A Dark Inheritance

Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica

Bibliographic Data

ID23410825
AuthorsBrooke N Newman (corresponding author)
Year2018
Pages352
Publication date2018-08-28
Open AccessYes
TypeBOOK
VenueDark Inheritance (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherYale University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.12987/yale/9780300225556.001.0001
OpenAlexW3217394823
ISBN9780300225556
Open LibraryOL28689050M
LanguageEN
Citations received2

Focusing on Jamaica, Britain’s most valuable colony in the Americas by the mid-eighteenth century, A Dark Inheritance explores the relationship between racial classifications and the inherited rights and privileges associated with British subject status. Brooke Newman reveals the centrality of notions of blood and blood mixture to evolving racial definitions and sexual practices in colonial Jamaica and to legal and political debates over slavery and the rights of imperial subjects on both sides of the Atlantic. Weaving together a diverse range of sources, Newman shows how colonial racial ideologies rooted in fictions of blood ancestry at once justified permanent, hereditary slavery for Africans and barred members of certain marginalized groups from laying claim to British liberties on the basis of hereditary status. This groundbreaking study demonstrates that challenges to an Atlantic slave system underpinned by distinctions of blood had far-reaching consequences for British understandings of race, gender, and national belonging.

Biology · Colonialism · Ethnology · Genealogy · Ideology · Inheritance (genetic algorithm) · Political science · Politics · Race (biology) · Sociology · Subject (documents) · Theme (computing) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Cuban History and Society · Gender Studies · Genetics · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society · British colonies · Colonies · ethnic relations · Great britain · Jamaica · Privilege (Social psychology) · race relations · Social conditions

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