HEIRESSES

Cruelty, oppression, and fortune hunting.

British historian and journalist Kaufmann offers a fresh perspective on Britain’s involvement in slavery through the lives of nine 18th-century women who accrued large fortunes in the empire’s Caribbean colonies and, by virtue of their wealth, became sought-after wives by men of all classes. These heiresses owned, managed, or had financial interests in plantations that depended on slave labor, which the women were well aware of and condoned. All, Kaufmann asserts, willfully disregarded the suffering their fortunes depended on. Drawing on family papers, letters, diaries, and portraits, Kaufmann offers richly detailed biographies of the women, along with many of the men and women whom they enslaved. She depicts the back-breaking labor required of plantation workers, their degrading living conditions, and the abuse they suffered at the hands of owners, overseers, lawyers, and governors. She depicts, as well, those who rebelled: Betsy Newton, for example, one of 400 enslaved people on a sugar plantation in Barbados, who traveled to London to petition for freedom for herself and her children. The heiresses profiled, Kaufmann reveals, are only a small number of at least 150 other women whose marriages brought wealth to Britain. And plantation owners were only part of the nation’s profiteering from slavery: Britons “invested in slaving voyages, either through direct ownership or by becoming shareholders. Some insured the ships.” Others provided manacles and guns. Importers bought sugar, rum, coffee, and tobacco produced by enslaved workers. Kaufmann discovered that some of her own ancestors were involved in trafficking Africans; two family members were Liverpool slavers. She hopes, through this examination of Caribbean women, to raise awareness of the web of connections to slavery throughout Georgian Britain—connections that persist into the present—and to begin a process of making amends.

A meticulously researched history.