The Blood of Mothers: Women, Money, and Markets in Black Atlantic Perspective

West African concepts of fertility and procreation are examined in relation to "reproductive value," defined analytically as the generative condition of social reproduction and transformation, but approached historically through a range of social practices and economic institutions throughout the Black Atlantic world.  These include ideas about menarche, childbirth, cannibalism, and menopause in relation to women's economic activities in the marketplace and home.  Relating the blood of mothers—the irreducible "secret" of human reproduction—to the circulation of money and commodities in the body social, the paper illustrate how value was "engendered" in areas of West Africa, Haiti and Jamaica where local markets developed as historically female domains in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.