea32526, 332, 344
in British West Indies3940, 13637, Connecticut River186n10, 186n11
403 Conspiracy of Tailors227n41, 228n45
in France151, 157, 15862, 16367, construction work29899, 3089
16870, 17781, 182 convents48, 217, 258, 282
in Italy11 conversos and converso-origin
in New Netherland152, 183214, migrants23, 15582, 162n14, 336, 405.
19597, 19798, 2079 See also crypto-Jews; New Christians
in Philadelphia3839, 10326, 109t corporatism1011, 19, 2024
430 index
Correction House (workhouse in in Philadelphia105, 108n21, 403

Aberdeen)8889, 95, 96n145 in West Africa1314, 308, 32930
Couto Cardoso, Balthazar do. See Abreu e dEntremeuse, Jeanne. See also Castro, Jos
Lencastre, Maria rsula de Lus de, Count of Resende (viceroy of
coverture20, 103, 106, 107, 125, 21213 Brazil); Pina Manique, Diogo Ignacio de;
craftsmen15, 18, 54, 55, 304 Tavares, Eleuterio
in British West Indies129, 136 overview of152, 218, 4067
in Saint-Domingue359, 365, 39091, use of gender expectations by216,
39192 23233, 23738
in Seville44, 54, 55 family of21819, 220, 222
in West Africa18, 304 flight to Mauritius21921
in competition with women15, 136 non-migr status of220n17, 221
slaves as18, 365 activities while in Mauritius22425
craftswomen15, 46, 109t, 12324, 366, arrival at Salvador de Bahia,
4034 Brazil22627
crime and punishment activities in Brazil22627, 22728,
disorderly activities121, 141 233, 23738
illegal trading. See illegal trading relationship with viceroy and
seizure of ships and goods by port wife230, 233, 23536, 23839,
authorities226, 229, 240 24041, 250
theft103, 11213, 12425 illegal trading by21516, 224, 23435,
transportation of felons310, 313, 402 23839, 24041
criminals. See crime and punishment interactions with privateers of224,
crop failures77, 100, 142 234, 24243
cross-gendering27880 use of letters of recommendation
crypto-Jews155, 156, 157, 167, 178, 336 by233, 235, 23637, 24041
Cunha, Maria da25758, 4056 denounced by viceroy224, 241, 242,
243
Dalmira, Dorothea Engrassia Tavareda. arrest of in Lisbon242
See Silva e Horta, Teresa Margarida da suspected of being a male spy215, 244
dance halls36162, 362n19 condemned for illegal trading24445
dashees. See gift giving imprisonment of24446
debt use of connections to obtain her
in Brazil277 freedom24647
in British West Indies142 release from prison of247
in France16667, 169, 17374, 175 petitions for compensation for lost
in New Netherland183n1, 190, 195, assets24749
2023, 208, 21011 dey294n11
in Philadelphia120 diaspora. See migration
in Saint-Domingue374, 38081 diversification10910, 115, 123, 125,
in Scotland82, 8586, 86n86 19899, 199n50
in Seville41, 42, 50, 5253, 5862 divination339, 342
in West Africa305 djagras. See Baun; Pepel
Delaware River186n11, 187, 214 Djola/Felupe321. See also Africans
demographics domestic service. See also indentured
of Cacheu31718, 329 servitude
of New Netherland186, 188n17, 191, in British West Indies137
191n26 in Saint-Domingue. See mnagres
of Philadelphia105, 108n21, 403 in West Africa317, 340
of ports and port cities12, 12, 14 as life cycle stage36364
of slaves28, 58, 25455, 308, 329, 330 wages and other compensation
demographics of women for6364, 85, 90
in Italy12 domestic sphere23, 37, 107, 11516,
in New Netherland186, 191, 191n26 12526
index 431
donas da Zambezia24, 26265, 26768, Elmina291, 315n3, 350, 355n142. See also
271, 278, 352 West Africa
Dorset, Patience148 Erroll, Countess of. See Carnegie, Lady
dowries Katherine
in France166, 175, 18081, 369n57 Espinosa Briceo, Antonio Ortuo
in New Netherland400401 de6062. See also Porras, Leonor de
in the Portuguese empire153, 25960, ethnicity. See mixed-lineage groups;
270 mixed-lineage women
in Saint-Domingue36869, 388 ethnonyms3n36, 329n41
dowries in Seville
administration of44, 4750 factory production9596
legal context of4142, 4748, 400401 family. See gan; networks, kin-based
parental favoritism and38, 55 famine19, 80, 99102, 310
slaves as part of63 Fante28788, 29293, 4023. See also
widows and44, 5052 Africans; Akan
wills and59, 6163, 65, 66 Farim317, 321, 322, 323, 323n21, 337. See
Dunbar, Mrs.13435 also West Africa
Dundee101. See also Scotland Felupe/Djola321. See also Africans
Dutch East India Company18687 feme covert20, 103, 106, 107, 125, 21213
Dutch West India Company33, 7476, feme sole106
74n21, 80, 18586, 186n13, 187n16, 205 fetishes295, 295n12, 300, 303, 304
Dutch women192 Fetu28788, 29293, 4023. See also
education of19193, 191n27, 193n29 Africans
legal rights of19597, 213, 401 fingrams (lighter-weight serge cloth)79.
participation in trade18385, 186, 188, See also plaiding trade
18995, 196214 food provision109t, 12223
Fountaine, John31112
East Africaix France. See also Rouen
Mozambique22324, 262, 26465 Bordeaux23, 156, 159, 160
Zambeziaix, 26263 Nantesix, 151, 155, 17677, 400
East India Company. See Dutch East India overview of womens activities in405
Company Franciscan missionaries. See missionaries
education by women11718, 33132, freed people5859, 267, 272, 273, 276,
4034 387. See also Ponce, Ana (freed slave);
education of women Scipion, Marie
literacy rates64n73 French Caribbean. See Saint-Domingue
Dutch19193, 193n29, 193n30, 195 French Guianaviii, 367
in France15960 French Revolution21821, 224n29, 225, 402
in New Netherland152, 191n27, 401 Fresh River. See Connecticut River
in Philadelphia20, 11718 funerals251, 267, 28081, 296, 296n17,
in Portugal28182 297n20, 300n39
in Saint-Domingue387 fur trade185, 188, 2014
in West Africa337 womens participation in193, 19899,
elite women 2014, 203, 211
in Brazil23132, 25560
in British West Indies128 Galicia16, 48n16, 50n27, 55n46, 63n67,
in Europe10, 22122 217, 223. See also Spanish
in the Portuguese empire153, 23132, Gambia308, 350. See also West Africa
25560, 26071, 28184 Gambia River16, 317n7, 323n21, 332n53,
in West Africa10, 293, 294 336n64, 337, 348
agency of24 gan (trading lineages)327, 33132,
expectations regarding33, 23132 34547, 347n114, 349, 35051, 354, 356
social status versus financial security Geba317, 322, 323n21, 330, 337. See also
of5960 West Africa
432 index
gender. See also gender norms; gender Gonalves Francs, Jorge335, 338, 342.
roles See also Peres, Crispina
corporate influences on10 Gonzlez, Francisca44
cross-gendering27880 Gteborg12
and hybridity34, 56, 89 Graham, Maria232n54
as locally defined4, 67 Gro-Par (trading company in
in West Africa4, 1314 Brazil)258
as window on dynamics of ports2, 8, Grimmelshausen, Hans Jakob Christoffels
2526, 252 von12
gender norms (presumed nature of men grumetes318, 324, 32728, 330
and women). See also gender; gender Guadalquivir River42
roles Guedes de Brito, Joana26869
change over time399400 Guinea Bissau. See West Africa
flexibility of4 Guinean Creole. See Kriol
in Galicia21718
masculine versus feminine Haiti. See Saint-Domingue
behavior215, 244, 27880 handicrafts. See craftsmen; craftswomen
official views of women versus Hardenbroeck, Margaret
realities21732, 24950 commercial activities of183, 198, 203,
in the Portuguese empire153, 21718, 208, 212, 405
23132, 252, 255, 35152 overview of183, 183n2, 405
regarding womens commercial Havanaviii, 27
activities103, 13436, 18385, heads of household, women as
21518, 35860 in Brazil254, 26869
in West Africa29394, 3089, 35152 in British West Indies13132, 403
women as civilizing force37778 in East Africa26364
women as weak, helpless21819, 232, in France158, 159
24849, 407 in Philadelphia105, 1078, 403
womens challenges to15153, 352 in Saint-Domingue387
womens sexuality and137, 3013, 332, in West Africa329
351, 357, 37778, 395, 396 healers335n60, 338, 339, 340, 341, 342
womens use of152, 216, 34849 Hendricks, Geertje19899
gender roles (male and female activities). hide trade199, 210, 235, 238, 239, 321,
See also gender; gender norms 345. See also fur trade
in the British West Indies3940 honor
in France151, 15758, 159, 22122 feminine2223, 63n67, 23132, 27178,
in New Netherland15152 272
in Philadelphia3839, 1017, 10910, masculine24950, 27881, 407
113, 116, 119, 123, 12526 as linked to nobility171, 261, 265,
in Portugal28384 27172
in the Portuguese empire15253, public and private aspects of265, 272,
21718, 219, 23132, 24950, 251, 27475, 278
27881 Hudson River186, 186n10, 186n11, 188n19,
in Scotland38 211
in Seville3738 hybridity2, 34, 56, 6n15, 2434, 3436,
in West Africa31556 28789
Genoa11
Gernima, Mara5253 Iberians. See Portuguese; Spanish
Ghana. See West Africa illegal trading. See also dEntremeuse,
gift giving294, 29697, 298300 Jeanne; Tavares, Eleuterio
Goa261, 262, 26465, 279 between Brazil and Spanish
Godinho, Simoa26667 America22830, 23435, 23840
Gold Coast. See West Africa between Mauritius and
Gomes, Ambrsio345, 345n103. See also Mozambique22324
Vaz de Frana, Bibiana in New Netherland2034
index 433
in Philadelphia11213 Kriston. See also grumetes; Peres, Crispina;

