Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

The Gendered Nature of Atlantic World Marketplaces: Female Entrepreneurs in the Nineteenth-Century American Lowcountry

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Female Entrepreneurs in the Long Nineteenth Century

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Economic History ((PEHS))

  • 706 Accesses

Abstract

Alisha M. Cromwell uses the case study of Mary Ann Cowper, Flora and Elsey to show how elite and enslaved women throughout the nineteenth-century Atlantic World profited from the gendered nature of the provincial food trade. Similar to their counterparts in West Africa, enslaved women throughout the American South engaged in business partnerships with their female owners, buying and selling goods on their own behalf. With the support of their mistresses, entrepreneurial women like Flora and Elsey developed relatively privileged positions, acculturated from African economic practices, enabling them to benefit from their own labour in local marketplaces. By shifting the analysis from rural plantations to urban environments, this chapter focuses on women as important contributors to the American economy.

I would like to express my gratitude to the editors and Global Female Entrepreneurs Workshop participants for their suggestions, which pushed me to improve my analysis. I also wish to thank Meagan Duever for her cheerful help with my Geographic Information System (GIS) maps. Finally, I owe a special mention to Jon Falsarella Dawson for his patience and editorial skills.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
eBook
USD 16.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 129.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 129.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. 1.

    Bessie House-Midamba and Felix K. Ekechi (eds), African Market Women and Economic Power: The Role of Women in African Economic Development (London: Greenwood Press, 1995); Hilary McDonald Beckles, Centering Woman: Gender Discourses in Caribbean Slave Society. (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 1999), pp. 140–55; Betty Wood, Women’s Work, Men’s Work: The Informal Slave Economies of Lowcountry Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995).

  2. 2.

    For this chapter, the American Lowcountry refers to the coastal areas of both South Carolina and Georgia, including the city of Savannah; Philip Morgan (ed.), African American Life in the Georgia Lowcountry: The Atlantic World and the Gullah Geechee (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010).

  3. 3.

    Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein, ‘Women’s Importance in the African Slave Systems’, in Robertson and Klein (eds), Women and Slavery in Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983): pp. 2–28; David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 92; Robert Olwell, ‘“Loose, Idle and Disorderly”: Slave Women in the Eighteenth-Century Charleston Marketplace’, in David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clarke Hine (eds), More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996): pp. 97–110, pp. 99–103; Wood, Women’s Work, Men’s Work, p. 101.

  4. 4.

    Nicola Phillips, Women in Business, 1700–1850 (Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2006), p. 9; Pamela Sharpe, Adapting to Capitalism: Working Women in the English Economy, 1700–1850 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), pp. 17–18; Bridget Hill, ‘Women’s History: A Study in Change, Continuity or Standing Still’, Women’s History Review 1 (1993): pp. 5–19; Judith Bennett, ‘Women’s History: A Study in Continuity and Change’, Women’s History Review 2 (1993): pp. 173–84; Linda J. Nicholson, Gender and History: The Limits of Social Theory in the Age of Family (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 17–42.

  5. 5.

    Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South, Revised Edition (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999); Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982).

  6. 6.

    Stephanie Jones-Rogers, ‘Rethinking Sexual Violence and the Marketplace of Slavery: White Women, the Slave Market, and Enslaved People’s Sexualized Bodies in the Nineteenth Century South’, in Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie M. Harris (eds), Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018): pp. 109–23.

  7. 7.

    E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie: The Rise of a New Middle Class (New York: Macmillan, 1957), pp. 17, 129–39.

  8. 8.

    Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians and Irish of New York City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1963), pp. 30–33.

  9. 9.

    Juliet E.K. Walker, The History of Black Businesses in America: Capitalism, Race, Entrepreneurship (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), p. xxiv.

  10. 10.

    Walker, The History of Black Businesses in America, p. 90.

  11. 11.

    Walker, The History of Black Businesses in America, p. 89.

  12. 12.

    Joseph Bancroft, Census of the City of Savannah (Savannah: Edward J. Purse, Printer, 1848), p. 7.

  13. 13.

    Timothy Lockley, ‘Slaveholders and Slaves in Savannah’s 1860 Census’, Urban History 41, no. 4 (2014): pp. 647–63, pp. 653–55; Jacqueline Jones, ‘“My Mother Was Much of a Woman”: Black Women, Work, and the Family Under Slavery’, Feminist Studies 8, no. 2 (1982): pp. 235–69, pp. 236–37.

