Slavery, Indentureship, and Women’s Labor: Early British Guiana’s Jails (Caribbean Studies Series)

Slavery, Indentureship, and Women’s Labor: Early British Guiana’s Jails uncovers the overlooked histories of incarcerated women in colonial British Guiana, revealing how prisons evolved from sites of punishment into tools of labor extraction.Spanning the period from slavery through the end of indentureship, this groundbreaking study explores how the colonial state exploited the labor of imprisoned women-both African and immigrant-within a broader system of racial, gendered, and economic control. Drawing on lived experiences as well as rich archival research from Guyana and the UK, the book challenges the conventional binary of slave versus free labor by showing how incarceration became a strategic method of coercing women into unpaid public and plantation work, monetizing the labor of incarcerated individuals to manage and manipulate the workforce in service of colonial economic interests.It also exposes the deliberate masculinization of imprisoned women to justify their use in physica