FILTHY HORRIFIC SECRETS ABOUT SEX ON SLAVE SHIPS

Much of the discussion has centered on reproduction and production on the plantation. Fertility rates of black females were seminal to demographic analyses which stressed the adverse effects of sugar monoculture on family and mating patterns of slaves. Two such studies have yielded valuable insights into the lives of women under slavery but only marginally addressed these vital issues from the slave's perspective. The history of British slavery has been buried. The thousands of British families who grew rich on the slave trade or from the sale of slave-produced sugar in the 17th and 18th centuries brushed those uncomfortable chapters of their dynastic stories under the carpet. Today, across the country, heritage plaques on Georgian townhouses describe former slave traders as West India merchants, while slave owners are hidden behind the equally euphemistic term West India planter. Thousands of biographies written in celebration of notable 17th and 18th-century Britons have reduced their ownership of human beings to footnotes or else expunged such unpleasant details altogether