  14. 14.

    Paul E. Lovejoy, ‘The Characteristics of Plantations in the Nineteenth-Century Sokoto Caliphate’, American Historical Review 84, no. 5 (1979): pp. 1267–92; Polly Hill, ‘From Slavery to Freedom: The Case of Farm-Slavery in Nigerian Hausaland’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 18, no. 3 (1976): pp. 395–426, p. 420; Ahmed Beita Yusuf, ‘Capital Formation and Management among the Muslim Hausa Traders of Kano, Nigeria’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 45, no. 2 (1975): pp. 167–82.

  15. 15.

    Britta Frede and Joseph Hill, ‘Introduction: En-gendering Islamic Authority in West Africa’, Islamic Africa 5, no. 2 (2014): pp. 131–65; Barbara J. Callaway, ‘Ambiguous Consequences of the Socialisation and Seclusion of Hausa Women’, The Journal of Modern African Studies 22, no. 3 (1984): pp. 429–50, p. 431.

  16. 16.

    Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Culture, Vol. II: Family, Law and Politics (Boston: Brill, 2005), p. 258.

  17. 17.

    Kelley Fanto Deetz, Bound to the Fire: How Virginia’s Enslaved Cooks Helped Invent America’s Cuisine (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2017), pp. 101–03; Kirsten E. Wood, Slaveholding Widows from the American Revolution Through the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), pp. 84–85; Victoria E. Bynum, Unruly Women: The Politics of Social & Sexual Control in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), pp. 47–48.

  18. 18.

    George E. Brooks, ‘A Nhara of Guinea-Bissau: Mae Aurelia Correia’, in Claire Robertson and Martin A. Klein (eds), Women and Slavery in Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983): pp. 295–319, p. 295.

  19. 19.

    Vanessa S. Oliveira, ‘Gender, Foodstuff Production and Trade in Late Eighteenth-Century Luanda’, African Economic History 43 (2015): pp. 51–81, p. 59.

  20. 20.

    See Chap. 9 by Oliveira in this volume.

  21. 21.

    Hafiz Nazeem Goolam, ‘Gender Equality in Islamic Family Law’, in Hisham M. Ramadan (ed.), Understanding Islamic Law: From Classical to Contemporary (AltaMira Press, 2006): pp. 117–34, p. 129; Richard Kimber, ‘The Qur’anic Law of Inheritance’, Islamic Law and Society 5, no. 3 (1998): pp. 291–325, p. 291.

  22. 22.

    Mary Ann Cowper, ‘Estate Records, 1816–1850’, Mackay-Stiles Papers, #00470, Vol. 44, Series E.6, Folder 118 (Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; hereinafter cited as SHC).

  23. 23.

    Walter Charlton Hartridge (ed.), The Letters of Don Juan McQueen to His Family (Savannah: Georgia Society of the Colonial Dames of America, 1943), p. 27. Walter Charlton Hartridge (ed.), The Letters of Robert Mackay to His Wife (Savannah: Georgia Society of the Colonial Dames of America, 1949), pp. 254–55, 274.

  24. 24.

    Mary Ann Cowper, ‘Estate Records, 1816–1850’ (SHC).

  25. 25.

    Georgia Court of Ordinary, Chatham County, GA., Wills Vol 1, 1852–1862, Last Will & Testament of Mary Anna Cowper, 23 April 1856, 201–206. Ancestry.com. Georgia, Wills and Probate Records, 1742–1992. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2015; Cowper listed a total of US$8000 in cash as gifts and named a total of sixty-seven individuals, who were worth at least US$57,000 https://www.measuringworth.com/slavery.php, as well as her properties in Georgia, South Carolina and New York. A currency calculator was used to convert currency from 1856 into 2015 money https://www.historicalstatistics.org/Currencyconverter.html

  26. 26.

    Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities: The South 1820–1860, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964); Claudia Dale Goldin, Urban Slavery in the American South, 1820–1860: A Quantitative History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).

  27. 27.

    Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage Books, 1976), p. 390.

  28. 28.

    Loren Schweninger, ‘Slave Independence and Enterprise in South Carolina, 1780–1865’, South Carolina Historical Magazine (1992): pp. 101–25.

  29. 29.

