Heiresses: Marriage, Inheritance, and Slavery in the Caribbean by Miranda Kaufmann instant download

Heiresses: Marriage, Inheritance, and Slavery in the Caribbean by Miranda Kaufmann instant download

From Jamaica to Charleston, Sierra Leone to India, Australia and back to England, this is the story of the heiresses—and the role they played in the history of enslavement.
Through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it was a fact universally acknowledged that any man in want of a great fortune ought to find himself a Caribbean heiress. Their assets, the product of the exploitation of enslaved African men, women, and children, enabled them to marry into the top tiers of the aristocracy and influence society and politics. They fell in love (not always with their husbands), eloped, divorced, squandered fortunes, commissioned art, threw parties, went mad and (in once case) faked a daughter's death.
In her much anticipated follow up to Black Tudors, Miranda Kaufmann peers beneath our pastel-hued, Jane Austen inspired image of the Georgian heiress to reveal a murky world of inheritance, fortune-hunting and human exploitation. She also unearths...