in West Africa324n24, 338, 34547, tungums
345n106 development of Kriol by318
womens participation in11213, port communities of32833
2034, 21516, 23940 religious beliefs and practice of31718,
illegitimate children6163, 62n63, 332, 334, 335, 33839, 34142
63n67, 84, 289, 38788 as traders and brokers288, 31719, 321,
immigrants. See migration 32324, 325, 326n29, 32728, 344, 355
indentured servitude20, 105, 107, 125, 403 Kwadwo Egyir. See Caboceer, Cudjoe
India. See Goa
Indians261, 262, 26465, 279, for Native labor, forced273. See also slavery
Americans see indigenous peoples labor, wage. See wage labor
(American) lanados317, 32124, 321n19, 338. See also
indigenous peoples (African). See Africans traders
indigenous peoples (American)2012, language
202n56, 2034, 205, 2067, 254, 27374, as factor in assimilation151, 158, 160,
278 179
inheritance. See also wills as factor in trading activities151, 332
daughters and52, 55, 55n46, 61, 401 slaves as translators288
as financial security for women4142, Larcher, Antoine Ren226n41
13132, 260 law and legal codes. See also crime and
laws concerning4142, 47, 55, 62n63, punishment; licenses; marriage; power
195, 213 of attorney
of mixed-lineage children3067 antenuptial contracts19697
inns. See lodging arras47, 49n22, 51, 400401
Inquisition, Portuguese in Cape Coast303, 305
in Portugal167, 323 civil death221, 221n19
in West Africa24, 326, 332, 33436, Dutch19597, 401
340, 344, 35355. See also Peres, indigenous Americans and206
Crispina inheritance4142, 47, 55, 62n63, 195,
Inquisition, Spanish44, 6061, 167, 332, 213
344 Laws of Toro49n22, 55n45, 62, 62n63,
investment38, 5455, 16061, 169, 17176, 401
17778, 18081, 209n81. See also real legal status of women1415, 4142,
estate, womens investments in 1067, 152, 18384, 18997, 259
Isle of France. See Mauritius mercantile policies225, 235
Italy11, 12, 391n137 in New Netherland184n4, 187n16, 401
in Portuguese empire153
El Jadida, Morocco. See Mazago regarding prostitution137
Jesuit missionaries. See missionaries rights and status of wives103, 106,
Jews2223, 13334, 15556, 156n3, 162n14, 18997, 260, 33031
167, 406. See also conversos; crypto-Jews; Siete Partidas32
Sephardim slaves and275, 276n83, 277n86
Joncke, Maritie Jans21011 Spanish32, 49n22, 55n45, 62, 401
spread of25, 32
Kaab17, 323, 323n21. See also West Laws of Toro49n22, 55n45, 62, 401
Africa Leeward Islandsviii, 3940, 12122,
Kaufsystem (system of textile 12750. See also British West Indies
production)87 Len, Francisca de5051
King Williams War (16881697). See War Lerma, Yez de164
of the Grand Alliance letters of recommendation215, 22728,
Kingston (Jamaica)28 233, 235, 23637, 24041
kriason (wardship)33132 licenses
Kriol (Guinean Creole)318, 322n19, beggars licenses142
328n36, 330, 332, 346, 352 midwifery licenses119n68
434 index
retail and trading licenses11213, 211, as partnership194, 19596, 401

