Blood Legacy
Reckoning With a Family’s Story of Slavery
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE
'An incredible work of scholarship' Sathnam Sanghera
Through the story of his own family’s history as slave and plantation owners, Alex Renton looks at how we owe it to the present to understand the legacy of the past. 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.
Blood Legacy explores what inheritance – political, economic, moral and spiritual – has been passed to the descendants of the slave owners and the descendants of the enslaved. He also asks, crucially, how the former – himself among them – can begin to make reparations for the past.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Renton (Stiff Upper Lip) tackles difficult questions about culpability and reparations in this mesmerizing and deeply personal account of his family's legacy of slavery. Drawing on family papers, Renton describes his 18th-century ancestors' short-lived plantation on Tobago's Bloody Bay and a more successful Jamaican plantation known as Rozelle. Extensive research reveals the remarkable story of Augustus Thomson, an enslaved man who escaped Rozelle and traveled to London, where he met with his surprised owner to complain about his harsh treatment by an overseer, and compensation for his stolen and burned personal belongings. (The owner sent him back to Jamaica with the promise that his previous "misdemeanour" would be forgiven.) Renton also documents his own visits to the Caribbean, where he talks with descendants of the enslaved, who provide frank insight into the continuing legacy of colonialism and outline possible steps for progress, including an official apology from the British government for the injustices of the colonial era. Renton's sincerity and dogged persistence in combing through the historical record inform this unflinching look at how the "history of Britain and slavery" provided the "foundation of comfortable, liberal life." This earnest investigation into what it means to take responsibility for racial inequality deserves a wide readership.