    Inge Dornan, ‘Masterful Women: Colonial Women Slaveholders in the Urban Low Country’, Journal of American Studies 39, no. 3 (2005): pp. 383–402; Jeff Forret, ‘Slaves, Poor Whites, and the Underground Economy of the Rural Carolinas’, The Journal Of Southern History LXX, no. 4 (2004): pp. 783–824; Eugene D. Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South, 2nd ed. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), pp. 159–67.

  30. 30.

    Harlan Greene, Harry S. Hutchins Jr. and Brian E. Hutchins, Slave Badges and the Slave-Hire System in Charleston, South Carolina, 1783–1865, (North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2004), p. 6; Bruce Smith, ‘Badges Give a Glimpse into Slavery’, Charleston Post & Courier, 24 February 2003; ‘A Special Note About Slave Tags’, Price Guide, 8th Edition, North-South Trader (1999), p. 151.

  31. 31.

    Jonathan Martin, Divided Mastery: Slave Hiring in the American South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 30.

  32. 32.

    South Carolina General Assembly Petitions, The Committee on Colored Populations to the House of Representatives, December 7th, 1858 (South Carolina Archives and History, to be further abbreviated as SCDAH).

  33. 33.

    South Carolina General Assembly Petitions, The Committee on Colored Populations to the House of Representatives, December 7th, 1858 (SCDAH).

  34. 34.

    For further analysis of enslaved Southerners’ willingness to contribute to a larger market economy, see Philip D. Morgan, ‘The Ownership of Property by Slaves in the Mid-Nineteenth Century Low Country’, Journal of Southern History 49 (1983): pp. 399–420; Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan (eds), The Slave’s Economy: Independent Production by Slaves in the Americas (London: Frank Cass & Co. LTD, 1991); Dylan Penningroth, Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Kathleen M. Hilliard, Masters, Slaves, and Exchange: Power’s Purchase in the Old South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

  35. 35.

    Cowper, ‘Estate Records, 1816–1850’ (GHS), p. 79.

  36. 36.

    Cowper, ‘Estate Records, 1816–1850’ (SHC), pp. 82, 89.

  37. 37.

    City of Savannah, ‘Fine Docket Book’, 5600CM-10, Research Library and Municipal Archives, Savannah, Georgia.

  38. 38.

    Robert Olwell, Masters, Slaves and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740–1790 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), pp. 97–110.

  39. 39.

    South Carolina Gazette, 24 September, p. 1772.

  40. 40.

    Olwell, Masters, Slaves and Subjects, pp. 166–78.

  41. 41.

    Olwell, ‘Loose, Idle and Disorderly’, pp. 178–81.

  42. 42.

    1850 US Census, Savannah, Chatham County, Georgia, M-19, Roll 16 (Savannah: Bull Street Library), p. 55.

  43. 43.

    Cowper, ‘Estate Records, 1816–1850’(SHC), pp. 12–17.

  44. 44.

    Cowper, ‘Estate Records, 1816–1850’ (SHC), p. 79.

  45. 45.

    The Letters of Don Juan McQueen, p. 27.

  46. 46.

    The Letters of Don Juan McQueen, p. xxxi.

  47. 47.

    Commissioner of Records, Surrogates’ Court, County of New York, ‘Administration Bonds, 1753–1866’, Box 8-28,975, Vol 0042–0044, 1842–1844. Ancestry.com. New York, Wills and Probate Records, 1659–1999. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2015.

  48. 48.

    The Letters of Robert Mackay, p. 268.

  49. 49.

    Cowper ‘Estate Records, 1816–1850’ (SHC), 19.

  50. 50.

    Philip D. Morgan, ‘Work and Culture: The Task System and the Word of Lowcountry Blacks, 1700–1880’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 39 (October 1982), pp. 563–99.

  51. 51.

    ‘Last Will and Testament of Mary Anna Cowper, 1856’.

  52. 52.

    The Letters of Don Juan McQueen to His Family, p. 27.

  53. 53.

    Cowper, ‘Estate Records, 1816–1850’, p. 22.

  54. 54.

    Timothy J. Lockley, ‘Trading Encounters Between Non-Elite Whites and African Americans in Savannah, 1790–1860’, The Journal of Southern History 66, no. 1 (2000): pp. 25–48; Jeff Forret, ‘Slaves, Poor Whites, and the Underground Economy of the Rural Carolinas’, The Journal of Southern History 70, no. 4 (2004): pp. 783–824.

