Popular opinion casts the voyage of the Empire Windrush, which docked outside London in 1948, as the beginning of migration to Britain by the descendants of West Indian planters and their slaves. Daniel Livesay's exhaustively researched Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic World, 1733–1833 shows that this movement began two centuries earlier, as the sugar planters of Jamaica, Britain's richest Caribbean colony, began to send their mixed-race sons and daughters to seek opportunities in the metropole. Livesay contends that, although this cohort was a small one—he tracks approximately 360 individuals—its members’ unique status as the children of men of great wealth, linked by blood or friendship to some of the nation's most influential inhabitants, gave them an outsized role in the ongoing renegotiation of ideas of race and kinship in both the mother country and the colony. Drawing upon largely unmined sources such as the wills and legislative records of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Jamaica, supplemented by invaluable archives of family papers, Livesay analyzes evolving ideas of racial identity in Georgian Britain and its empire. He does so not by focusing on philosophical or religious formulations, but on connections between family members on both sides of the Atlantic. Children of Uncertain Fortune depicts in commodious detail how phenomena such as Tacky's Revolt, the Haitian Revolution, and the rise of antislavery sentiment would eventually transform kinfolk into aliens.

Because Jamaica was already committed to sugar planting when the English seized it from Spain in 1655, and attempts to increase the number of white residents were largely unsuccessful over the next hundred years, the population was extremely unbalanced with respect to both race and gender. Many of the islands’ planters engaged in sexual relationships, coerced or voluntary, with enslaved or free black women, and in the absence of white offspring born within marriage, many of these men opted not only to recognize and free these children but to pass some or all of their lands and fortunes on to them. By the early 1730s, the island's assembly began to chip away at the rights of free people of color, but the system of privilege petitioning allowed these elite biracial individuals to gain the same rights as white inhabitants—the former's close kin connections to wealthy whites allowed them to escape the legal inferiority associated with blackness. Three decades later, however, the combination of racial fears engendered by Tacky's Revolt and metropolitan legislation aimed at limiting irregular relationships and out-of-wedlock births encouraged Jamaican politicians to restrict the rights of this group, notably by capping the amount of money and property they could inherit. As “the space of toleration in which they operated was dwindling rapidly” (89), many of these elites of color opted to relocate across the Atlantic.

Having set the scene in considerable detail, Livesay moves on to analyze the experiences of a number of these “children of uncertain fortune” throughout the British Isles in the later eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries. He presents vivid and fascinating accounts of their adventures, whether they occurred in “cold Yorkshire schoolhouses” or in the “refined society” (107) of later Georgian London, in which the presence of wealthy, elegant, and educated young men and women of mixed racial heritage caused far less public concern than the simultaneous growth of the city's community of poor people of color, particularly those who were the offspring of runaway slaves and proletarian whites. Especially illuminating are the case studies which Livesay has excavated from the archives of a few Anglo-Afro-Jamaican families, such as those of the glamourous Sarah Cator, who presented herself to metropolitan elites as an East India Company “nabobina,” or of John Tailyour, who set himself up in baronial splendor on the east coast of Scotland and transformed himself from a plantocrat to a laird but remained closely connected to his Jamaican children even after he married a Scotswoman and had a number of legitimate children. But Tailyour's paternal support was, by the early nineteenth century, becoming more the exception than the rule. As debates over abolition, first of the Atlantic slave trade and then of slavery itself, became fiercer, British society began to lump mixed-race Jamaicans in with those who were deemed fully black, and metropolitan clans became less willing to welcome into their homes and social networks individuals born outside the circles of both wedlock and whiteness. While many of these racially mixed “Creoles” remained in Britain, others returned to Jamaica, where after Emancipation they were viewed by colonial administrators as the ideal population which would “help navigate Jamaica's transition to freedom” (397).

This is a rich book in terms of both its length and the depth of Livesay's research and thought. It makes a significant contribution to both Jamaican and British history, and to the history of the family, law, racial formation, and imperial development. But the thickness of description at some moments detracts from the power of its argument. With the inclusion of so many details regarding numerous aspects of social and legal change in two distinct but intimately linked locations over an entire century, it is sometimes difficult to ascertain what Livesay most wants us to understand about the experiences of several generations of these “children of uncertain fortune.” While Livesay's prose is lucid and graceful, it is also in places quite dense; lengthy paragraphs engender still lengthier footnotes, some so discursive that they disrupt the flow of the text and others containing a flood of citations that might have been better suited to a bibliography, which the book lacks. Nonetheless, Children of Uncertain Fortune is likely to be a landmark book within the historiographies of race, slavery, empire, and family formation, and it should be read not only by scholars of Britain's West Indian colonies, but also by those who study racial relations across the Atlantic world more generally. Some readers may prefer to dip into this physically and intellectually hefty work rather than to embrace it in its totality, but in either case, they will learn much from it.