This book provides critical perspectives on the multiple forms of 'mothering' that took place in Atlantic slave societies. This book comprises two special issues, originally published in Slavery & Abolition and Women's History Review.

Introduction Part I: Mothers, Masters and the State: Motherhood and Reproduction under Slavery and Freedom 1. The Nameless and The Forgotten: Maternal Grief, Sacred Protection, and the Archive of Slavery 2. Maternal Struggles and the Politics of Childlessness under Pronatalist Caribbean Slavery 3. "Bad Breeders" and "Monstrosities": Racializing Childlessness and Congenital Disabilities in Slavery and Freedom Part II: Enslaved Women and the care of white children 4. The Enslaved Wet Nurse as Nanny: The Transition from Free to Slave Labor in Childcare in Barcelona after the Black Death (1348) 5. Between Two Beneditos: Enslaved Wet-Nurses amid Slavery's Decline in Southeast Brazil 6. "[S]He Could...Spare One Ample Breast for the Profit of her Owner": White Mothers and Enslaved Wet Nurses' Invisible Labor in American Slave Markets 7. Fertility Control, Shared Nurturing, and Dual Exploitation: The Lives of Enslaved Mothers in the Antebellum United States 8. Black nannies: Hidden and Open Images in the Paintings of Nicolas-Antoine Taunay Part III: Sexuality, Respectability, and Violence 9. 'By her unnatural and despicable conduct': motherhood and concubinage in the Watchman and Jamaica Free Press, 1830-1833 10. Conceived in Violence: Enslaved Mothers and Children Born of Rape in Nineteenth-Century Louisiana 11. Mistresses, Motherhood, and Maternal Exploitation in the Antebellum South Part IV: The Geographies of Motherhood 12. African Mothers in the City of Bahia, 1734-1799 13. The African Women of the Dos Hermanos Slave Ship in Cuba: slaves first, mothers second 14. Gendered Geographies: Motherhood, Slavery, Law, and Space In Mid-Nineteenth-Century Cuba 15. Mothering Slaves, Labor, and the Persistence of Slavery in Northeast Brazil: A Non-Plantation View from the Hinterlands of Ceará, 1813-1884 Part V: Slavery and the Medicalisation of Childbirth 16. Midwifery and Childbirth Among Enslaved and Freed Women in Rio de Janeiro in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century 17. Pregnant Slaves, Workers in Labour: Amid Doctors and Masters In A Slave-Owning City (nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro) Part VI: Mothering in the Era of Emancipation 18. U.S. Slavery, Civil War, and the Emancipation of Enslaved Motherhood 19. Bad Mothers, Labouring Children: Emancipation, Tutelage and Motherhood in São Paulo in the Last Decades of the Nineteenth Century 20. In Pursuit of Autonomous Womanhood: Nineteenth-Century Black Motherhood in the U.S. North 21. From Free Womb to Criminalized Woman: Fertility Control in Brazilian Slavery and Freedom