  55. 55.

    Cowper, ‘Estate Records, 1816–1850’, p. 13.

  56. 56.

    Cowper, ‘Estate Records, 1816–1850’, pp. 12–17.

  57. 57.

    Probate Records, Trelawney Parish, Anno 1804, ‘Basil Cowper Inventory’ No. 101 (Jamaican National Archives, Spanish Town hereinafter cited as JNA), pp. 22–25.

  58. 58.

    Daina Remy Berry, Swing the Sickle for the Harvest is Ripe (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), p. 53; Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976).

  59. 59.

    Linda M. Chatters, Robert Joseph Taylor and Rumalie Jayakody, ‘Fictive Kinship Relations in Black Extended Families’, Journal of Comparative Family Studies 25, no. 3 (1994): pp. 297–312.

  60. 60.

    James Sweet, ‘Defying Social Death: The Multiple Configurations of African Slave Family in the Atlantic World’, The William and Mary Quarterly 70, no. 2 (2013): pp. 251–72; Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1982).

  61. 61.

    Journals of the Council, October 1792–December 1793, Vol. 1B, Folder 5/4/18 (JNA).

  62. 62.

    Office of the Registry of Colonial Slaves and Slave Compensation Commission, Records Class 771, ‘1817 Return of Slaves for Mary Cowper in the Parish of Trelawney, Jamaica’ (The National Archives of the United Kingdom, Kew, Surrey, England hereinafter cited as NAUK), 227; Ancestry.com. Slave Registers of former British Colonial Dependencies, 1813–1834. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc., 2007.

  63. 63.

    ‘A Return of Slaves, 1817’ (NAUK), 227–31.

  64. 64.

    Michael Craton, Empire, Enslavement and Freedom in the Caribbean (United Kingdom: James Currey Publishers, 1997), p. 243.

  65. 65.

    Cheryll Ann Cody, ‘There Was No “Absalom” on the Ball Plantations: Slave-Naming Practices in the South Carolina Low Country, 1720–1865’, The American Historical Review 92, no. 3 (1987): pp. 563–96.

  66. 66.

    Philip F.W. Bartle, ‘Forty Days: The Akon Calendar’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 49, no. 1 (1978): pp. 80–4.

  67. 67.

    Cowper ‘Estate Records, 1816–1850’, pp. 69–75.

  68. 68.

    Registry of Colonial Slaves and Slave Compensation Commission, Records Class 771, ‘1820 Return of Slaves for Joseph Travers’ (NAUK), p. 230.

  69. 69.

    John C. Inscoe, ‘Carolina Slave Names: An Index to Acculturation’, The Journal of Southern History 49, no. 4 (1983): pp. 527–54.

  70. 70.

    Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women & Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), pp. 12–34.

  71. 71.

    Dylan Penningroth, ‘The Claims of Slaves and Ex-Slaves to Family and Property: A Transatlantic Comparison’, The American Historical Review 112, no. 4 (2007): pp. 1039–69; Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976).

  72. 72.

    Georgia Court of the Ordinary, Last Will and Testament of Mary Cowper, 1821, Georgia Wills & Probate Records, 1742–1992; Wills Vol. E-F, 1807–1827, pp. 135–39. Ancestry.com. Georgia, Wills and Probate Records, 1742–1992. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2015.

  73. 73.

    Cody ‘There Was No “Absalom” on the Ball Plantations’, p. 587.

  74. 74.

    Cowper ‘Estate Records, 1816–1850’, p. 12.

  75. 75.

    Robert and Eliza Mackay, ‘The Grange Plantation Journal’, The Records of the Antebellum Southern Plantations from the Revolution to the Civil War ed. Kenneth Stamp, microfilm: F213.R43 1985 Series J, pt. 4, r 1–7 (University of Georgia Main Library, Athens), p. 25.

  76. 76.

    Eliza MacKay, ‘The Grange Plantation Journal’, p. 36.

  77. 77.

    Cowper, ‘Estate Records, 1816–1850’, p. 79.

  78. 78.

    Shane Gadberry, ‘Alternative Feeds for Beef Cattle’, Agriculture and Natural Resources (Division of Agriculture, University of Arkansas), https://www.uaex.edu/publications/PDF/FSA-3047.pdf

  79. 79.

