Cassandra Pybus
Enterprising Women: Race, Gender and Power in the Revolutionary Caribbean
This paper aims to challenge our current understanding of the dynamic between gender, race and power in the Anglo Atlantic world during the Age of Revolutions. It will consider the role of entrepreneurial women of color as key actors in the contested, multinational colonies of the southern Caribbean. Such women were part of a highly successful and economically tenacious free-colored community that exploded after the American war to become a particular feature of this multicultural and volatile region, at a time when allegiances to Spain, France and England were in a state of flux. In discussion of the Caribbean in this period, free women of color are rarely noticed, except as manipulative and/or parasitic concubines of the white male elite. However, I will argue that free women of color were highly entrepreneurial, operating substantial colonial enterprises and extensive commercial connections, with business and kinship networks across colonies and reaching into the metropole. In the period between 1775 and 1830 these women came into their own.
Cassandra Pybus holds an Australian Research Council Professorial Fellowship in History at Sydney University. In 2013 she will be Leverhulme Visiting Professor at King’s College London. She has published extensively on Australian, American and transatlantic history and her interests span as broadly as Australian social history, colonial history in North America, South East Asia, Africa and Australia, slavery and the history of labor. She has published several books, including Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty (2006); Black Founders: The Unknown Story of Australia’s First Black Settlers (2006); and as co-editor with Emma Christopher and Marcus Rediker, Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World (2007).
