The Politics of Reproduction: Race, Medicine, and Fertility in the Age of Abolition

"One of the best books on slavery, medicine, and sexuality in a long time. Intellectual historians will appreciate Paugh's careful, nuanced, and detailed attention to the logics behind the "politics of reproduction", particularly to the ways she unpacks the medical, religious, and economic ideas that shaped the words of policy makers. Social historians will readily draw upon chapters which take on the microhistories of enslaved women as they were affected by, responded to, resisted, and moulded new reproductive regimes. Those concerned with ongoing debates regarding capitalism and slavery will find much to like in a history as attentive to material conditions as it is to discourse, one that makes abundantly clear the ways that Abolitionism worked "to harness and commodify the tangible, material, productive powers on Afro-Caribbean women's bodies to the tasks of capital"." -- Suman Seth, Cornell University

"[A] Superb work of Atlantic history... Paugh successfully weaves together the social history of plantation life in Barbados and elsewhere with the political and intellectual history of the slavery debates in a way that few historians have managed... This is a major contribution to the study of slavery as practice, experience, and politics." -- Diana Paton, Slavery & Abolition

"One of the best books on slavery, medicine, and sexuality in a long time. Intellectual historians will appreciate Paugh's careful, nuanced, and detailed attention to the logics behind the "politics of reproduction", particularly to the ways she unpacks the medical, religious, and economic ideas that shaped the words of policy makers. Social historians will readily draw upon chapters which take on the microhistories of enslaved women as they were affected by, responded to, resisted, and moulded new reproductive regimes. Those concerned with ongoing debates regarding capitalism and slavery will find much to like in a history as attentive to material conditions as it is to discourse, one that makes abundantly clear the ways that Abolitionism worked "to harness and commodify the tangible, material, productive powers on Afro-Caribbean women's bodies to the tasks of capital"." -- Suman Seth, Cornell University

"[A] Superb work of Atlantic history... Paugh successfully weaves together the social history of plantation life in Barbados and elsewhere with the political and intellectual history of the slavery debates in a way that few historians have managed... This is a major contribution to the study of slavery as practice, experience, and politics." -- Diana Paton, Slavery & Abolition