    Family Archive of the Andrew Low House, MS #1624 ‘The Mackay-McQueen Family Papers’, Folders 57–65 (Georgia Historical Society, Savannah, GA; hereafter cited as GHS).

  80. 80.

    Commissioner of Records, Surrogates’ Court, County of New York, ‘Administration Bonds, 1753–1866’, Box 8-28,975, Vol 0042–0044, 1842–1844. Ancestry.com. New York, Wills and Probate Records, 1659–1999. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2015.

  81. 81.

    Inventory of the Estate of J. McQueen in Florida, ‘The Mackay-McQueen Family Papers’, Box 7, Folder 60-16, (GHS).

  82. 82.

    Margaret McQueen to Eliza MacKay, 27 March 1812, ‘The Mackay-McQueen Family Papers’, Box 7, Folder 63-45B, (GHS).

  83. 83.

    Mary Ann to Eliza MacKay, 16 Dec 1816, Barron Hill, ‘The Mackay-McQueen Family Papers’, Box 7, Folder 63-49 (GHS).

  84. 84.

    Mary Ann to Eliza MacKay, 16 Dec 1816, Barron Hill, ‘The Mackay-McQueen Family Papers’, Box 7, Folder 63-49 (GHS).

  85. 85.

    Mary Ann Cowper to Eliza Mackay, Reynolds Square 3 March 1833; Thunderbolt Cliffs 6 April 1833; Reynolds Square 23 July 1833; Thunderbolt Cliffs 26 July 1833; Broughton Street, 4 August 1833, ‘The Mackay-McQueen Family Papers’ (GHS).

  86. 86.

    Jessica B. Harris, ‘Keynote Address- Sea Changes: Culinary Connections in the African Atlantic World’, Atlantic World Foodways Conference, 30 January 2014.

Bibliography

  • Anon., ‘A Special Note About Slave Tags’, Price Guide, 8th Edition, North-South Trader (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  • Bancroft, Joseph, Census of the City of Savannah (Savannah: Edward J. Purse, Printer, 1848)

    Google Scholar 

  • Bartle, Philip F.W., ‘Forty Days: The Akon Calendar’ Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 49, no. 1 (1978): pp. 80–4

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Beckles, Hilary McDonald, Centering Woman: Gender Discourses in Caribbean Slave Society (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 1999)

    Google Scholar 

  • Bennett, Judith, ‘Women’s History: A Study in Continuity and Change’, Women’s History Review 2 (1993): pp. 173–84

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Berlin, Ira and Philip D. Morgan (eds), The Slave’s Economy: Independent Production by Slaves in the Americas (London: Frank Cass & Co. LTD, 1991)

    Google Scholar 

  • Berry, Daina Remy, Swing the Sickle for the Harvest is Ripe (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007)

    Google Scholar 

  • Brooks, George E., ‘A Nhara of Guinea-Bissau: Mae Aurelia Correia’, in Claire Robertson and Martin A. Klein (eds) Women and Slavery in Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983): pp. 295–319

    Google Scholar 

  • Bynum, Victoria E., Unruly Women: The Politics of Social & Sexual Control in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992)

    Google Scholar 

  • Callaway, Barbara J., ‘Ambiguous Consequences of the Socialisation and Seclusion of Hausa Women’, The Journal of Modern African Studies 22, no. 3 (1984): pp. 429–50

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Camp, Stephanie M.H., Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women & Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004)

    Google Scholar 

  • Chatters, Linda M., Robert Joseph Taylor and Rumalie Jayakody, ‘Fictive Kinship Relations in Black Extended Families’, Journal of Comparative Family Studies 25, no. 3 (1994): pp. 297–312

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Clinton, Catherine, The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982)

    Google Scholar 

  • Cody, Cheryll Ann, ‘There Was No “Absalom” on the Ball Plantations: Slave-Naming Practices in the South Carolina Low Country, 1720–1865’, The American Historical Review 92, no. 3 (1987): pp. 563–96

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Craton, Michael, Empire Enslavement and Freedom in the Caribbean, (United Kingdom: James Currey Publishers, 1997)

    Google Scholar 

  • Deetz, Kelley Fanto, Bound to the Fire: How Virginia’s Enslaved Cooks Helped Invent America’s Cuisine (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2017)

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Dornan, Inge, ‘Masterful Women: Colonial Women Slaveholders in the Urban Low Country’, Journal of American Studies 39, no. 3 (2005): pp. 383–402