24849 polygyny29394, 294n7, 32526
tavern-keeping licenses31, 12122, remarriage5051, 50n27, 195n36
13942, 14344, 403 rights and status of wives103, 106,
travel licenses48 18997, 260, 27071, 33031
Lisbonix, 267, 267n54, 284 womens attitudes toward38687
literacy, of women Maryland184, 191n26
Dutch191n27, 192, 193, 401 matriliny13, 24, 288, 29394, 295, 351
Portuguese157, 158, 178, 181 matronage35054. See also patronage
Spanish41, 64n73, 67, 157, 158 Mauritiusix, 21921, 22324, 239
Livingston, Alida Schuyler189, 189n21, mazaganistas257, 258
213 Mazago (El Jadida, Morocco)ix, 255,
lodging. See also real estate 257. See also New Mazago
rental practices in Seville58n54, 61 medicine299, 338, 340, 341, 342, 352n133
lodging as female commercial activity mnagres (housekeepers)
in British West Indies13435, 403 affective relationships of37981
in Philadelphia39, 108, 109t, 11517, housekeeping as life cycle
120, 125, 4034 stage36364
in Saint-Domingue37071 as providers of sexual services36061,
in Seville38, 4546 363, 363n26, 37881
Luandaix, 24, 262n35. See also West salaries of36263
Africa services provided by36061, 362, 363,
Luis, Gaspar4850. See also Alfaro, Ins 37981
de Mendes, Isabel167, 168, 181
luxury goods292n4, 29394, 296, merchants. See also merchants, women as;
298300 traders
absences of44, 54
Machado, Genevieve167 exploitation of labor by38, 7071,
male absence 9192, 96, 98
in France159, 166, 16970, 18081 illegal trading by. See illegal trading
in Philadelphia105, 4034 involvement in the Atlantic
in Spain44, 4647, 5658, 223 trade73n18, 151, 155, 15657, 359
in West Africa330, 352 networks and reputation of17778,
Mandinga321, 323, 324, 341. See also 200201, 20910, 21314
Africans participation in plaiding trade of19,
mantua makers11315 69, 7677, 78, 87, 9899
Maria I, mother of King Joo VI of poor relief efforts of20n57, 8889
Portugal251 relay trade and13, 316, 318, 32125,
Marie-Genevive38788, 39193, 32628
391n139. See also Scipion, Marie riverine trade and. See riverine trade
markets, womens participation in21112 service nobility and253, 26566
marriage. See also arras; concubinage; in Southeast Africa264
dowries; wives travel by86n91, 170
antenuptial contracts19697 merchants, women as. See also
arras47, 49n22, 51, 400401 dEntremeuse, Jeanne; Rossignol, Anne;
and assimilation159, 16162, 169, 170, Vaz de Frana, Bibiana
17176, 182, 269 in the British West Indies13334
as business arrangement26970 in France151, 157, 159, 16367, 16870
common-law300301, 3035 invisibility of250
economic aspects of47, 19596, in New Netherland183214, 19798,
38789, 400401 200201, 20711
mixed marriages300301, 3035, in Philadelphia11112
32526, 388 in Saint-Domingue36667, 396, 397
network-building and324, 331n50, 351 in West Africa. See tungums
index 435
mestizo, use of term. See ethnonyms stereotypes regarding. See stereotypes

