Alex Renton, author of Blood Legacy. Photo by Caroline Irby -
Over the past few years it’s been increasingly revealed – or rather, re-revealed – just how much of Britain’s wealth – which built and ran factories, canals and industrial machinery, the stately homes, the museums, the universities – came from “the West Indians” – the UK-based absentee landlords who profited from the transatlantic trade in African people. August institutions were created, sustained and enriched by the unpaid labour of enslaved Africans who produced cocoa and cotton, indigo, coffee and, cruellest of all, sugar, on estates throughout the Caribbean.
The British would have been aware of a lot of this a long time ago, of course, if they’d just read Eric Williams. It was he who wrote in the 1940s in Capitalism and Slavery that the bricks of Liverpool, England’s biggest slaving port, were cemented with African blood – an unforgettably sickening but almost literal metaphor.
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[Many thanks to Michael O’Neal (Slavery, Smallholding and Tourism) for bringing this item to our attention.] Andrew Anthony (The Guardian) reviews Blood Legacy: Reckoning With a Family’s Story of Slavery (Canongate Books, 2021) by Alex Renton. “The author of Stiff Upper Lip examines his own family history to expose the extent to which the fortunes of the UK’s…
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Blood Legacy by Alex Renton review â family fortunes built on brutality
An illustration depicting slaves loading coal in Morant Bay, Jamaica, in the 18th century. Illustration: De Agostini/Getty Images
An illustration depicting slaves loading coal in Morant Bay, Jamaica, in the 18th century. Illustration: De Agostini/Getty Images
The author of Stiff Upper Lip examines his own family history to expose the extent to which the fortunes of the UKâs wealthiest relied on a dehumanising trade
Sun 23 May 2021 06.00 EDT
This is an important book and not just because it is a chilling account of slavery and commerce in the West Indies in the 18th and 19th centuries. Itâs important because it establishes a vital link between then and now, cause and effect, history and its long and damaging legacy.