Blood Legacy - by Alex Renton (Hardcover)
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<p/><br></br><p><b> About the Book </b></p></br></br><b>One man's personal discovery of his family's involvement in transatlantic slavery leads to his call for a wider reckoning among the descendants of slave owners</b><p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br><p>Through the story of his own family's history as slave and plantation owners, Alex Renton looks at how we owe it to the present to understand the legacy of the past. When the transatlantic slave trade was abolished across most of the British Empire in 1833, it was not the newly liberated who received compensation, but the tens of thousands of enslavers who were paid millions of pounds in government money. The descendants of some of those slave owners are among the wealthiest and most powerful people in Britain today. <p/>A group of Caribbean countries is calling on ten European nations to discuss the payment of trillions of dollars for the damage done by transatlantic slavery and its continuing legacy. Meanwhile, Black Lives Matter and other activist groups are causing increasing numbers of white people to reflect on how this history of abuse and exploitation has benefited them. <p/><i>Blood Legacy</i> explores what inheritance - political, economic, moral and spiritual - has been passed to the descendants of the slave owners and the descendants of the enslaved. It travels through eighteenth-century Tobago and Trinidad, and nineteenth-century Jamaica, and Renton interviews people living in the Caribbean today. <p/>He also asks, crucially, how the descendants of those slave owners - himself among them - can begin to make reparations for the past.</p><p/><br></br><p><b> Review Quotes </b></p></br></br><br>'A courageous, <br>deeply affecting and excoriatingly honest account of his family's role in<br>enslavement' PHILIPPE SANDS, <i>Financial Times </i>(UK)</p> </p>'Utterly gripped - an<br>incredible book. Alex's work is my book in practice' EMMA DABIRI</p> </p>'Alex Renton has<br>done Britain a favour and written a brutally honest book about his family's<br>involvement with slavery. Blood Legacy could change our frequently defensive<br>national conversation about slavery/race' SATHNAM SANGHERA, <i>The Times </i>(UK)</p><i> </i></p>'Mesmerising and<br>deeply personal . . . unflinching . . . This earnest investigation into what it<br>means to take responsibility for racial inequality deserves a wide<br>readership' <i>Publishers Weekly (starred review)</i></p><i> </i></p>'An important book<br>. . . one of the strengths of Renton's book is that it takes seriously the<br>issue of class . . . In breaking class ranks, Renton has given voice to a long<br>suppressed truth . . . [an] admirable book' <i>Observer </i>(UK)</p><i> </i></p>A deeply moving, <br>brave and powerful book' ANDREW MARR<i></i></p> </p>'In this<br>unflinching, fascinating and very human account, drawn from his own family<br>papers, Alex Renton takes a crucial first step towards reparation, by<br>acknowledging the cruel reality of his ancestors' callous exploitation of<br>enslaved people's labour from afar; detailing the damage done, and both asking<br>and beginning to answer the question of what can be done to purge these sins<br>and their legacies today' MIRANDA KAUFMANN, author of Black Tudors</p> </p>'<i>Blood Legacy</i> is<br>a moving, timely, well-written and strikingly thoughtful book that makes an<br>important contribution to the growing debate on the horrors that accompanied<br>Britain's empire-building. Alex Renton's forensic and remarkably honest<br>analysis of his own family papers, and the profound darkness they contain, <br>highlights our continuing failure to acknowledge the extreme toxicity of so<br>much of our Imperial history' WILLIAM DALRYMPLE</p> </p>'A brilliant read'<br>PROFESSOR TREVOR BURNARD</p> </p>'Moving and deeply<br>researched, Alex Renton's account of his ancestors' slaveholding brings home<br>the everyday brutality of Caribbean slavery and its contribution to the making<br>of Britain both then and since. <i>Blood Legacy</i> sets the<br>ordinariness of slaveholding in the eighteenth-century monied world alongside<br>accounts of the extraordinary lives of those they owned. This is a book that<br>asks white Britons to look hard at our past and its consequences in the<br>present' PROFESSOR DIANA PATON</p> </p>'A fascinating<br>family history of profit and loss made during slavery in the Caribbean. This<br>book is truth not fiction' PROFESSOR SIR GEOFF PALMER</p> </p>'The kind of<br>history I wish they'd taught me in school; Renton takes the yellowed old papers<br>from his grandfather's study and with them weaves a vivid, gripping, modern retelling<br>of a historical abomination . . . Unearthing even a portion of the stories of<br>the slaves Renton's family bought, transported, exploited and ultimately killed<br>feels like a necessary first step towards a modest degree of<br>redemption' GAVIN FRANCIS</p> </p>'In exploring his<br>family's historic links to the slave trade, Alex Renton paints a sobering<br>picture of a society built on systematic brutality, and poses important<br>questions about how best to right the wrongs of the past . . . Truly<br>fascinating' Stuart Kelly, <i>Scotsman</i></p> </p>'<i>Blood<br>Legacy </i>is far more than one man's <i>mea culpa </i>for his<br>family's role in the slave trade and the benefits bestowed on him as a result.<br>It asks that most urgent of moral questions: what do I do about it now? Renton<br>is clear, if we cannot change our past we can certainly do something about the<br>consequences that still flow from it - the racism, the inequality and injustice<br>that still blights the lives of the descendants of those who were once<br>enslaved. <i>Blood Legacy</i> is a full frontal challenge to those<br>who enjoy a comfortable, liberal life - it's time to stand up and be<br>counted' GEORGE ALAGIAH</p> </p>'As a fairly<br>well-educated man, I thought I knew about the slave trade and I now realise I<br>knew almost nothing . . . it may be the most important book I've ever<br>read' NEAL FOSTER, <i>writer and director of Horrible Histories Live<br>On Stage</i></p> </p>'<i>Blood Legacy</i> is<br>destined to at once prompt and shape an urgent public conversation, long<br>overdue, that we can only hope will be guided by the core contention of<br>Renton's bracing work: that it's the responsibility of <i>all </i>of<br>us who belong to societies shaped by the Triangle Trade not merely to confront<br>the torrid legacies of slavery, but to change them. Remarkably researched, <br>searchingly told, this is an exemplary book - and a necessary one' JOSHUA<br>JELLY-SCHAPIRO</p> </p>'This moving and<br>powerful book asks one of the most important moral questions of our age: how<br>are we to repair the historic damage done by transatlantic slavery? Reparation<br>is the answer, but it is too grudging a word. We should not heal the sins of<br>our past because we are pressured to do so. We should do it joyfully, because<br>it is the right thing to do' RICHARD HOLLOWAY</p> </p> <p/> <p/> <p/> <p/> <p/> <p/> <p/> <p/> <p/> <p/> <p/> <p/> <p/> <p/> <p/> <p/> <p/> <p/> <p/> <p/> <p/> <p/> <p/></p>'How should Britons<br>reckon with the wrongs of slavery? Those wrongs cannot be put right, but recognition<br>of that history matters, an essential step forward if we are to build a better<br>future. Alex Renton's honest exploration of his own family's history as<br>Caribbean slave-owners, based on an extraordinary archive, is an important<br>contribution to this work' CATHERINE HALL, Chair of the Centre for the<br>Study of the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership</p><br><br><p/><br></br><p><b> About the Author </b></p></br></br><p><b>Alex Renton</b> is a journalist who has won awards for his work as an investigator, war correspondent and food policy writer. He has also worked for Oxfam, in East Asia, Haiti and on the Iraq war. Most recently he has been a columnist on the <i>Times </i>and Scotland correspondent for <i>Newsweek </i>magazine. He lives in Edinburgh with his family. <p/>@axrenton alexrenton.com</p>
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