mestizos/mestizas266, 269, 329, 333n53 mobility (freedom of movement). See also
mestras (tutors)33132 travel
middle class10, 22, 24, 254, 4023 mens22829, 22930
women10, 1920, 22, 24, 4023 restrictions on womens17, 16970,
midwifery46, 11819, 119n68, 137, 394, 180, 217, 23132, 255, 258
4034 womens184n3, 4078
migration mobility (social)
as characteristic of Atlantic world in France161, 17071, 182
2, 25 in Portuguese empire26768
communities shaped by2224 for slaves and freed slaves5859,
coping with the effects of2122 267
of Creole populations367n45 in West Africa31819, 33132
effects on Philadelphia105 Montevideoviii, 225, 400
effects on West African Moreau de Saint-Mry, Louis-Elie361,
development1617 362, 363n26, 37778, 381, 395
effects on women1120, 2324, 35, 151, morgado (entailed estate)266
251, 31114 Moriscos (Muslim converts to
to France15582 Christianity)44, 58, 64
from Mazago to New Mazago255, Mother Courage (fictional character)12,
257 10, 19, 22, 2930
to Saint-Domingue358, 370n65 Mozambique22324, 262, 26465. See
as urban phenomenon12, 1516, also East Africa
15657, 25152, 255, 26768, 280, 400 mulato, use of term. See ethnonyms
military, womens participation in251, mulatos/mulatas49, 65, 254, 270, 329,
27880 332n53, 405
milliners11315, 117, 376 Muoz, Catalina6364
Miranda, Juana de164
missionaries317, 332, 332n52, 332n53, Nantesix, 151, 155, 17677, 400. See also
338 France
mixed-lineage groups Napoleonic wars225, 230, 235, 246n104
influence of2632 Native Americans. See indigenous peoples
in Portuguese empire25455, 26165, (American)
329 Navigation Acts (1660)93, 208
in West Africa3057, 329 Netherlands16n44. See also Amsterdam
mixed-lineage women256. See also laws of184n4, 191, 19597
donas da Zambezia; Peres, Crispina; plaiding trade and69, 73, 74, 79, 91
Rossignol, Anne; Scipion, Marie; Vaz de womens place in19192, 195, 208,
Frana, Bibiana; women of color 209n81, 211
in British West Indies128, 13435, networks. See also social capital
13637 mutual-aid339, 34142
in French Caribbean28889, 388, personal233, 293
39495 in West Africa13, 3035, 339, 34142,
in Portuguese empire153, 26165, 348, 35051, 355
262n35, 26667, 26871, 278, 285 womens creation and maintenance
challenges faced by2728 of10, 152, 3035, 35051, 355, 406
honor and27178 networks, commercial
marriage and26970, 388 of African women301, 318, 32526, 331
as members of service nobility26162, of the Baun336n64
26364, 268, 271, 285 concubinage and32526
prejudices against269, 306 created by Jeanne dEntremeuse216,
prostitution and13435 22730, 233, 23536, 23738, 240
sexual stereotypes regarding137, 357, of Portuguese merchants in
36162, 363n26, 378, 395, 396 France15657
436 index
of Spanish merchants in France Oeynhausen, Countess of. See Almeida

15657 Portugal, Leonor de
in West Africa323n21 Ogua. See Cape Coast
networks, kin-based Ouidah1617. See also West Africa
gender and2526
of Kriston women324, 33132, 33536, panyar305n53
33738, 345 Parat229. See also Brazil
lineal circulation and2526 Parnaba259, 260. See also Brazil
marriage as part of26970, 331n50 patriliny13, 17, 3334, 293, 332
in New Netherland199201 patronage24, 287, 297300, 324
of Portuguese merchants in pawnship17
France156, 16970, 17879 pensions. See poor relief
in Saint-Domingue38991, 39193, Pepel24, 321, 32425, 334n56, 343, 345.
39596 See also Africans
in Seville38, 60 Peres, Crispina. See also Gonalves
of Spanish merchants in France156, Francs, Jorge; Kriston
16970 accusations against333, 334, 335
in West Africa18, 24, 33132, 402 trial of333, 33435, 336, 353
New Amsterdamviii, 18689, 186n12, 401, sentencing and excommunication
405. See also New Netherland of342
New Christians. See also crypto-Jews; return to Cacheu342n90
Kriston; Moriscos; Sephardim education of337
in Europe151, 157, 159, 16263, 17879, illness of352n133
406 language skills of353
in West Africa321n19, 323, 326n33, networks of335, 336, 33738, 354
33536, 338, 343 religious practices of338, 33942
New Mazago (Brazil)viii, 255, 25759, compared with Bibiana Vaz35254
260, 4056. See also Mazago Prez, Matheo5658
New Netherlandviii Philadelphiaviii
Beverwijckviii, 186n12, 187, 18889, demographics of105, 108n21, 403
201 economy of1045, 109
New Amsterdamviii, 18689, 186n12, womens place in1920, 3839,
401, 405 10326, 109t, 4012, 4034
access to river transport of186n10, Pina Manique, Diogo Ignacio de215,
188n17, 188n19 216, 23637, 242, 24445. See also
demographics of186, 188n17, 191, dEntremeuse, Jeanne
191n26 Pinheiro, Esther13334, 403
governance by Dutch West India plaiding trade. See also textile production;
Company187n16 textile trade
laws and legal codes of33, 184n4, overview of6971, 7879
21213 description of cloth, social
take-over by British21213 context7879
womens status in33, 152, 186, 21314 domestic forces affecting76, 8081,
New York City. See New Amsterdam 82n60, 99
Nine Years War (16881697). See War of external forces affecting7477, 80,
the Grand Alliance 81, 99
nobility171, 25354, 26061, 26566, importance of low labor costs
27172. See also service nobility in7071, 7879, 92
North America. See Charleston; Scottish economic dependence on70,
Maryland; New Netherland; 79, 8182, 82n63, 96102
Philadelphia; Virginia plantations
notarial records41, 6768, 172, 18990, in the British West Indies40, 12829,
35960, 360n10, 408 13132, 13738
nursing118, 4034 Dutch38, 69, 7475, 77, 80, 9293
index 437
on Mauritius22324 poverty1415, 71, 90, 91, 12526, 14244.

