Proto-Capitalism and the Contradictions of Women’s Economic Empowerment in Colonial America

Having grown up on an Antiguan sugar plantation amidst the triangular trade and completed her early education in London — the economic epicenter of the British Empire — Eliza Lucas Pinckney was immersed in the proto-capitalist currents that shaped the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. While attending an elite boarding school in London, she spent holidays with...