Elizabeth Keye, who sued successfully for her freedom in Virginia in 1655, opens Morgan's argument that racial slavery has to be understood through kinship and arithmetic at once. Early modern Europe was learning to count, and political arithmetic promised that populations, cargoes and value could be rendered rational and knowable. Turned on African women, that numeracy produced sex ratios, ledgers and estimates in which the women survive only as units. The Virginia assembly's ruling of 1662, that a child's status followed the mother's, made reproduction into an engine of property and stripped enslaved people of the ability to pass on family. Morgan reads slave trade accounts, travel writing, colonial statute and merchant records, treating the archive's silences as products of those same counting habits. Her sharper claim is that captive women grasped the calculus being worked on them, and that this understanding shaped how they resisted and revolted.