in Portuguese Brazil26869 See also poor relief
in Saint-Domingue370n65 power of attorney
of So Tom and Prncipe266 granted by women46, 54, 57
politics granted to women42, 44, 67, 196, 378
taverns as site for14448, 145n51 prazos (chieftancies)26263
women and1067, 195, 221, 251, pregnancy5253, 63n67
34450, 394n152, 404 Presa, Ysabel de la16364
polygyny. See marriage privateers99, 224, 225, 234, 235, 240,
Ponce, Ana (freed slave)5859 24243
Ponce, Ana (widow of Luis de professional occupations, womens
Caraballo)5859, 4045 participation in108, 109t, 11719,
poor relief. See also tavern-keeping; 12526
workhouses proletarianization1516, 1820, 18n51.
funding for20n57, 70, 88n101, 9899 See also wage labor
pensions85, 85n83 prostitution13435, 137, 36162, 395. See
for sailors20n57 also concubinage
tavern-keeping12122, 139, 14142, proto-industrialization71, 7374, 9091
143, 403 public sphere
workhouses8889 taverns and coffeeshops as key sites
poor women. See also Aberdeenshire; within32, 39, 12021, 13840
British West Indies; Philadelphia womens place in32, 223, 238, 250,
honor and27278 272, 274
invisibility in official records71n12, 73, punch-houses14344. See also beer
115, 122 houses; taverns
proletarianization of1820, 38, 8386 putting-out system87, 9596
shadow existence of1415, 115, 122
work demands of3031 Quaque, Philip31213
Porras, Leonor de6062. See also Quintanadoines, Marie de (widow of
Espinosa Briceo, Antonio Ortuo de Robert Le Hanyvel)165, 17475
Port-au-Prince. See Saint-Domingue Quintanadoines, Marie de (widow of
ports and port cities Thomas Guiffard)17274
characteristics of24, 6, 9, 186 Quintanadoines family17172. See also
corporate structures operating in1011 Quintanadoines, Marie de
demographics of12, 12, 14 Quintanadueas, Marie de. See
long-distance commerce and15657, Quintanadoines, Marie de
159 Quintanadueas family. See
migration as aspect of1516, 15657, Quintanadoines family
25152, 255, 26768, 280, 400
organizational impact of78 race8, 128, 137, 139, 25455, 394. See also
place of marginal groups in2122, mixed-lineage groups; mixed-lineage
11213, 138, 278 women; women of color
womens opportunities within107, racial stereotypes. See stereotypes
11213, 153, 255, 26768, 37477, 400 racialized labels. See ethnonyms
Portuguese real estate, womens investments in.
hierarchical and patriarchal culture See also lodging
of21718, 25253, 26061 in France151, 159, 165, 17274, 17576,
immigrants to France23, 151, 15582, 17778, 18081
167n37 in Saint-Domingue357, 360, 366, 368,
Portuguese empire. See also Brazil; East 37074, 396, 397, 404
Africa; West Africa Recifeviii. See also Brazil
overview of womens activities recolhimentos282
in21718, 251, 35051, 35456, relay trade13, 316, 318, 32125, 32628
4056 religion. See also witchcraft
438 index
beliefs and practices of Iberian women Ruiz, Maria163

in France156, 157, 161, 285 Ruiz de Cabrera, Isabel5152
beliefs and practices of Kriston rural women16, 71n12, 8283, 91, 98, 102,
women24, 334, 335, 33839, 34142 376, 386
beliefs and practices of West African
women33842 sailors
gender and2223, 25, 157, 285, 302, 351 in Philadelphia116
Rensselaer, Maria van189, 189n21, in Saint-Domingue359, 361, 395
19394, 198, 200201, 213 in Seville33, 44, 4546, 52, 56, 5859
Resende, Count of. See Castro, Jos Lus in West Africa327, 330, 339n74
de, Count of Resende (viceroy of Brazil) crew of the Boa Viagem225, 226,
retail, womens involvement in14, 72. 226n41, 22829, 239
See also trade poor relief for20n57
Dutch198, 401 Saint-Domingueviii
Italian11 Cap Franais289, 360, 376, 39193
in Philadelphia10910 male population of361
in Saint-Domingue36570 social and economic structure of358,
Spanish and Portuguese21 359n6, 363n21, 370n65, 37475
Rio de Janeiroviii, 23435, 251. See also women in28889, 35758, 35860,
Brazil 36162, 37477, 39597, 404
Ro de la Plata225, 234 Saint-Domingue, women of color of
riverine trade case studies of358. See also Rossignol,
in Brazil34 Anne; Scipion, Marie
in New Netherland186n10, 186n11, financial profiles of375
188n17, 188n19 marriages to white men388
in West Africa13, 316, 318, 32125, networks of39596
32628, 337 praise for383
rivers scholarship on35758
in New Netherland186n10, 188n17, social and economic roles of35874,
188n19 38183, 39597, 404
in West Africa316, 32021 social status of39495
Rodrguez, Isabel45 Saldaigne family17172, 17576
Rome11 Saldaa family. See Saldaigne family
Rossignol, Anne. See also Rossignol, Marie- salons237, 238, 284, 37778
Adlade Salvador da Bahiaviii, 226, 227n41,
overview of358, 36770, 38384, 404 227n45, 23435, 25152, 400. See also
early life36768 Brazil
family of384, 384n11, 389, 39091, Sandelin, Marie166, 16869, 405
390n134 Santa Ana of Triana (district of Seville).
intimate relationships of385, 385n115 See Seville
children of385, 387, 38889, 393 Santo Domingo, Andre Ruiz de16364.
assets and property owned by36869, See also Santo Domingo, Ysabel de
375 Santo Domingo, Ysabel de163. See also
Rossignol, Marie-Adlade (daughter of Santo Domingo, Andre Ruiz de
Anne Rossignol)36870, 385n115, So Tom and Prncipeix, 26667
38889, 393. See also Rossignol, Anne Schaw, Janet13435
Rotterdam12, 22 Scipion, Marie. See also Marie-Genevive
Rouenix. See also France overview of358, 38384
Portuguese immigrants in23, 151, 157, early life38485
15960, 16667, 17980, 182 family of386, 38788, 38990
Spanish immigrants in23, 151, 155, 159, intimate relationships of386
16566, 17176, 182, 405 children of386, 38788
Royal African Company (RAC)142, 292, networks of39193
298, 303, 304, 347n112 real estate purchases of374, 389
index 439
Scotland. See also Aberdeen; Skene, Alexander (Aberdeen merchant

