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Through the story of his own family's history as slave and plantation owners, Alex Renton looks at how we owe it to the present to understand the legacy of the past. When British Caribbean slavery was abolished across most of the British Empire in 1833, it was not the newly liberated who received compensation, but the tens of thousands of enslavers who were paid millions of pounds in government money. The descendants of some of those slave owners are among the wealthiest and most powerful people in Britain today.
Blood Legacy explores what inheritance - political, economic, moral and spiritual - has been passed to the descendants of the slave owners and the descendants of the enslaved. He also asks, crucially, how the former - himself among them - can begin to make reparations for the past.
About the author
Alex Renton is a journalist who has won awards for his work as an investigator, war correspondent and food policy writer. He has also worked for Oxfam, in East Asia, Haiti and on the Iraq war. Most recently he has been a columnist on the Times and Scotland correspondent for Newsweek magazine. He lives in Edinburgh with his family.@axrenton | alexrenton.com
Summary
One man's personal discovery of his family's involvement in transatlantic slavery leads to his call for a wider reckoning among the descendants of slave owners
Foreword
One man's personal discovery of his family's involvement in transatlantic slavery leads to his call for a wider reckoning among the descendants of slave owners
Additional text
A useful counter to British self-congratulation on the ending of the Atlantic slave trade . . . It must make any reader question much of the received wisdom about the eighteenth-century Enlightenment
