Heiresses, as Miranda Kaufmann admits, is indebted to scholarship which has revealed, over many decades, the extent of the ties between the British establishment and Caribbean slavery. Founded in 2009, UCL’s Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery database has become an important touchstone for any researcher wishing to understand how men – and women – benefited from the £20 million paid out by the British government to compensate enslavers for loss of their ‘property’ after the abolition of slavery in 1833. In recent years, organisations including the Church of England, Bank of England, and the Guardian newspaper, and families such as the Gladstones and Trevelyans, have acknowledged their institutional and personal indebtedness to slavery. Some have taken active measures, issuing public apologies, making financial reparations, or curating exhibitions to account for the lasting harms of slavery. Attention has fallen, almost exclusively, upon men. But, as UCL’s Centre has shown, over 40 per cent of the beneficiaries of compensation were women, half of whom were resident in Britain.
Kaufmann invites us to explore the lives of nine women – the ‘heiresses’ of the title – who benefited from slavery. Born in the early decades of the 18th century, most of them lived into their sixties (and even nineties), and witnessed seismic shifts in societies on both sides of the Atlantic. But Heiresses is as much about how these women’s lives were shaped by the law and societal expectations as it is about their relationships with Caribbean slavery. Their fortunes hinged on their ability to inherit property, but this was curtailed by primogeniture and coverture and, sometimes, issues of illegitimacy. Often, it was women’s inability to inherit property (including enslaved people) that helped conceal their complicity in slavery. Kaufmann’s subjects all did inherit enslaved people in the Caribbean, and include women as different as Isabella Bell Franks (1769-1855), the daughter of an Ashkenazi Jewish ‘mercantile dynasty’, and Frances Dazell (1729-78), the mixed-heritage daughter of an enslaved mother and enslaver father.
We learn how heiresses collaborated with their husbands, children, and attorneys to ensure the continued prosperity of their Caribbean estates. Many developed (or attained through kinship) close, even intimate, ties to members of the royal family, leading politicians, and the most notable cultural figures of the day – think Elizabeth Vassall (1771-1845), who entertained Lord Byron and Charles Dickens, or Jane Cholmeley (c.1744-1836), who was Jane Austen’s aunt. They accrued material wealth, lavishly spending on works of art and property, like Mary Ramsay (1717-94), a Jamaica heiress who acquired over 100,000 acres of land in Scotland. But they also accrued political and social capital with the income generated by their Caribbean plantations. Vassall, whose great-great grandfather had first acquired land in Jamaica in 1669, used her influence to project Thomas William Plummer into Parliament in 1806 to oppose the abolition of the slave trade. She also helped launch the political career of James Scarlett, brother of one of her Jamaican attorneys, who advised the ‘West India’ lobbying group of merchants and enslavers on how to combat the Slave Trade Abolition Bill.
The wealth that some of Kaufmann’s heiresses inherited was truly staggering. Anna Susanna Taylor (1781-1853) and her husband became ‘the richest commoners in England’ (according to their contemporaries) when they were bequeathed the property of her uncle Simon Taylor, the wealthiest Jamaican of his time whose assets totalled around £1 million. An estimated £128,550 of this wealth was derived from ownership of 2,248 enslaved people. The impersonality of such numbers, and the nature of the source material, can make it difficult to breathe life into the often anonymous people who are so central to this narrative. Kaufmann attempts to correct this by focusing on some enslaved people’s tenacity and resistance, including those who journeyed from the Caribbean to Britain to seek redress. In 1795 Betsy Newton, whose grandmother Mary Hylas had received her freedom 27 years earlier in an English court ruling, arrived at the doorstep of her enslavers in London to plead ‘strongly for her liberty, with her little girl in her arms’. Her enslaver, John Lane, refused her plea for formal manumission, but conceded that by virtue of her ‘setting foot on English ground’, she was free. Betsy stayed in England and continued to seek the emancipation of her four enslaved children left behind in Barbados, to little avail.
Enslaved people were not, of course, granted complete freedom in 1833. Emancipation would be a transition, with enslaved people forced to work as apprentices without compensation until 1838. This scheme cost the British government a further £27 million on top of the £20 million paid to enslavers. As Kaufmann insists, it is only by quoting the name of the act in full – ‘An Act for the Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Colonies; for promoting the Industry of the manumitted Slaves; and for compensating the Persons hitherto entitled to the Services of such Slaves’ – that we can understand ‘the true nature of the legislation’. Following abolition, both Isabella Bell Franks and Elizabeth Vassall continued to benefit from the exploitation of unfree people, including those forced to work under apprenticeship, and those from Sierra Leone coerced into indentured labour.
The attention to women reveals new ways to understand the legacies of transatlantic slavery, but should also encourage reflection on how we think about women in the past – their willingness to exploit and dehumanise for their own gain, in a period when their own power was limited. As Kaufmann writes, the heiresses in her book never appear to have worried about the morality of their inheritance. As a Caribbean colleague reminded me last year, and as this book shows, the fight for abolition was many decades long. Calls for reparations are, by comparison, in their infancy. Heiresses is a timely contribution to this conversation.
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Heiresses: Marriage, Inheritance and Caribbean Slavery
Miranda Kaufmann
Oneworld, 544pp, £30
Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)
Misha Ewen is Assistant Professor in American History at the University of Sussex.