Aberdeenshire; plaiding trade and historian)71, 7475, 75n26, 9293,
Dundee101 9596
effects of war and unrest in8081, 99 slave owners
famine of 16951699 in99102 restrictions on18n51, 33, 27576,
international trade and7071, 74n21, 276n83
94 slaves as27677
occupation of8081 slave owners, women as
political status of9394 in Brazil258, 4056
proletarianization in1819 in the British West Indies132,
women in1819 14243
Scots, migr populations of1819, in Saint-Domingue36465, 36769,
2223, 74n21, 93, 98n156, 134, 136, 253n8 373, 383, 387, 390, 404
seamen. See sailors in Seville33, 6367, 4045
seamstresses39, 46, 11315, 137, 237, 359, in West Africa330, 331, 33941
369 in Zambezia26263
seclusion of women217, 23132, 258, 260, slave trade
28182. See also convents; recolhimentos in East Africa22324, 264
Second Indian War (16881697). See War in West Africa29293, 304, 313, 318,
of the Grand Alliance 322, 334, 33638, 34347
Senegambia13, 17, 24, 301, 328. See also illegal22324, 235, 239
West Africa movement of slaves within358
Sephardim. See also Jews; New Christians womens involvement in5354, 264,
in British West Indies13334, 403 304, 330, 357
in Europe2223, 155 156, 157, 160 slave women14. See also slaves
in West Africa288, 32122, 321n19, as black wenches128
326, 332, 33536, 345 company slaves1819, 29293, 30810
service nobility. See also honor; nobility as competition for work13637
overview and development of153, 253, as cultural go-betweens288
26061, 27172 honor and27478
mixed-lineage persons and26162, as members of households5859,
26771, 285 6364, 331, 33940
womens role in254, 260, 26162, participation in trade by2056
26871, 285 as practitioners of native rites339,
Sevilleix. See also Spanish 340, 341
overview and description of42, 43, 44 prostitution of361
women in16, 3738, 4142, 4456, rental of36465
5768, 401, 4045 slavery. See also slave owners; slave trade;
sewant2024, 206, 208, 210, 211. See also slaves
wampum company slavery30710
sexuality, female15, 17, 2223, 231, 244 entered into voluntarily27378
of women of color137, 300303, legal codes concerning32
36062, 363n26, 378 in North America2021
shells298, 309 in the Portuguese empire25455, 258,
shipping371, 373, 401, 403 266, 267, 275
shop-keeping. See retail proletarianization as applied to18n51
shrines339, 341, 354 violence as an aspect of27576
Sibbald, Sir Robert100 slaves. See also freed people; slave women
Siete Partidas (Spanish legal code)32 as assets63, 380, 383
signares (free businesswomen of attitudes toward freedom275n82
Gore)367, 393 company slaves1819, 29293, 295,
Silva e Horta, Teresa Margarida 299, 300, 30710, 313, 402
da28184 as competition for work128, 129, 130,
silver trade156, 235 13637
440 index
demographics and origins of28, 58, in British West Indies139, 141, 14345,
25455, 308, 329, 330 14748, 403
given as wages362 in Philadelphia39, 109t, 11920, 12122,
manumission of58, 59, 6367, 39596 125
as members of households59, 6364, tavern-keeping as poor relief
305, 330, 331, 33940 in British West Indies139, 14142, 143,
as owners of property60, 205 403
as owners of slaves27677 in Massachusetts143n47
participation in trade by2056, 322 in Philadelphia12122
protection of275, 276n83 in Virginia143n47
as relocation payment258 taverns
rental of36465 regulation and licensing of12122,
as residents of port districts44, 138, 13942
327, 32930, 33940 as sites of social and political
rights of275, 27677, 277n86, 307 activity13839, 13940, 14548,
as soldiers264, 326 145n51
as status symbols295 taxes88, 92n125, 115, 122, 145, 160, 187n16,
as wedding gifts49, 50, 36768, 387, 226, 324
388, 390 textile production. See also plaiding trade;
smuggling77n34, 229, 343. See also textile trade
illegal trading dependence of Aberdeen and
social capital23, 171, 200n51, 331. See also Aberdeenshire on96102
networks Dutch76n32, 9192
South River. See Delaware River as female commercial activity39,
Spain. See Galicia; Seville 7778, 8183, 9798, 109t, 125
Spanish. See also Seville gendered division of labor in82, 97n151
immigrants23, 151, 155, 159, 16566, Kaufsystem87
17176, 182, 405 labor costs as important factor
missionaries332, 347 in9192
women in Spain3738, 5859, 162n14, linen production101
21718, 401, 4045 mass-production78
St. Johns130, 147, 403. See also Antigua numbers of producers involved
staple ports80, 92, 187 in82n63
starvation. See famine putting-out system87, 9596
stereotypes about women3940, 152, role of women in8186
288 in Scotland69102
stereotypes about women of color spinning83, 9798
in the British West Indies137 stocking production82n63, 95n141, 97
in Saint-Domingue288, 357, 363n26, weaving97n151, 101
378, 395 textile trade. See also plaiding trade; textile
in West Africa3013, 306, 351, 351n132, production
356n146 forces affecting76n32, 91, 99
sub tutela status of women19596 illicit smuggling and77n34
sugar plantations38, 69, 128, 129, 266 knitted stockings77n34, 79, 82n63,
sugar trade76, 104, 17980, 235 94n137, 99
womens involvement in133, 238, 403 Rouen as primary port in165
in Scotland69102
tangomos (male private traders)32124, textile trade, womens participation in
321n19, 328, 328n36. See also tungums compared to mens165n27
Tavares, Eleuterio225, 226, 22829, in France15859, 165, 17475
230, 230n50. See also Boa Viagem; in Philadelphia108, 109t, 11315, 4034
Castro, Jos Lus de, Count of Resende; in Scotland1819, 6970, 8687
dEntremeuse, Jeanne Thirty Years War12, 80
tavern-keeping as female commercial tobacco trade104, 187, 210, 214, 235
activity3031, 32 womens involvement in183, 210, 239
index 441
trade. See illegal trading; traders; Udny, Issobel8687

