Caribbean Studies Seminar Series

CLACS Caribbean Studies Seminar Series actively promotes intellectual engagement and knowledge exchange by providing scholars - including postgraduate students and early career researchers - with the opportunity to present their interdisciplinary, comparative and integrated research on the Caribbean.

Enquiring about Freedom: Networks of Resistance and Confrontation of Women of Colour in Tortola (1807 – 1828)

Speaker: Amy Cottrill (University of Leeds)

Between 1821 to 1828, a Commission of Enquiry was conceived to investigate the ‘state’ and ‘condition’ of the kidnapped Africans on Tortola in the British Virgin Islands. It documented swathes of women’s experiences as they sought connections across statuses amidst the trauma of the Middle Passage and apprenticeship. Using these voices as raw material, a gendered entanglement of stratified female resistance networks emerged from within masculine colonial networks, persisting despite the violent, imperial frameworks that dictated Tortolean bureaucracy, and the Commission itself. Masculine networks were not without confrontation themselves; the innerworkings of this hierarchy fractured under political and religious conflicts. Some networks were small and isolated, operating within intimate relationships themselves. Others were large and complex, enmeshed with generational colonial hierarchies. The extensive, often disputed, documentary processes of Commissioners John Dougan and Major Thomas Moody, stitched this patchwork of female networks together. It formed a powerful resistive pattern via the lines of confrontation and support that crossed the rigid numerical categorisation of the Tortola Schedules.

Using James Scott’s Domination and the arts of resistance hidden transcripts as a methodological framework, kidnapped African women articulated ‘hidden transcripts’ consistently and daringly in the unsafe, hierarchical, masculine spaces of the Commission. This micro-historical research fills gendered gaps in conversations on the illegal transatlantic slave trade. Resistance, collaboration, and hierarchy are brought together in a humanised exploration of the interconnected lives of women of colour, where their wider connections to imperial frameworks are considered through an important geographical locale in the British Caribbean.

Amy Cottrill recently concluded the MA Race and Resistance program at the University of Leeds. Her thesis, supervised by Professor Manuel Barcia, focused on Tortola during the early 19th century. Amy’s undergraduate dissertation, supervised by Dr Kevin Waite at the University of Durham, explored the resistive voice of African American women against oppressive sexual exploitation in the antebellum and reconstruction US South. In 2024, Amy presented this research at The University of Leeds Undergraduate Research Conference and The International Conference of Undergraduate Research. Amy’s primary research interests concentrate on intersectional histories of the Caribbean and African diaspora that explore ideas of gendered resistance, testimony, and the female voice in the power hierarchies of archival documentation. 

All are welcome to attend this free seminar, which will be held online via Zoom at 16:00 BST (UK time). You will need to register in advance to receive the online joining link. Please click on the Book Now button at the top of the page to register.