    Google Scholar 

  • Joseph, Suad, Afsaneh Najmabadi, Julie Peteet, Seteney Siapno and Jane I. Smith (eds), Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Culture, Vol. II: Family, Law and Politics (Boston: Brill, 2005)

    Google Scholar 

  • Eltis, David, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)

    Google Scholar 

  • Forret, Jeff, ‘Slaves, Poor Whites, and the Underground Economy of the Rural Carolinas’, The Journal of Southern History 70, no. 4 (2004): pp. 783–824

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988)

    Google Scholar 

  • Frazier, E. Franklin, Black Bourgeoisie: The Rise of a New Middle Class (New York: Macmillan, 1957)

    Google Scholar 

  • Frede, Britta and Joseph Hill, ‘Introduction: En-gendering Islamic Authority in West Africa’, Islamic Africa 5, no. 2 (2014): pp. 131–165

    Google Scholar 

  • Gadberry, Shane, ‘Alternative Feeds for Beef Cattle’, Agriculture and Natural Resources (Division of Agriculture, University of Arkansas): https://www.uaex.edu/publications/PDF/FSA-3047.pdf

  • Genovese, Eugene D., Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage Books, 1976)

    Google Scholar 

  • Genovese, Eugene D., The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South, 2nd ed. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989)

    Google Scholar 

  • Glazer, Nathan and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians and Irish of New York City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1963)

    Google Scholar 

  • Glymph, Thavolia, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)

    Google Scholar 

  • Goldin, Claudia Dale, Urban Slavery in the American South, 1820–1860: A Quantitative History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976)

    Google Scholar 

  • Goolam, Hafiz Nazeem, ‘Gender Equality in Islamic Family Law,’ in Hisham M. Ramadan (ed.), Understanding Islamic Law: From Classical to Contemporary (AltaMira Press, 2006): pp. 117–134

    Google Scholar 

  • Greene, Harlan, Harry S. Hutchins, Jr. and Brian E. Hutchins, Slave Badges and the Slave-Hire System in Charleston, South Carolina, 1783–1865 (North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2004)

    Google Scholar 

  • Gutman, Herbert G., The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976)

    Google Scholar 

  • Harris, Jessica B., ‘Keynote Address—Sea Changes: Culinary Connections in the African Atlantic World’, Atlantic World Foodways Conference, January 30, 2014

    Google Scholar 

  • Hartridge, Walter Charlton (ed.), The Letters of Robert Mackay to His Wife, (Savannah: Georgia Society of the Colonial Dames of America, 1949)

    Google Scholar 

  • Hill, Bridget, ‘Women’s History: A Study in Change, Continuity or Standing Still’, Women’s History Review 1 (1993): pp. 5–19

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hill, Polly, ‘From Slavery to Freedom: The Case of Farm-Slavery in Nigerian Hausaland’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 18, no. 3 (1976): pp. 395–426

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hilliard, Kathleen M., Masters, Slaves, and Exchange: Power’s Purchase in the Old South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014)

    Google Scholar 

  • House-Midamba, Bessie and Felix K. Ekechi (eds), African Market Women and Economic Power: The Role of Women in African Economic Development (London: Greenwood Press, 1995)

    Google Scholar 

  • Inscoe, John C., ‘Carolina Slave Names: An Index to Acculturation’, The Journal of Southern History 49, no. 4 (1983): pp. 527–54

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jones-Rogers, Stephanie, ‘Rethinking Sexual Violence and the Marketplace of Slavery: White Women, the Slave Market, and Enslaved People’s Sexualized Bodies in the Nineteenth Century South’, in Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie M. Harris (eds), Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018): pp. 109–23

    Google Scholar 

  • Jones, Jacqueline, ‘“My Mother Was Much of a Woman”: Black Women, Work, and the Family Under Slavery’, Feminist Studies 8, no. 2 (1982): pp. 235–69

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kimber, Richard, ‘The Qur’anic Law of Inheritance’, Islamic Law and Society 5, no. 3 (1998): pp. 291–325

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lockley, Timothy J., ‘Trading Encounters Between Non-Elite Whites and African Americans in Savannah, 1790–1860’, The Journal of Southern History 66, no. 1 (2000): pp. 25–48

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lockley, Timothy, ‘Slaveholders and Slaves in Savannah’s 1860 Census’, Urban History 41, no. 4 (2014): pp. 647–63