transatlantic trade Union of the Crowns (1603)93
trade directories1078, 108n21, 112
trade settlements32428. See also ports Vaz de Frana, Bibiana. See also Gomes,
and port cities Ambrsio
traders, West African. See also lanados; rebellion led by34546
tangomos; tungums capture of34445, 346, 348
attempts to control324n24, 326, 343 trial of333, 344
history of317, 323 penalties levied on348
involvement in relay trade32124 appeal efforts of34849, 353
Kriston as317, 32728, 33031, 344 royal pardon of349
mobility of32324, 32627 family of345, 348, 349
rebellious attitudes of343n93, 34546 illness of352n133
traders, women as. See also tungums language skills of353
American Indian women205, 2067 power and influence of344, 346,
in British West Indies135, 403 34950, 354
in New Netherland197211 trading activities of345, 346, 347
in Philadelphia39, 10813, 109t, 125, compared with Crispina Peres35254
4034 vecindad (householdership)42n3
in Seville38, 4445, 5455 Venice11
in West Africa317, 32728, 33031, Villadiego, Margarita de164
352n135 Virginia106, 120, 184, 200, 210
transatlantic trade. See also trade visitadores (religious inspectors)334,
as alternative to European-based 335, 336, 342, 349
markets81, 94
challenges and risks of73n18 wage labor. See also indentured servitude
Kriston connections to324, 347, 356 costs associated with7071, 9091
widows participation in13334, performed by women103, 211,
22223 298300, 361
womens participation in13334, wages
18385, 2079, 22223, 347, 356 for company slaves30910
transvestism. See cross-gendering for day-laborers85, 85n84
travel by women184, 185, 22223, for domestics86n90, 105
22427, 258, 259. See also mobility for servants8586
(freedom of movement) for textile workers8485, 85n83,
Treaty of Madrid (1750)257n17 92n122, 95n143, 9798
Treaty of San Idelfonso (1777)235 womens compared to mens105, 404
Treaty of Tordesillas257n17 wampum198, 2024, 202n60, 211.
Treaty of Utrecht145 See also sewant
Triana (Santa Ana of Triana; district of war
Seville). See Seville effects on plaiding trade80, 99
tungums (freeborn women traders and effects on shipping225, 226, 229, 240
brokers). See also Kriston; tangomos War of the Grand Alliance99
description and overview31819, War of the League of Augsburg
321n19 (16881697). See War of the Grand
case studies of. See Peres, Crispina; Vaz Alliance
de Frana, Bibiana War of the Palatine Succession
as cultural brokers24, 33132 (16881697). See War of the Grand
gan of331 Alliance
as heads of household329, 33132 wardship. See kriason
influence in trading communities324, Wars of the League172
32728, 349, 352, 354, 355, 356 welfare. See poor relief
parallels with donas da Zambezia352 West Africaix, 320. See also Cacheu;
political skills of349 Cape Coast
religious practices of332, 340, 341 Anomabu301, 304, 308, 310
442 index
Bissau320, 322 of absent husbands4447, 52, 68n85,

Elmina291, 315n3, 350, 355n142 103, 1056, 159, 190, 403
Farim317, 321, 322, 323, 323n21, 337 elite wives in Cape Coast29394,
Gambia308, 350 29597
Geba317, 322, 323n21, 330, 337 legal rights of103, 106, 18997, 260,
Gold Coast29192 33031
Kaab17, 323, 323n21 social and economic influence of
Luandaix, 24, 262n35 25960, 27071, 3035, 311
Ouidah1617 women. See also women of color; women
Senegambia13, 17, 24, 328 of mixed lineage
Upper Guinea32526, 332, 344 access to capital of. See capital,
development of13, 1617 womens access to
gender in4, 1314, 31556 agriculture and199n50, 258, 26869
geography of316, 32021 assimilation and acculturation and. See
proletarianization in1819 assimilation and acculturation
trading patterns in13, 1617, 316, 318, commercial activities of. See
32125, 32628 commercial activities of women
women in4, 10, 1314, 17, 24, 291314, craftswomen. See craftswomen
31556 cross-gendering by27880
West India Company. See Dutch West demographics of. See demographics
India Company education of. See education of women
West Indies. See British West Indies elite. See elite women
wet-nursing57, 118, 365, 368 European women in Africa29293,
widows. See also wives 31114, 4023
of CMTA employees305, 31011, 402 fur trading by. See fur trade
as heads of household108, 13132, gender norms of. See gender norms
158, 222 group identifications of2930
as honorary men22122 as heads of household. See heads of
legal rights of195, 195n36, 259, household
394n152, 401 honor and. See honor
leverage of31 illegal trading by. See illegal trading
poverty of70, 105, 141, 14243 and inheritance. See inheritance
remarriage and5051, 195n36 intellectual activities of237, 238, 284,
sexuality of244 37778
widows, commercial activities of legal status of. See law and legal codes
in Brazil25859 literacy of. See literacy
in British West Indies13335, 141, 144, marriage and. See marriage
403 as merchants. See merchants
in France15761, 164, 16567, 16869, middle class10, 1920, 22, 24, 4023
170, 17276, 18081, 182 military participation of251, 27880
in Philadelphia111 mobility of. See mobility
in Portuguese empire153, 238 and politics1067, 195, 221, 251,
in Saint-Domingue36566, 386 34450, 394n152, 404
in Scotland70, 83 poor. See poor women
in Seville4445, 5052, 5455, 63 public life of. See public sphere
tolerance of233 real estate investments of. See real
wills41, 56, 6768, 21011, 38182, 389 estate
Wit, Janneke de190. See also Wit, religious beliefs of. See religion
Johannes de resistance strategies of3031
Wit, Johannes de190. See also Wit, retail activities of. See retail
Janneke de rural16, 71n12, 8283, 91, 98, 102, 376,
witchcraft288, 33335, 340, 352, 35354. 386
See also religion salons led by237, 238, 284, 37778
wives. See also widows seclusion of. See seclusion
index 443
service nobility and. See service nobility viewed as jezebels332, 351, 351n132,
sexuality of. See sexuality 356n146
as slave owners. See slave owners, viewed as mammies351, 356n146
women as viewed as witches288, 333, 33435,
as slave traders. See slave trade 340, 352, 356n146
as slaves. See slaves women of mixed lineage256. See also
tavern-keeping by. See tavern-keeping donas da Zambezia; Peres, Crispina;
as teachers and mentors11718, Rossignol, Anne; Scipion, Marie; Vaz de
33132, 4034 Frana, Bibiana; women of color
textile production and. See textile in British West Indies128, 13435,
production 13637
textile trade and. See textile trade in French Caribbean28889, 388,
as traders24, 197, 2056, 317, 33031, 39495
352n135, 4034. See also traders; in Portuguese empire153, 26165,
tungums 262n35, 26667, 26871, 278, 285
trans-national forces acting on38 challenges faced by2728
wage labor and86n90, 95n143, 103, 211, honor and27278
298300, 361, 404. See also wage marriage and26970, 388
labor as members of service nobility26162,
women of color. See also women of mixed 26364, 268, 271, 285
lineage prejudices against269, 306
African. See African women prostitution and13435
big women346, 346n108, 347, 35152 stereotypes regarding. See stereotypes
as housekeepers. See mnagres wool trade. See also plaiding trade; textile
indigenous (American)2067, 273, 278 trade
occupations of13637, 28889, Scottish76n30, 82, 82n60, 87, 9596
298300, 330, 38283 Spanish76n32, 155, 172, 405
relationships with white and European workhouses85, 8889, 89n106, 95
men300301, 3035, 388 working class
of Saint-Domingue. in British West Indies30, 31, 39,
See Saint-Domingue 12729, 13638, 14850
sexuality of137, 300303, 36061, in Scotland90. See also Aberdeen;
363n26, 378 Aberdeenshire
as slaves. See slaves in Spain44, 58n54, 67, 162n14
as social brokers38183. See also world of letters28184
Kriston; tungums
stereotypes of. See stereotypes Zambezi River263
as traders317, 33031, 352n135, 4034. Zambeziaix, 26263. See also East Africa
See also Kriston; tungums Zamora, Catalina de5960

