Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833 by Daniel Livesay (review)

Historians of modern Britain have long sought to explain why racial prejudice increased from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, why being not fully white came to mean being not British over these years. In Children of Uncertain Fortune, Daniel Livesay offers a highly original explanation. Rather than looking to natural philosophies of race or national political discourses, Livesay argues that hardening racial ideologies were the product of negotiating membership within mixed-race imperial families. He bases this conclusion on a study of 360 mixed-race children he was able to track through wills and other legal documents who were sent from Jamaica to Britain between 1733 and 1833 for education or to advance their prospects in other ways. While there were likely thousands of mixed-race children who made this transatlantic crossing over the century, even this larger group represents a small minority of individuals born to a white father and a black or mixed-race mother; only about 20% of such children were manumitted in their fathers' wills, and fewer still were openly acknowledged during their fathers' lifetimes. Nonetheless, the experiences of elite migrants of colour in Britain, along with the debates and anxieties their presence triggered, are revealing. Above all, they show that before many influential Britons publicly wrestled with questions about race, imperial obligations, and who belonged in the "British family," they first had to wrestle with who belonged in their own families, and how these relations should be treated.

Children of Uncertain Fortunes begins in the 1730s, when definitions of kinship were relatively fluid. Though subject to a host of legal restrictions in the colony, many mixed-race Jamaicans submitted "privilege petitions" to the island's Assembly for one-off exceptions based on their wealth and social standing. Concerns over lack of white settlement in Jamaica led to general approval on both side of the Atlantic of granting "white status" in these cases; officials viewed mixed-race elites as not only loyal to the plantocracy, but also believed their progeny—provided the other parent was fully white—could assimilate into white society in a generation or two. By the 1750s and 1760s, however, opposition from poor whites and fears over security produced a stricter policing of colour lines and reduced accommodations. To distance their children from racial stigmatization in the colonies, fathers sent an increased number of their illegitimate offspring to Britain to be cared for by relatives, most of whom they had never before met.

While receptions varied, with families expressing everything from affection and loyalty to apprehension and resentment, these children were generally welcomed in the middle decades of the eighteenth century; though the African features of their newest member may have embarrassed some families, consanguinity and class standing tended to count for more than race. Yet both the social and familial status of mixed-race Jamaicans became increasingly precarious as the century wore on. This was partly due to both abolitionists and defenders of slavery stirring up fears about race mixing, which fed into growing anxieties about the myriad ways in which empire was entering into and corrupting the metropole. But an even more significant impetus for the souring attitude towards mixed-race migrants, Livesay contends, had to do with family finances. Namely, acknowledging the legitimacy of mixed-race kin meant acknowledging their right to a share in the family inheritance, if a father's will so specified. As evidenced by often lengthy litigations over estates, many Britons worked hard to exclude their Jamaican relatives from them. Such lawsuits also reveal that family members frequently held opposite views on questions related to kinship and race, with some seeing African blood as disqualifying, and others holding older, more fluid understandings of both these concepts.

There was no single moment when British families began rejecting their colonial cousins en masse, or when race came to trump other considerations...