“She Made Her Belly Disappear”: A Microhistory of Slavery and Reproduction in Nineteenth-Century Martinique

Employing a microhistorical examination of the papers of planter Pierre Dessalles and French colonial civil records, this article examines how community and kin-based systems supported reproduction and mothering among enslaved women in nineteenth-century Martinique. Slaveholders in nineteenth-century Martinique mapped anxieties about the future of the plantation regime and white colonial rule onto slavery’s sexual economy and enslaved reproduction. Yet, despite the pervasive exploitation of their reproductive labor, enslaved women on the Dessalles plantation fostered kinship networks and community support systems to assert some autonomy over their bodies and family lives. The article demonstrates how attending to the collaborative dynamics of enslaved reproduction reveals the broader strategies of survival and subversion of slavery’s sexual economy, as well as the post-emancipation afterlives of the familial and social networks enslaved women relied on as they mothered (or not) in bondage.