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

In Children of Uncertain Fortune, Daniel Livesay investigates the lives, experiences, and migrations of 360 mixed-race individuals in a very complex intellectual history of the changing nature of race and family in the British Atlantic world during what he describes as the long eighteenth century. By focusing on a hundred-year period between 1733 and 1833, Livesay expertly demonstrates how the conceptualization of race in the Atlantic world changed from a very fluid idea to one that became increasingly obtuse, as individual households navigated and negotiated both colonial and metropolitan attitudes toward what became normalized as the “Atlantic family.”

At the start of Livesay’s analysis, we see white Britons placing their faith upon mixed-race elites who were thought to be the “vanguard of a new type of colonial settlement” (398) in the absence of a large white settler population in Jamaica. Yet, privilege became the exception as the increased passage of laws designed to control a steadily growing free population of color only eroded political rights and limited financial freedom. Marriage reforms and inheritance caps imposed even more barriers to legitimacy, striking a major blow to anyone of African descent living in the empire. After Tacky’s Rebellion ended in June of 1760, ideas of race and family began to narrow even further as abolitionist sentiment against the transatlantic slave trade gained traction in Parliament. The increased migration of mixed-race elites to England further complicated the issue, as they increasingly attended prestigious schools, took prized apprenticeships, married into prominent families, and ultimately became more visible within polite English society.

Negotiations in both public and private spheres based on geographical and genealogical factors encompassed family on both sides of the Atlantic, as concerns of kinship, race, and belonging increasingly challenged Britain’s need to compartmentalize their racial classifications and social hierarchies. By the 1780s, caught in a backlash against enslaved revolt and American independence, migrants of color quickly came to symbolize the breakdown and instability surrounding British hegemony in the Atlantic world. Deemed an improper fit and a stain on English society, their presence was problematic and vexing to white Britons on many levels. Yet, most felt that mixed-race elites compromised the existence of legitimate families and threatened the purity of English culture and society. In the wake of the numerous revolutions and slave revolts spreading throughout the Atlantic during this period, many saw these individuals as being not only a danger to British households, but to Caribbean social stability as well (345).

As Livesay notes, open ideas of kinship in the Atlantic meant that “conceptions of race were not singular and unmitigated” (248). Imperial pressures, increased abolitionist sentiment, and complicated family dynamics lead to the whitewashing and rejection of mixed-race family members, as public discourse forced a reconsideration of their place within the larger vision of empire. With each chapter, Livesay exposes the increased anxiety among white Britons, who continuously reorganized and reassessed their ideas and definitions of race and family while struggling to control an ever-changing society moving toward what they feared most—colonial anarchy within an empire in crisis. Interestingly, mixed-race elites seem to come full-circle with emancipation in 1833, once again relied upon by white Britons to help construct a new Jamaica in the absence of a stable white settler community on the island. Yet, while Livesay establishes that mixed-race families were less dependent upon white patronage during this transition from slavery to freedom, and blanket rights began to replace the exemptions and preferential treatment granted before Tacky’s Revolt, class distinctions began to disappear and race became the only defining factor. Prejudice worsened, tolerance faded, and blackness was no longer stratified. In the new post-Emancipation Atlantic, obtuse definitions of black and white guided the debate.

Truly Atlantic in scope, Children...