    Google Scholar 

  • Lovejoy, Paul E., ‘The Characteristics of Plantations in the Nineteenth-Century Sokoto Caliphate’, American Historical Review 84, no. 5 (1979): pp. 1267–92

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Martin, Jonathan, Divided Mastery: Slave Hiring in the American South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004)

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Morgan, Philip D. (ed.) African American Life in the Georgia Lowcountry: The Atlantic World and the Gullah Geechee (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010)

    Google Scholar 

  • Morgan, Philip D., ‘The Ownership of Property by Slaves in the Mid-Nineteenth Century Low Country’, Journal of Southern History 49 (1983): pp. 399–420

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Morgan, Philip D., ‘Work and Culture: The Task System and the Word of Lowcountry Blacks, 1700–1880,’ William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 39 (October 1982): pp. 563–99

    Google Scholar 

  • Nicholson, Linda J., Gender and History: The Limits of Social Theory in the Age of Family (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986)

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Oliveira, Vanessa S., ‘Gender, Foodstuff Production and Trade in Late Eighteenth-Century Luanda’, African Economic History 43 (2015): pp. 51–81

    Google Scholar 

  • Olwell, Robert, ‘“Loose, Idle and Disorderly”: Slave Women in the Eighteenth-Century Charleston Marketplace’, in David Barry Gaspar & Darlene Clarke Hine (eds), More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996): pp. 97–110

    Google Scholar 

  • Olwell, Robert, Masters, Slaves and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740–1790 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998)

    Google Scholar 

  • Patterson, Orlando, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1982)

    Google Scholar 

  • Penningroth, Dylan, Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003)

    Google Scholar 

  • Penningroth, Dylan, ‘The Claims of Slaves and Ex-Slaves to Family and Property: A Transatlantic Comparison’, The American Historical Review 112, no. 4 (2007): pp. 1039–69

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Phillips, Nicola, Women in Business, 1700–1850 (Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2006)

    Google Scholar 

  • Robertson, Claire C. and Martin A. Klein, ‘Women’s Importance in the African Slave Systems’, in Claire Robertson and Herbert S. Klein (eds), Women and Slavery in Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), pp. 2–28

    Google Scholar 

  • Schweninger, Loren, ‘Slave Independence and Enterprise in South Carolina, 1780–1865’, South Carolina Historical Magazine (1992): pp. 101–25

    Google Scholar 

  • Sharpe, Pamela, Adapting to Capitalism: Working Women in the English Economy, 1700–1850 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996)

    Google Scholar 

  • Smith, Bruce, ‘Badges Give a Glimpse into Slavery’, Charleston Post & Courier, February 24, 2003

    Google Scholar 

  • Sweet, James, ‘Defying Social Death: The Multiple Configurations of African Slave Family in the Atlantic World’, The William and Mary Quarterly 70, no. 2 (2013): pp. 251–272

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wade, Richard C., Slavery in the Cities: The South 1820–1860 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964)

    Google Scholar 

  • Walker, Juliet E.K., The History of Black Businesses in America: Capitalism, Race, Entrepreneurship (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009)

    Google Scholar 

  • White, Deborah Gray, Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South, Revised Edition (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999)

    Google Scholar 

  • Wood, Betty, Women’s Work, Men’s Work: The Informal Slave Economies of Lowcountry Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995)

    Google Scholar 

  • Wood, Kirsten E., Slaveholding Widows from the American Revolution Through the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004)

    Google Scholar 

  • Yusuf, Ahmed Beita, ‘Capital Formation and Management among the Muslim Hausa Traders of Kano, Nigeria’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 45, no. 2 (1975): pp. 167–82

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Coastal Carolina University, Conway, SC, USA

    Alisha M. Cromwell

Authors
  1. Alisha M. Cromwell
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alisha M. Cromwell .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Northumbria University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK

    Jennifer Aston

  2. Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Catherine Bishop

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2020 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Cromwell, A.M. (2020). The Gendered Nature of Atlantic World Marketplaces: Female Entrepreneurs in the Nineteenth-Century American Lowcountry. In: Aston, J., Bishop, C. (eds) Female Entrepreneurs in the Long Nineteenth Century. Palgrave Studies in Economic History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33412-3_6

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33412-3_6

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-33411-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-33412-3

  • eBook Packages: Economics and FinanceEconomics and Finance (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation