Blood legacy Reckoning with a family's story of slavery
Book - 2021
When British Caribbean slavery was abolished across most of the British Empire in 1833, it was not the newly liberated who received compensation, but the tens of thousands of enslavers who were paid millions of pounds in government money. The descendants of some of those slave owners are among the wealthiest and most powerful people in Britain today. Alex Renton explores what inheritance - political, economic, moral and spiritual - has been passed to the descendants of the slave owners and the descendants of the enslaved.
- Subjects
- Published
-
Edinburgh :
Canongate
2021.
- Language
- English
- Main Author
- Physical Description
- xi, 388 pages : illustrations, maps ; 22 cm
- Bibliography
- Includes bibliographical references (pages 339-341) and index.
- ISBN
- 9781786898869
- Notes
- Introduction
- Family tree
- 1. In the family papers
- Tobago - 1773-1785
- 2. A prospect of acquiring a fortune
- Map: Eastern Caribbean, 1775
- 3. People as property
- 4. Many ways to die: pirates, famine and the flux
- 5. Tobago today
- Jamaica - 1769-1875
- 6. A fine property in Jamaica: Rozelle
- Map: Rozelle Estate, c. 1780
- 7. Enlightenment gentlemen and runaway slaves
- 8. 'Goatish embraces' and the breeding of humans
- 9. The money and the pox
- 10. Slavery modernised
- 11. The end of the British trade
- 12. Decline, disgust and death
- 13. Cleansing the money
- 14. Emancipation at a price
- 15. Freedom's debt
- 16. Betrayal: absentee landlords and planter-magistrates
- 17. The Empire strikes back
- Map: South-east Jamaica, 1865
- 18. Jamaica today
- Appendix: What happened next? and What to do?
- Acknowledgements
- Select bibliography
- Notes
- Image credits
- Index