Introduction

Author(s):  
Daniel Livesay

This chapter introduces the main ideas and themes of the book. It describes not only how and why mixed-race Jamaicans travelled to Britain, but it explains why their migration was so important. Because they were connected to such wealthy and influential individuals in the British Atlantic, and because family relationships complicated their racial status, mixed-race migrants were instrumental in deliberations on questions of race in the British Empire. The introduction also analyses the various sources and methodology that constitute the book’s research base.

Author(s):  
Daniel Livesay

The conclusion reiterates the core argument of the book. It contends that mixed-race Jamaicans who left for Britain were critical to the debates around race and slavery in the Anglo-Atlantic world. In particular, their experiences show the ways family relationships influenced racial standing in the long eighteenth century. When definitions of family were loose, elites of color could successfully integrate in the British Empire. When definitions of family constricted, it became much more difficult to avoid being lumped into discriminated categories around Africanness. Overall, the conclusion reasserts that racial ideologies and prejudices were more complex than previously thought, both in the nakedly abusive society of Jamaica as well as the seemingly more tolerant location of Britain.


Author(s):  
Daniel Livesay

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.


Author(s):  
Daniel Livesay

This chapter chronicles the personal and public disputes rankling the British Empire after the American Revolution. It includes a case study of a mixed-race Jamaican family who travelled to England, then to India, and back to England. When they finally settled in Britain, a white cousin sued them for their Jamaican inheritance and used their West and East Indian ties (including connections to Bengal’s discredited governor Warren Hastings) as a way of castigating them as both corrupt and racially impure. This lawsuit demonstrates the ways that family negotiation in Britain grew increasingly racialized in the wake of the imperial storm of the American Revolution and the beginning of popular protests against colonial slavery. At the same time, however, the chapter shows great divergences in mixed-race experiences in Britain as well as the continuation of interracial relationships in Jamaica despite increasing calls against the practice.


Author(s):  
Kenneth McNeil

This chapter provides an overview of the themes of the book. Largely in response to their own national predicament in post-Union imperial Britain, Scottish writers of the Romantic period brought to the British Atlantic a historiography of collective or cultural memory, which imagined an unprecedented fissure within the flow of time that had rent the present from the past. This sense of an immense gulf between past and present – measured in only one or two generations and imagined to be within reach of, or just beyond, living memory – was attended by deep national anxieties but also by a renewed optimism, of social and cultural reinvention. As it circulated along the routes of the British empire, Scottish history writing of the period made a fundamental contribution to the culture of modernity in the Atlantic world.


Author(s):  
Daniel Livesay

This chapter evaluates the evolving legal and cultural standing of elite mixed-race Jamaicans in the first half of the eighteenth century. It describes why so many interracial families formed on the island as well as the legal restrictions imposed on mixed-race people by the colony’s legislature, the Jamaican assembly. In particular, it considers how concerns over the balance between a small white and large enslaved population in Jamaica created security fears as well as demographic anxieties about mixed-race families. However, the chapter shows that elite free people of color carved out legal privileges for themselves by petitioning directly to the assembly. Moreover, the assembly experimented early on with allowing family connections, wealth, and ancestry to put certain mixed-race people into the legal category of “white.” A series of enslaved rebellions in the middle of the eighteenth century named Tacky’s Revolt, along with growing concerns about improper households across the British Empire, resulted in more restrictions against mixed-race Jamaicans generally by 1761. Yet, island rulers still held onto a demographic hope that certain elites of color—namely those who had spent time in Britain—could become the seedbed on which to grow a strong white population.


The year 1714 was a revolutionary one for Dissenters across the British Empire. The Hanoverian Succession upended a political and religious order antagonistic to Protestant non-conformity and replaced it with a regime that was, ostensibly, sympathetic to the Whig interest. The death of Queen Anne and the dawn of Hanoverian Rule presented Dissenters with fresh opportunities and new challenges as they worked to negotiate and legitimize afresh their place in the polity. The essays in this collection examine how Dissenters and their allies in a range of geographic contexts confronted and adapted to the Hanoverian order. Collectively, they argue that though generally overlooked compared to the Glorious Revolution of 1688–9 or the 1707 Act of Union, 1714 was a pivotal moment with far reaching consequences for Dissenters at home and abroad. By decentralizing the narrative beyond England and exploring dissenting reactions in Scotland, Ireland and North America, the authors in this volume demonstrate the extent to which the Succession influenced the politics and touched the lives of ordinary people across the British Atlantic world. As well as offering a thorough breakdown of confessional tensions within Britain during the short and medium terms, this volume also marks the first attempt to look at the complex interaction between religious communities in consequence of the Hanoverian Succession.


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