The History of Mary Prince was the first account of the life of a Black woman to be published in the United Kingdom. Part of the avalanche of print culture that accompanied the transatlantic abolitionist movement, it has in recent years become an increasingly central text within pedagogy and research on Black history and literature, thanks to its vivid testimonies of Prince’s thoughts and feelings about her gendered experience of Caribbean slavery. Embracing and celebrating a growing international scholarly and general interest in African diasporic voices, texts, histories, and literary traditions, this Companion weds contributions from Romanticists, Caribbeanists, and Americanists to showcase the diversity of disciplinary encounters that Prince’s narrative invites, as well as its rich and troubled contexts. The first published collection on a single slave narrative or author, the volume is not only an authoritative, highly focused resource for students but also a model for future research.

The History of Mary Prince is a geographically layered narrative: The text transcribes Prince’s experiences of enslavement in the Caribbean from her birth in 1788 in Brackish Pond, Bermuda, to her harrowing labor on the salt industries on Grand Turk to her efforts to purchase her freedom in Antigua in the 1820s to her journey to London in 1828, where she continued her campaign for emancipation. Yet this chapter turns to The History to meditate on the methods we use for recovering Black geographies that may remain oblique in colonial archives. It argues that contemporary Black poets offer insights into Prince’s movements that may only exist as palimpsests within The History by speculating on her knowledge of Caribbean resistance movements, such as the Haitian Revolution and the Sunday Market Revolt in Antigua. By assembling this diachronic reading method, the chapter resists the impulse to achieve conclusive answers about Prince’s geographical relations but instead unfolds alternative possibilities for locating her in Black spaces.

This chapter considers The History of Mary Prince as an environmental history and demonstrates how Mary Prince theorized environmental justice from the perspective of an African descended woman who labored in the trenches of ecological imperialism and envisioned liberation. In studying Prince’s text, we can better understand how the interwoven systems of slavery and colonialism altered the natural world and also how imperialism, as a formalized ideological structure administered in the colonies as well as in the metropole, always left its imprint on the environment. The chapter argues that Prince demands a geography of freedom that is outside of the colonial-defined borders of the Caribbean islands, calling for an end to both slavery and ecological imperialism. In making this argument, it examines a series of vivid moments in Prince’s environmental history to catalogue Prince’s anti-imperialist geography. Further, this chapter also considers Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite’s theoretical neologism, tidalectics, as an entryway to comprehending Prince’s conceptualization of the marine landscapes of the islands she traversed.

In the highly stratified servile societies of the Caribbean, numerous codes made it difficult for enslaved persons to distinguish themselves as generators of personal income. Yet an unmistakable feature of Caribbean slavery was the countless number of enslaved persons who succeeded in making money for their own benefit. Several historians have interrogated this history through their examination of the provision ground–Sunday market complex and the hiring and self-hiring of enslaved laborers. Despite the solidity of their scholarship, gaps exist in the historiography, not least of which is the general anonymity of these servile small-scale business people. This chapter, relying heavily on the 1831 publication of The History of Mary Prince, along with other contemporary sources as well as secondary publications, aims at narrowing the gap by focusing on the personal economic pursuits of Mary Prince, a relatively well-known enslaved female from the Caribbean who lived the last years of her life in London.

This chapter examines Thomas Pringle’s and Susanna Strickland’s literary relationship and their contributions to anti-slavery print culture in the years surrounding their work on The History of Mary Prince. Each brought a different set of interests and strengths to the production of The History. Pringle was an established voice in abolitionist writing, having published anti-slavery poems and essays in venues ranging from the Oriental Herald to the Penny Magazine. Strickland had not previously written about slavery, but she was practiced in writing for the fashionable and ornamental publications that targeted one of the anti-slavery movement’s primary audiences, middle-class white women. In the years immediately surrounding the publication of Prince’s History, Pringle and Strickland brought anti-slavery discourse into ornamental and ostensibly apolitical forms of print culture such as literary annuals; conversely, by foregrounding the first-person testimony of enslaved people, they brought novelistic discourse into overtly political and polemical publications such as the Anti-Slavery Reporter.

This chapter explores the questions and insights that the digital humanities and Mary Prince can offer each other. With its complex interplay of authorial and editorial agencies, The History of Mary Prince reveals key challenges for several major modes of digital scholarship: developing accurate but scalable digital models, aligning computational methods with humanities research questions, and curating textual collections for study and analysis. This chapter offers a case study with the Women Writers Project’s edition of The History of Mary Prince to outline both the new potentials and the thorny questions that arise in research with digital editions. Working with a digital model, scholars can examine the text at many levels and in contexts that range from other personal narratives to hundreds of works of pre-Victorian women’s writing. The case study focuses on how Prince and the other writers who contributed to The History engage with gender, with authorial and editorial agency, and with the representation of persons – but this is only the beginning of what is possible for Prince and the digital humanities.