“One can only guess what passed through James Taylor's mind when he landed in the small Scottish seaport of Montrose in 1791”, so begins one of the chapters in Daniel Livesay's remarkable history of mixed-race families in the eighteenth century Atlantic world. “Beset by financial troubles, Jack Morse went to court in the spring of 1795”, so begins another. At the very heart of Livesay's book is the endeavour to combine the history of race and empire, slavery and abolition with the family lives of individuals whose own struggles did not just reflect broader processes of change but constituted and compelled them. As Livesay explains, historians too often consider racial ideology and family formation apart, one occupying a realm of abstractions and ideas, the other concerned with more intimate questions of sexuality, childhood, and domesticity. And yet, the issue of racial differentiation turned always on matters of family belonging. Who was legitimate, who was a rightful heir, who could claim connections to whom—these were the grounds on which notions of race, citizenship and national identity were contested and reworked, while attitudes towards whiteness and colour, freedom and slavery were dramatized and given human meaning within (often highly public) disputes over property and inheritance. If the fiction of racial difference depended ultimately on a clear distinction between free and unfree, white and black, it is a history of people of mixed-race that perhaps best reveals the tensions, contradictions and changing historical circumstances that belie that myth.
That history derives from the fact that a considerable number of British men in Jamaica (and elsewhere in the Caribbean) sired children with women of colour, both enslaved and free. That presents the first of many interpretative challenges. Interracial sex was marked by “white male violence meant to subjugate and control enslaved women … but, in some cases, white men held long term, though by no means fully consensual, relationships with free and enslaved women of colour”. One man whom Livesay follows closely, John Tailyour, had a relationship with Polly, a mixed-race slave woman belonging to Taiylour's cousin. In requesting that his cousin emancipate both Polly herself and the children she had borne him, Tailyour admitted that he was “much attached” to them all. Tailyour's affections for his children and their mother, Livesay concludes, reveal an element of compassion that, though set within a context of brutal and devastating inequality, “existed nonetheless”. Other men, some deeply wedded to the continuation of slavery—others responsible for some of the most shocking inhumanity that the book describes—nevertheless cohabitated and had children with women of colour. Family attachments cut across political commitments. Men cared for their children across lines of race and legitimacy, provided for their education and included them in their wills. Much of what the book describes are relationships characterised by care and concern—the idiosyncratic family ties by which property and power were transmitted but also by which individual identities in the world obtained coherent meaning. Livesay does not orientate his book towards a feminist tradition but the maxim, “the personal is political” captures well the sense in which this history combines “big” historical forces and currents of change with the distinctive substance of putatively “private” lives.
That is only possible by the fact that Livesay has so painstakingly researched his subject. Two main archival collections make up the core of the book's source material: the privilege bills by which people of colour in Jamaica appealed for full or partial immunity from race-based laws; and probate records, revealing how more than 2,000 white men between 1773 and 1815 apportioned their inheritance (a significant number of which were complicated further by the lawsuits filed against them). All of these records offer up complex biographical micro-histories. It is a testament to Livesay's care and ingenuity that he has been able to reconstruct family trees, pursue individuals across oceans and continents and rebuild the rationales by which they were variously incorporated within or excluded beyond the bounds of family belonging. Besides these sources, Livesay has read exhaustively from fictional accounts, press reports, Jamaican assembly pamphlets, and autobiographical writing. What we gain is a new understanding of how racial thinking during the long eighteenth century evolved in dynamic interaction with shifting gradations of class and culture, status, and respectability. Agents of historical change both in Britain and the Caribbean—lawmakers, opinion shapers and leading protagonists in the battle to defend or oppose slavery itself—were often profoundly motivated by their family commitments, their interests in channelling the future direction of their family fortunes and their emotional investments in their children and, though usually to a much lesser extent, the women who gave them birth.
The viability of Jamaica as a colonial society, it was commonly believed, depended on the island's white population remaining sufficiently numerous and sufficiently united to control the slave population on which the island's economy depended. That demographic (im)balance, Livesay shows, was the single constant theme that animated debates on the political and social positioning of persons of mixed-race across the century before slavery was outlawed. The hope for much of this period was that mixed-race children, born in the Caribbean but educated in Britain and endowed with significant financial, social and cultural capital, could “become white” on return to the Caribbean. Precisely because the nature of the family was also changing, however—the growth of merchant capitalism repositioned the boundaries defining kinship at the same time as racial attitudes were also hardening—the status of mixed-race migrants took on new and very different connotations. No longer seen as the vanguard of a modern white settler society, elites of colour were expected to form an interstitial bulwark against colonial anarchy nonetheless.
Though it will form a valuable addition to the scholarship on the Atlantic world in the era of slavery and abolition, there is much in this book that will resonate with historians of other colonial times and places. The underlying fear of colonial rebellion, the intense anxiety around the prospect of racial degeneration, the ever-indeterminate nature of the very racial categories that justified colonial rule: these are themes as pertinent to historians of the southern United States in the nineteenth century or South Africa in the twentieth as they are those studying the eighteenth century Caribbean. The importance of sex for understanding race—as a now considerable literature now shows—helps to explain why questions of similarity and difference ultimately begin at home.
