A Dark Inheritance

Download or read book Dark Inheritance written by Brooke N. Newman and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-28 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major reassessment of the development of race and subjecthood in the British Atlantic 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.