In this Book
- Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833
- Book
- 2018
- Published by: The University of North Carolina Press
- Series: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia
summary
By tracing the largely forgotten eighteenth-century migration of elite mixed-race individuals from Jamaica to Great Britain, Children of Uncertain Fortune reinterprets the evolution of British racial ideologies as a matter of negotiating family membership. Using wills, legal petitions, family correspondences, and inheritance lawsuits, Daniel Livesay is the first scholar to follow the hundreds of children born to white planters and Caribbean women of color who crossed the ocean for educational opportunities, professional apprenticeships, marriage prospects, or refuge from colonial prejudices.
The presence of these elite children of color in Britain pushed popular opinion in the British Atlantic world toward narrower conceptions of race and kinship. Members of Parliament, colonial assemblymen, merchant kings, and cultural arbiters--the very people who decided Britain's colonial policies, debated abolition, passed marital laws, and arbitrated inheritance disputes--rubbed shoulders with these mixed-race Caribbean migrants in parlors and sitting rooms. Upper-class Britons also resented colonial transplants and coveted their inheritances; family intimacy gave way to racial exclusion. By the early nineteenth century, relatives had become strangers.
The presence of these elite children of color in Britain pushed popular opinion in the British Atlantic world toward narrower conceptions of race and kinship. Members of Parliament, colonial assemblymen, merchant kings, and cultural arbiters--the very people who decided Britain's colonial policies, debated abolition, passed marital laws, and arbitrated inheritance disputes--rubbed shoulders with these mixed-race Caribbean migrants in parlors and sitting rooms. Upper-class Britons also resented colonial transplants and coveted their inheritances; family intimacy gave way to racial exclusion. By the early nineteenth century, relatives had become strangers.
Table of Contents
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- Acknowledgments
- pp. vii-x
- List of Illustrations
- pp. xiii-xiv
- Abbreviations
- pp. xv-xvi
- Note on Terminology
- pp. xvii-xx
- Introduction
- pp. 1-19
- 3 Lineage and Litigation, 1783–1788
- pp. 143-192
- 5 Tales of Two Families, 1793–1800
- pp. 249-300
- 6 Imperial Pressures, 1800–1812
- pp. 301-346
- 7 New Struggles and Old Ideas, 1813–1833
- pp. 347-397
- Conclusion
- pp. 398-402
- Appendix 2. Genealogical Charts
- pp. 405-406
Additional Information
ISBN
9781469634456
Related ISBN(s)
9781469634432, 9781469634449, 9798890852168
MARC Record
OCLC
1019680915
Pages
432
Launched on MUSE
2018-01-21
Language
English
Open Access
No