A Dark Inheritance: Blood, race, and sex in colonial Jamaica by Brooke N. Newman (review)

Brooke N. Newman begins her insightful study about race in colonial Jamaica with a memorial written by three mixed-race men in 1825. The memorial lays out a complex, constitutional argument for extending English common law rights to people of mixed English and African parentage. The petitioners insist that all children born to an English parent should be regarded as "free born subjects of England," and they highlight their own English fathers as evidence for their common law birthright. The memorial is one of many documents preserved in the British National archives that has been "long overlooked" (3). These archives, explains Newman, capture rare and important colonial voices that have been "excluded from the traditional historical narrative for nearly two centuries" (3). They also highlight several key themes in Newman's study: the role of bloodlines and ideas of "purity" in English racial discourse; the centrality of law in defining race, and especially "whiteness"; and the important role that non-white people, especially free people of color, played in ongoing debates about race, lineage, and rights in the British Atlantic World.

Newman's study proceeds in two parts. Part One, "Blood, Sovereignty, and the Law," highlights the legal foundations of race in colonial Jamaica. Moving chronologically, Chapter 1, "The Birthright of Freeborn Subjects," asks what it meant to be an English subject living in Jamaica during the early colonial period. Newman shows how lawmakers in Jamaica invoked their "birthright liberties" in order to secure political power and justify their dominion over the enslaved. They did so by creating a racial classification system that privileged whiteness and Protestantism. By the early eighteenth century, as the free black population grew larger, the Jamaican legislature "steadily curtailed the civil and political liberties… of former slaves and their free descendants" (63).

By the 1730s, however, warfare with the Maroons and a dearth of white settlers led lawmakers to make some concessions to the free black population. Chapter 2, "Blood of the Father," shows how free people of color advocated for their rights in the mid-eighteenth century. Some elite people of color were able to obtain a "whitened" racial classification for themselves. These free people of color highlighted white paternity as they argued for the rights and privileges of English subjecthood.

The definition of "whiteness" contracted once again in the wake of Tacky's Revolt (1760), one of the largest slave rebellions in British colonial history. After the revolt, Jamaican lawmakers sought to make white status more exclusive. In 1761, they passed the Devises Act, which prevented white men from bequeathing large estates or fortunes to their mixed-race children. While some elite men and women were able to obtain exceptions to the "inheritance cap," the law succeeded in creating a "more exclusive definition of British national and racial identity" (114). Newman looks especially at the life of Sarah Morris, a mixed-race woman who petitioned the Assembly for white status. Her actions show that she and other petitioners of color had a "keen awareness of the material and social value of both British blood and white womanhood in colonial Jamaica" (122).

The second part of Newman's book, entitled "Blood Mixture, Abolition, and Empire," focuses on decades before emancipation. Chapter 4, "Blood Ties in the Colonial Sexual Economy," takes a closer look at the lived experiences of elite free people of color, many of whom sought to obscure their African lineage. Newman focuses on the Tailyour family, especially the mixed-race children of John Tailyour and Polly Graham, an enslaved woman. Their oldest son, James, was educated in England and later joined the East India Company as a cadet. Newman shows how James' African heritage was a constant concern, especially for his white relatives, who aimed to obscure and hide his mother's race.

Chapter 5 turns to printed comics in the era of abolition. Comics often focused on black women and white male lust as a "visual reference point" (182) for the contamination...