Dark Inheritance

Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica

Newman Brooke N.

Focusing on Jamaica, Britain's most valuable colony in the Americas by the mid-eighteenth century, Brooke Newman explores the relationship between racial classifications and the inherited rights and privileges associated with British subject status. Weaving together a diverse range of sources, she 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.

About the author

Brooke N. Newman is associate professor of history and associate director of the Humanities Research Center at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is co-editor of "Native Diasporas: Indigenous Identities and Settler Colonialism in the Americas" and lives in Richmond, VA.