Heiresses
Marriage, Inheritance, and Slavery in the Caribbean
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- $28.99
Publisher Description
From Jamaica to Charleston, Sierra Leone to India, Australia and back to England, this is the story of the heiresses—and the role they played in the history of enslavement.
Through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it was a fact universally acknowledged that any man in want of a great fortune ought to find himself a Caribbean heiress. Their assets, the product of the exploitation of enslaved African men, women, and children, enabled them to marry into the top tiers of the aristocracy and influence society and politics. They fell in love (not always with their husbands), eloped, divorced, squandered fortunes, commissioned art, threw parties, went mad and (in once case) faked a daughter’s death.
In her much anticipated follow up to Black Tudors, Miranda Kaufmann peers beneath our pastel-hued, Jane Austen inspired image of the Georgian heiress to reveal a murky world of inheritance, fortune-hunting and human exploitation. She also unearths the stories of the people the heiresses enslaved, whose labor funded their lifestyles with whom their fates were intimately intertwined.
Heiresses provides a compelling and often shocking account of how Britain profited and continues to profit from enslavement. In the vein of landmark books such as Empireland, Natives, They Were Her Property, and White Debt, Heiresses promises to expand and challenge our understanding of history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This robust chronicle from historian Kaufman (Black Tudors) excavates the lives of nine female British enslavers. In the popular imagination, the enslaver is almost always male, but Kaufman demonstrates that marrying an heiress was an "overlooked... route to acquiring" slaves during the 18th and 19th centuries. The most famous heiress of this sort is fictional—Jane Eyre's Bertha Rochester—while among the real-life heiresses covered here are Jane Cholmeley, Jane Austen's "stingy aunt" who has cameos in several of Austen's novels, and Mary Ramsay, who appears in a vicious poem by poet Robert Burns in which he calls her a woman with "hands that took, but never gave." These female enslavers were just as callous as their male counterparts, Kaufmann diligently shows. Her research is impressive; she frequently leaves her subjects behind in their mansions to dive into the history of slavery in the West Indies, and spends ample time delineating the stories of enslaved people and their relationships to these heiresses (among her aims is to move her British readers, "with strong sense of ‘fair play,'" to reevaluate their upbeat understanding of their own national history). She follows the money doggedly—as money is the driver behind almost every plot point in the book—but the endless look into inheritances, investments, and debts grows a bit wearying. Still, serious students of history will learn much.
