Negotiating female property- And slave-ownership in the aristocratic world

Abstract

This article uses Anna Eliza Grenville, first duchess of Buckingham and Chandos, as a lens through which to explore the gendering of aristocratic property- and slave-ownership in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. Alongside the extensive metropolitan property that Grenville brought to her marriage was Hope estate, a Jamaican plantation upon which worked 379 enslaved men, women, and children. Using legal records, family papers, and correspondence, the article examines the ways in which Grenville negotiated her position as a married woman and substantial property-owner, and considers what it meant for a married woman to 'own' property, landed and in the form of other human beings, in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century aristocratic world. Examining her absentee slave-ownership alongside her metropolitan property-ownership highlights the complex intersections between race, class, and gender across both metropole and colony. In doing so, the article makes an important contribution to the rapidly expanding scholarship exploring female property-ownership in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, hitherto almost entirely metropolitan in focus. It demonstrates how seamlessly enslaved property could be integrated into aristocratic forms of property-ownership and transmission, and highlights the important role that women played in bringing slave-ownership 'home' to metropolitan Britain.