Translating chocolate: cacao, blood, and technologies of reproduction in the early modern Atlantic

Following the English conquest of Jamaica in 1655, English medical writers and colonial promoters projected various colonial fantasies onto chocolate. They claimed consuming cacao boosted women’s fertility and enabled demanding physical exertion despite the island’s hot climates. This paper investigates how they anticipated chocolate would solve the colony’s labor and population needs by developing deeply exploitative ideas about how it would enhance reproductive labor and plantation labor. Anxieties about labor and population size in Jamaica overlapped with emerging pronatalist sentiments in England. The way writers invested meaning in chocolate, however, depended on the context. While knowledge about its medicinal and aesthetic properties was first manufactured by individuals who had both personal and political interests in the development of the new Jamaican colony, it was reconfigured and reinterpreted by merchant intermediaries and authors of published medical and botanical treatises and translated by individual compilers of manuscript recipe books in England, many of whom were women, who selected and emphasized specific claims about chocolate’s therapeutic value in their own lives.