From Slavery to Wealth: The case of Anna Petronella Woodart, a British Caribbean Mixed Heritage Woman's transformation and extensive Legal Protection

A gendered mixed methodology study of socio-economic and traversed
intersectional boundaries and obstructions embedded within the lives of free
mixed heritage women during slavery. Within the study, over several generations through concubinage and consanguineous relationships, the women's posterity
moved through the colour continuum from black to legally white, having shifted
away from their black African heritage to the desired white European heritage,
thus affording vertical social mobility, some wealth and complex kin
relationships.
Qualitative archival research involves the extraction of multi-layered data from
historical records, which enables the analysis of and learning from past lives
which may influence our future. The main case study focuses on the life and
relationships of 18th century, Jamaican born Anna Petronella Woodart and her
colonial British community. Her extraordinary story highlights a developed
narrative embedded in her ‘lived experience’, wrapped in legal protection
including the involvement of the Archbishop of Canterbury. In this study, I argue
that narrative analysis represents an explorative method of unpicking and
understanding those experiences thus providing socio-moral education.
This presentation highlights excavated archival stories in a sociohistorical period
when black and mixed-heritage people were either enslaved victims and
considered property or free with minimal rights and privileges, where family and
kin relationships were crucial for survival and social progression. The discussions
explore the dynamics between enslaved people and some mixedheritage people
as enslavers, through intersectional theories of discrimination, domination,
sexual behaviour, oppression, gender, race and liminality, underpinned by the
Slavery Compensation Claims within the abolition of slavery.