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(Atlantic World) Douglas Catterall, Jodi Campbell-Women in Port - Gendering Communities, Economies, and Social Networks in Atlantic Port Cities, 1500-1800-Brill (2012)

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Women in Port

Europe, Africa and the Americas, 15001830

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/aw

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Copyright 2012 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

List of Maps and Illustrations...................................................................... vii

Introduction: Mother Courage and Her Sisters: Womens Worlds

Section One: Metropolitan Frameworks................................................... 37

The Women of Early Modern Triana: Life, Death, and Survival

Aberdeen and the Dutch Atlantic: Women and Woolens in the

Ports, Petticoats and Power? Women and Work in

Between Lady and Slave: White Working Women in the

Section Two: Traders and Travelers........................................................... 151

The Price of Assimilation: Spanish and Portuguese Women in

Capable Entrepreneurs: The Women Merchants and Traders of

Can She be a woman? Gender and Contraband in the

Lives On the Seas: Womens Trajectories in Port Cities of the

Section Three: Interactions and Intermediaries..................................... 287

Wives, Brokers, and Laborers: Women at Cape Coast,

Gendering the Black Atlantic: Womens Agency in Coastal

Housekeepers, Merchants, Rentires: Free Women of Color in

Conclusion: Women in the Port Cities of the Early Modern

Map of the Atlantic world (courtesy of Tracy Ellen Smith)............ viiiix

Alexandra Parma Cook

Kim Todt and Martha Dickinson Shattuck

Jnia Ferreira Furtado

In the final stages of the project, we have been fortunate in having

Doug Catterall and Jodi Campbell

Gayle Brunelle (Ph.D. Emory University) is a professor of history special-

Jodi Campbell (Ph.D. University of Minnesota) is an associate professor

Douglas Catterall (Ph.D. University of Minnesota) is an associate profes-

in a variety of articles and book chapters. He currently has two ongoing

Alexandra Parma Cook is an independent scholar interested in the social

Noble David Cook (Ph.D. University of Texas) is a professor of history at

Gordon DesBrisay (Ph.D. University of Saint Andrews) is Associate Dean

Aberdeen Before 1800: A New History, edited by E. Patricia Dennison, et al.

Jnia Ferreira Furtado (Ph.D. Universidade de So Paulo) is a professor of

Sheryllynne Haggerty (Ph.D. University of Liverpool) is a historian of

Philip Havik (Ph.D. Universiteit Leiden) is currently Researcher at the Insti-

Silences and Soundbytes: The Gendered Dynamics of Trade and Brokerage

Stewart Royce King (Ph.D. Johns Hopkins University) is currently a profes-

Ernst Pijning (Ph.D. John Hopkins University) is a professor of history at

Ty Reese (Ph.D. University of Toledo) is an associate professor of history

Dominique Rogers (Ph.D. Universit de Bordeaux III) is Matre de con-

Martha Shattuck (Ph.D. Boston University) is the former editor and

Kimberly Todt (Ph.D. expected Cornell University) is a Ph.D. candidate in

Natalie Zacek (Ph.D. Johns Hopkins University) is a Lecturer in American

MOTHER COURAGE AND HER SISTERS:

Douglas Catterall and Jodi Campbell1

I made a reckoning of my remaining fortune, for I had

Gender as a Transformative Category in Atlantic World History

With her landlocked life, Hans Jakob Christoffels von Grimmelshausens

commercially-acquired migrant labor. Ports and camps also counterbal-

chiefly by reconstructing womens social, cultural, and economic position

modern Europe hardly represented a patriarchal monolith, as familiar as

together.14 Below we break down this mobile, yet tangible hybridization

mercantile networks, by contrast, remain in the background.16 Instead of

16We replace the methodological terms circum-Atlantic and trans-Atlantic as coined

of cultural practices around gender relied on contacts between their local

Structuring Port Worlds:

contours of womens agency that corporatisms presences and absences

the Dutch Republic, Portugal, Britain, Northern Germany, and Scandina-