New West Indian Guide 89 (2015) 1–29 nwig brill.com/nwig Relative Property Close-Kin Ownership in American Slave Societies Aviva Ben-Ur* Associate Professor Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst ma, u.s.a.
[email protected] Abstract Most historians of slavery in the Americas treat masters of color who owned their own kin as an oddity, a scribal error, or as a topic to evade. Most others conclude that ruthlessly capitalistic owners reserved such behavior for slaves unrelated to them, and owned their own kin as slaves in name only, with the intention of providing protection and eventual manumission. This article considers several cases of close-kin ownership, particularly in Suriname, and explores the role of coercive economy in families emerg- ing from enslavement, arguing that the capitalistic values of slaveholding pervaded families approaching freedom, often informing both their economic behavior and their interpersonal relations. Keywords Suriname – Brazil – u.s. – slavery – slave society – close-kin ownership – kinship slavery – elective kinship Roza Judia, alias Roza Mendes Meza, was a prosperous free woman of color and estate owner living in eighteenth-century Suriname. By the 1760s and 1770s, * I am grateful to Frans van Dijk and Roberto Padoan, both of the Nationaal Archief, and Gert Oostindie, who kindly facilitated my access to the Suriname collection as it was under- going digitization. Special appreciation goes to Rosemarijn Hoefte for her support, and to Joseph C. Miller, Katherine Freedman, and two anonymous readers for their extensive, excel- lent comments. The writing and much of the research for this article was carried out during the summer of 2014 under the auspices of a kitlv fellowship, for which I am thankful.