Heiresses: Marriage, Inheritance, and Slavery in the Caribbean

This robust chronicle from historian Kaufman (Black Tudors) excavates the lives of nine female British enslavers. In the popular imagination, the enslaver is almost always male, but Kaufman demonstrates that marrying an heiress was an “overlooked... route to acquiring” slaves during the 18th and 19th centuries. The most famous heiress of this sort is fictional—Jane Eyre’s Bertha Rochester—while among the real-life heiresses covered here are Jane Cholmeley, Jane Austen’s “stingy aunt” who has cameos in several of Austen’s novels, and Mary Ramsay, who appears in a vicious poem by poet Robert Burns in which he calls her a woman with “hands that took, but never gave.” These female enslavers were just as callous as their male counterparts, Kaufmann diligently shows. Her research is impressive; she frequently leaves her subjects behind in their mansions to dive into the history of slavery in the West Indies, and spends ample time delineating the stories of enslaved people and their relationships to these heiresses (among her aims is to move her British readers, “with [their] strong sense of ‘fair play,’” to reevaluate their upbeat understanding of their own national history). She follows the money doggedly—as money is the driver behind almost every plot point in the book—but the endless look into inheritances, investments, and debts grows a bit wearying. Still, serious students of history will learn much. (Oct.)