Demographic scarcity of European women drove enslavement of African women as concubines

Evidence

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Latin America and the Caribbean, more African women were imported as slaves than there were European women migrating or indeed than imports of African male slaves. The colonial presence of European women at the time was relatively rare. In the first centuries of European colonization of the Americas, European men largely came in search of wealth rather than to settle. They quickly gained formal control of virtually all aspects of the local social order. Given the limited availability of European women as potential partners, they “freely” availed themselves of slave concubines whose resistance, in the majority of cases where affectionate ties didn’t prompt or sustain the relationships, could only be enacted on pain of death or significant harm, including rape, thus belying Freyre’s once-celebrated thesis of generous treatment by Portuguese men in Brazil of sexually promiscuous slave women. For some women, no doubt, the stressful calculation must have been between significant physical harm and the favors of sexual service, both sides of the balance sheet producing severe psychological distress. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1081

Categorization

• BMF: The slave concubine coerced into sexual service ‘on pain of death or significant harm,’ calculating between physical harm and sexual favors, evokes Bertha Rochester’s imprisonment and Jane Eyre’s subordinate status in the master’s house — the coerced intimacy of the colonized woman in the settler home.
• XREF: connects to: Medieval Frankish law priced women according to their reproductive capacity