A dark inheritance : blood, race, and sex in colonial Jamaica /
Brooke N. Newman.
- New Haven : Yale University Press, (c)2018.
- 1 online resource (xii, 340 pages) : illustrations, maps
- Yale scholarship online .
Includes bibliographies and index.
Part One. Blood, sovereignty, and the law. The birthright of freeborn subjects -- Blood of the father -- Whiteness and hereditary blood status -- Part Two. Blood, mixture, abolition, and empire. Blood ties in the colonial sexual economy -- Enslaved women and British comic culture -- Inheritable blood and the imperial body politic -- Conclusion.
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.