Love Sold into Slavery

The tale of Inkle and Yarico was a popular and oft-recounted one in eighteenth-century Britain and its colonies, appearing in magazines, newspapers, theater, opera, and art. In it, an indigenous woman, Yarico (sometimes cast as Native American, sometimes as African) fell in love with a shipwrecked European trader, Inkle. After time alone together, as she nursed him back to health, he became determined to take her home. So they sailed from her native land, entwined in each other’s arms. Once they reached their destination, though, Inkle sold Yarico, now pregnant, into slavery. In most accounts, Yarico was so distraught at Inkle’s greedy treachery that she killed herself, sometimes throwing herself into the waves that had both brought them together and yet also separated them again.

Such a tale crystallized broader cultural anxieties about the slave trade, interracial domestic and sexual connections, and shifting ideas of commerce and sentiment. Most scholars have focused on these matters. Yet it also traces out complicated ideas about love and marriage including their complex intersections with slavery in the early modern Atlantic world. Both marriage and slavery were vitally significant institutions that fundamentally shaped power relations in the early modern world. The intersection of these two institutions in the Atlantic world, and the ways they came to be distinguished from each other, helped to create the modern world. This tale, and its real-life counterpart, takes us to the heart of the matter, as modernity was born in the arms of love gone very wrong indeed.