From the point of view of metropolitan Britain, the Caribbean island colony of Jamaica was at once a gold mine and a problem. White slaveholding Jamaicans, especially those who owned the profitable sugar plantations on the island's sweltering lowland plains, were among the richest people in the empire. They were also some of its most controversial figures. Brooke Newman's articulate and detailed new study shows how these white colonials established a social order heavily defined by principles of blood inheritance, and how their sexual relations with enslaved and free women of color fed into transatlantic discussions over slavery, race, and British identities. Newman offers a meticulous and deeply researched exploration of those themes, using a wide variety of evidence from American, British, and Jamaican archives, including letters, wills, novels, plays, satirical prints, and proslavery and abolitionist literature.

Jamaica forms the book's main point of focus. There, the idea of inheritable British rights helped white colonials to justify the enslavement of Africans by mobilizing fictions of blood purity to establish the principle that only white Englishmen could claim all the legal trappings of English liberty as part of their “birthright.” By the middle of the eighteenth century, this principle, enshrined in local law, defined all aspects of life in Britain's most treasured sugar colony, privileging a small and oppressive white minority while helping to underpin the servile status of the enslaved majority. The notion of blood ancestry also barred other marginalized groups from claiming the full rights of English freedom, including Jamaica's expanding population of free people of color. Sexual exploitation and rape were rife on the plantations. Sometimes white slaveholders freed their mixed-race children or those enslaved women with whom they had sexual relations; and some wealthier white men struck up long-term sexual relationships with fairly well-heeled free women of color, who comprised a growing part of the population in colonial towns like Kingston, Jamaica's main port. By the final quarter of the eighteenth century, there were more than three thousand free people of color living in Kingston, representing around a third of the town's free population. By the early nineteenth century, across Jamaica as a whole, free people of color outnumbered white people. But, though free, they faced strict restrictions of their legal rights.

Newman offers an impressively nuanced account of changing and conflicting white colonial attitudes toward free people of color and of how those attitudes informed colonial law. For example, she explains the transition from the very strict racialized boundaries drawn around whiteness by a wealthy and politically confident Jamaican planter class during the 1760s to the relaxing of those boundaries as a dwindling number of local white planters sought local allies during a period of economic and political crisis in the early nineteenth century. Newman shows that, despite these important changes, elements of white colonial attitudes nevertheless remained consistent. Even when the local legislature chose to grant the rights of British subjects to free men of color in 1830, it still chose to do so in language that cast them as “a discrete and inferior subset of the colonial population” (269). Newman also presents revealing evidence of how people of color sought to undermine such judgments—appealing to white audiences for privileges on the basis of their blood ties to British parents. This forms part of an astute discussion of colonial debate about inheritance and rights, although parts of it might have been treated in more detail, particularly for the complex era of the French and Haitian Revolutions, and it could even perhaps have provided the substance for the whole book.

But A Dark Inheritance is an ambitious piece of transatlantic history that ranges beyond Jamaica. Newman devotes a substantial portion of it to discussing how concerns about colonial sexuality were expressed in the metropole. In part, this work helps to develop the idea that the rise of the British abolition movement was due to more than just rising sympathy for enslaved Africans. For example, Newman shows that the figure of the lascivious, sexually deviant colonial planter became a common archetype in late eighteenth-century British literature—and an obvious target for political attack. But despite the sympathy abolitionists expressed for enslaved Africans, metropolitan commentators were also fearful of the mixing and perceived “degeneracy” associated with interracial sex—anxieties often articulated in lurid satirical prints that denigrated black women. Indeed, despite the tendency of abolitionist writing to represent enslaved women as helpless victims of planter power, Newman claims that “the majority of British verbal and visual depictions emphasized the repulsive, amusing, titillating, and brutish aspects of black womanhood” (220–21).

A Dark Inheritance casts the history of colonial Jamaica during the slavery period in a compelling new light by looking at it through the lens of blood, sex, and Britishness. The book helps us to see how shifting ideas surrounding those themes were put to use by a small colonial elite as it attempted to exercise control in a colony peopled mostly by enslaved Africans and how liminal groups could try to put those ideas to work in pursuit of their own interests. We also learn about the ways in which questions of blood and sex framed transatlantic debates over slavery while simultaneously fueling metropolitan fears of how mixing on the colonial “periphery” might corrupt the body politic at “home.” This is a sophisticated book on themes that still resonate within contemporary British assumptions about national belonging. It is a timely intervention that should fuel discussion, shape future research, and become required reading for serious students of the British Atlantic empire and its afterlives.