Mary Prince

doi:10.1017/9781009259484.008

Chapter 7 - Mary Prince

An Economic Life beyond Slavery

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 April 2025

Gelien Matthews

Edited by

Nicole N. Aljoe

Show author details

Nicole N. Aljoe: Affiliation:
Northeastern University, Boston

Book contents

Get access

Summary

In the highly stratified servile societies of the Caribbean, numerous codes made it difficult for enslaved persons to distinguish themselves as generators of personal income. Yet an unmistakable feature of Caribbean slavery was the countless number of enslaved persons who succeeded in making money for their own benefit. Several historians have interrogated this history through their examination of the provision ground–Sunday market complex and the hiring and self-hiring of enslaved laborers. Despite the solidity of their scholarship, gaps exist in the historiography, not least of which is the general anonymity of these servile small-scale business people. This chapter, relying heavily on the 1831 publication of The History of Mary Prince, along with other contemporary sources as well as secondary publications, aims at narrowing the gap by focusing on the personal economic pursuits of Mary Prince, a relatively well-known enslaved female from the Caribbean who lived the last years of her life in London.

Keywords

enslaved labor economics Sunday markets small-scale business

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge Companion to Mary Prince , pp. 120 - 134

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009259484.008 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2025

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Book purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Works Cited

Andrews, William. Six Women’s Slave Narratives. Oxford University Press, 1988.Google Scholar

Beckles, Hilary. “An Economic Life of Their Own: Slaves as Commodity Producers and Distributors in Barbados.” Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader, edited by Shepherd, Verene and Beckles, Hilary, Ian Randle Publishers, 2000, pp. 732–42.Google Scholar

Beckles, Hilary. Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados. Rutgers University Press, 1989.Google Scholar

Campbell, Sandra. “The Woman Who Recorded the History of Mary Prince.” The Bermudian, Aug. 4, 2023, www.thebermudian.com/heritage/heritage-heritage/the-woman-who-recorded-the-history-of-mary-prince/.Google Scholar

Darrell, Harriett E. D., compiler. “The Journal of John Harvey Darrell.” The Bermuda Historical Quarterly, vol. 2, no. 3, July–Sept. 1945, pp. 129–43, www.maryprince.org/journal-of-john-harvey-darrell.Google Scholar

Federal Writers’ Project. Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936–1938, 1941, https://libguides.rice.edu/WPASlaveNarratives/Home.Google Scholar

Feuerstein, Anna. “The History of Mary Prince and the Racial Formation of Rape Culture.” Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, vol. 16, no. 2, Summer 2020.Google Scholar

Fleischner, Jennifer. Mastering Slavery: Memory, Family and Identity in Women’s Slave Narratives. New York University Press, 1996.Google Scholar

Glenn, Helen. “Birmingham First Ladies of the Abolition Movement,” 2021, https://theironroom.wordpress.com/2021/03/08/birminghams-first-ladies-of-the-abolition-movement/.Google Scholar

Government of Bermuda Archives. “Daniel Trimingham August 1806.” Paget Vestry Assessments 1805–1824, 8 compliments Government of Bermuda Archives.Google Scholar

Lambert, David. “The ‘Glasgow King of Billingsgate’: James MacQueen and an Atlantic Proslavery Network.” Slavery & Abolition, vol. 29, no. 3, 2008, pp. 389–413.CrossRef Google Scholar

MacQueen, James. “The Colonial Empire of Great Britain, Letter to Earl Grey, First Lord of the Treasury, &C, &c., from James MacQueen, Esq.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Nov. 1831, pp. 744–64.Google Scholar

Maddison-MacFadyen, Margot. “Turks Island Salt, Enslavement and the Newfoundland West Indian Trade.” Newfoundland Quarterly, vol. 105, no. 1, 2012, pp. 40–44.Google Scholar

Mary Prince, www.maryprince.org/slave-owners.Google Scholar

Mary Prince Bermudian Sites of Memory, www.maryprince.org/bermudian-sites-of-memory.Google Scholar

Midgley, Clare. “Anti-slavery and Feminism in Nineteenth-Century Britain.” Gender and History, vol. 5, no. 3, 1998, pp. 343–62.Google Scholar

Mintz, Sidney W., and Hall, Doughlas. “The Origins of the Jamaican Internal Marketing System.” Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader, edited by Shepherd, Verene and Beckles, Hilary, Ian Randle Publishers, 2000, pp. 758–73.Google Scholar

Paquet, Sandra Pouchet. “The Heartbeat of a West Indian Slave: The History of Mary Prince.” African American Review, vol. 26, no. 1, 1992, pp. 131–46.CrossRef Google Scholar

Penn, Sara. “The First Slave Narrative of a Woman: The History of Mary Prince A West Indian Slaver.” The Women’s Print History Project, July 3, 2020.Google Scholar

Peterman, Michael. “Early Narratives Documented the Slave Experience in America.” The Peterborough Examiner, Feb. 22, 2019, www.thepeterboroughexaminer.com/opinion-story/9189226-early-narratives-documented-the-slave-experience-in-america/.Google Scholar

Prince, Mary. The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave. Related by Herself. With a Supplement by the Editor. To which Is added, the Narrative of Asa-Asa, a Captured African. Edited by Thomas Pringle, F. Westley and A. H. Davis, 1831.Google Scholar

Sandu, Sukhdev. “The First Black Britons.” BBC – History, Feb. 2, 2011, www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/black_britons_01.shtml.Google Scholar

Sensbach, Jon. “The Sacred World of Mary Prince.” Protestant Empires Globalizing the Reformation, edited by Rublack, Ulinka, Cambridge University Press, 2020, pp. 296–320.CrossRef Google Scholar

Simmons, K. Merinda. “Beyond ‘Authenticity’: Migration and the Epistemology of ‘Voice’ in Mary Prince’s History of Mary Prince and Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba.” College Literature, vol. 36, no. 4, 2009, pp. 75–99.CrossRef Google Scholar

Thomas, Sue. “Prince v. Cadwell and Wood v. Pringle: The Libel Cases over the History of Mary Prince.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 40, no. 1, 2005, 113–35.CrossRef Google Scholar

Tomich, Dale. “The Other Face of Slave Labour: Provision Grounds and Internal Marketing in Martinique.” Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader, edited by Shepherd, Verene and Beckles, Hilary, Ian Randle Publishers, 2000, pp. 743–57.Google Scholar

Turner, Mary. “Chattel Slaves into Wage Slaves: A Jamaican Case Study.” Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader, edited by Shepherd, Verene and Beckles, Hilary, Ian Randle Publishers, 2000, pp. 774–83.Google Scholar

Vigne, Randolph. Thomas Pringle: South African Pioneer, Poet and Abolitionist. James Currey, 2012.CrossRef Google Scholar

Wajid, Sara. “They Bought Me as a Butcher Would a Calf or a Lamb.” The Guardian, Oct. 19, 2007, www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/oct/19/race.historybooks.Google Scholar

Welch, Pedro L. Slave Society in the City Bridgetown, Barbados, 1680 to 1834. Ian Randle Publishers, 2003.Google Scholar

Whitlock, Gillian. “Merry Christmas Mary Prince.” Biography, vol. 26, no. 3, Summer 2003, pp. 440–42.CrossRef Google Scholar

Book contents

Chapter 7 - Mary Prince

Summary

Keywords

Access options

Book purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Works Cited

Further Reading

Save book to Kindle

Save book to Dropbox

Save book to Google Drive