Utilizing bureaucratic records from Tortola’s ‘Commission of Inquiry into the state of ‘captured negroes’ in the West Indies’ (1821–1828), this article argues that a gendered entanglement of female resistance networks emerged from within masculine colonial structures, persisting despite the violent, colonial frameworks that dictated Tortolean bureaucracy, and the Commission itself. These masculine networks were not without confrontation; the innerworkings of this hierarchy fractured under political and religious conflicts, such as abolitionism and religion. This article is underpinned by James Scott’s ‘hidden transcript’ methodology. Kidnapped African women consistently and daringly articulated ‘hidden transcripts’ from within the unsafe, hierarchical, masculine spaces of the Commission, whose documentary processes reveal a patchwork of resistance networks. Engaging directly with ongoing historiographical debates on indentured labour and apprenticeship, this micro-history reshapes understandings of gendered resistance, including its formation, the exploitation it confronted, and its rippling impact. The collaborative and subversive nature of female resistance networks provides a crucial deepening to understandings of colonial power structures, notably their internal destabilization, documentary processes, and entanglement with resistance structures. In sum, the voices and experiences of kidnapped African women on Henry Clinton Maclean’s Quays Manor plantation are brought together in a humanized micro-history of resistance and colonial power.
Amy Kay Cottrill (2026) studied this question.