Complicating the patriarchy: elite and enslaved businesswomen in the nineteenth century Atlantic world

This dissertation focuses on how elite and enslaved businesswomen successfully participated in both the Atlantic market and the local marketplace. Based on extensive archival research throughout the U.S. South and Jamaica, this project traces the complicated movements of Mary Anne Cowper and her enslaved domestic from Jamaica, Flora. Mary Anne was slaveholder who was able to take part in male-dominated commerce due to her elite familial networks that flowed around the Atlantic World. Her status provided benefits for Flora, who helped to transform traditional European and African gender roles in the Savannah marketplace. By means of a fictive kinship system, Flora contributed to the public market, earned a small income, and maintained certain freedoms in a slave society. The intertwined lives of Mary Anne and Flora provide a unique example of the economic relationships that slavery created among women in the Atlantic World.