If differences between European and African concepts of insider made a transatlantic slave trade from Africa possible, then differences in European and African constructions of gender helped determine which Africans entered that trade. As Edmund Morgan argued a quarter-century ago, Europeans put African women to work in whip-driven field gangs in the Americas but were not prepared to see European women work under like conditions, a kind of sexual theory of slavery. As this suggests, Europeans and Africans defined gender as they defined the line dividing insider from outsider – with no apparent reference in either case to maximizing efficiency on plantations in the Americas or, more narrowly, what was in their best pecuniary interest. Once more, the profit-maximizing model of human behavior makes little sense unless it is placed within a cultural framework.

One route into early modern European constructions of gender is provided by the captain of the slave ship Hannibal, which sailed from London to the African coast in 1694. “This morning,” he wrote,