Christine Walker

I am a scholar of women, gender, and slavery in the Atlantic World with expertise in the Caribbean. My research exposes the diverse yet tangled experiences of free, freed, and enslaved women living in an era of tremendous change. It offers a necessary antidote to historical accounts that feature male actors, while also complicating feminist scholarship that either emphasises female oppression or celebrates women’s agency. My first book, Jamaica Ladies: Female Slaveholders and the Creation of Britain's Atlantic Empire (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), is the first systematic study of the free and freed women who perpetuated chattel slavery and reaped its profits in the early modern era. Winner of the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Book Prize by the American Society for Legal History, the Best Book Award by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender, and a finalist for the Harriet Tubman Prize, granted by the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery, Jamaica Ladies reveals women’s instrumental roles in creating the wealthiest and the largest slaveholding colony in British America. I am currently working on a new book project, “Imperial Kin”: a global history of the families that built the British Empire between 1650 and 1830. “Imperial Kin” illuminates the rise of an intimate form of colonialism facilitated through marriage, reproduction, parenting, and domestic slavery. This project advances my research in new geographic, temporal, and methodological directions while also maintaining an emphasis on women, who, in their varied capacities as wives, mothers, wealth managers, and political strategists, relentlessly advanced their own and their families’ interests.