Enslavement, Fugitivity and Freedom: Enslaved and Free Women of African Descent in an 18th-century French Slaving Port (Nantes)

This paper analyses the experiences and meanings of enslavement, fugitivity and freedom for women of West African descent in eighteenth-century Nantes, France's largest slaving port.  It uses a wide variety of records (law adjacent records, notarial records, admiralty court records) to explore the labor of these women as apprentices, skilled domestic staff, and essential workers and their practices of fugitivity and freedom.

Julie Hardwick is the John E. Green Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin.  This paper is part of a book project tentatively entitled, An intimate history of racial capitalism in an eighteenth-century French port city.  For more on her work, see:

https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/history/faculty/jholwell