This is the first book-length study of Caribbean slavery to make disability its primary focus. The book sets out to answer the following questions: How does colonialism—specifically slavery—challenge the way we think about histories of disability, race, and labor? In what ways might slavery and the expansion of the slave trade have transformed English understandings of supposedly defective bodies and minds in the metropole and colonies? How did disability, disfigurement, and deformity among the enslaved—whether transient, permanent, natural, or inflicted—influence English understandings of rac ... More

This is the first book-length study of Caribbean slavery to make disability its primary focus. The book sets out to answer the following questions: How does colonialism—specifically slavery—challenge the way we think about histories of disability, race, and labor? In what ways might slavery and the expansion of the slave trade have transformed English understandings of supposedly defective bodies and minds in the metropole and colonies? How did disability, disfigurement, and deformity among the enslaved—whether transient, permanent, natural, or inflicted—influence English understandings of race and ability in the colonial period? How did slavery-induced disability shape the embodied reality of enslavement in the British Caribbean? The analysis of disability in the context of Atlantic world slavery is threefold. First, it explores representations of disability as they connect with enslavement and the development of an English antiblack racism from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Second, it moves between the realms of representation and reality in order to examine the embodied, physical, emotional, and psychological impairments produced by the institution of slavery and endured by the enslaved. Third, it examines slave law as an institutionally driven system of enforced disablement. This book illustrates that the histories of disability and slavery overlap in significant ways, and second, that Caribbean bondspeople form an integral part of wider disability history.