Children of Uncertain Fortune : Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833 Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833

Abstract

This book traces the lives of more than three hundred mixed-race Jamaicans who left the Caribbean for Britain in the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Born to free and enslaved women of color and wealthy white men, these individuals fled Jamaica owing to its lack of schools, legal restrictions, and colonial prejudice. In Britain they lived with paternal relatives, attended expensive boarding schools, and apprenticed with their father’s extended networks. Many used this refined British upbringing as a launching pad for an eventual return to Jamaica, or to venture to other parts of the British Empire, in order to establish themselves as elite members of colonial society. This study is the first to trace the group’s migration back and forth across the Atlantic. It argues that family status played a central role in one’s racial category, in both the Americas as well as in Britain, during the long eighteenth century. Because of their kinship to wealthy and influential individuals as well as their intermediate racial status, migrants of color were critical actors in the debates around race, family, and belonging in the British Empire. Using thousands of wills, hundreds of legal petitions, dozens of family correspondences, and a number of inheritance lawsuits, this study shows the deeply complex evolution of Atlantic racial ideas, even in the most nakedly oppressive of slave societies.