In 1745, a Jamaican privateer brought a prize into Kingston, the San José y las Animas, earning one of the British investors in the privateering venture nearly 100 pounds from the sale of seven enslaved Africans taken off the ship (p. 92). Nothing about this episode should surprise historians familiar with the violence of mid-eighteenth-century Anglo-Spanish relations in the greater Caribbean. Nothing except the fact that the investor was a Jamaican woman named Anna Hassall, who inherited a business operation in Kingston from her mother and who would be buried five years later in Westminster Abbey following an elaborate and opulent funeral procession through the streets of London (p. 66). But as Christine Walker's tightly argued and lucidly written book makes clear, women like Hassall were hardly unique among the first few generations of settler colonists in British Jamaica, and they contributed more to the construction of that society's...

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