Children of Uncertain Fortune

By tracing the largely forgotten eighteenth-century migration of elite mixed-race individuals from Jamaica to Great Britain, Children of Uncertain Fortune reinterprets the evolution of British racial ideologies as a matter of negotiating family membership. Using wills, legal petitions, family correspondences, and inheritance lawsuits, Daniel Livesay is the first scholar to follow the hundreds of children born to white planters and Caribbean women of color who crossed the ocean for educational opportunities, professional apprenticeships, marriage prospects, or refuge from colonial prejudices.

The presence of these elite children of color in Britain pushed popular opinion in the British Atlantic world toward narrower conceptions of race and kinship. Members of Parliament, colonial assemblymen, merchant kings, and cultural arbiters--the very people who decided Britain's colonial policies, debated abolition, passed marital laws, and arbitrated inheritance disputes--rubbed shoulders with these mixed-race Caribbean migrants in parlors and sitting rooms. Upper-class Britons also resented colonial transplants and coveted their inheritances; family intimacy gave way to racial exclusion. By the early nineteenth century, relatives had become strangers.

"By tracing the largely forgotten eighteenth-century migration of elite mixed-race individuals from Jamaica to Great Britain, "Children of Uncertain Fortune" reinterprets the evolution of British racial ideologies as a matter of negotiating family membership. Using wills, legal petitions, family correspondences, and inheritance lawsuits, Daniel Livesay ... follow[s] the hundreds of children born to white planters and Caribbean women of color who crossed the ocean for educational opportunities, professional apprenticeships, marriage prospects, or refuge from colonial prejudices"--
Daniel Livesay is assistant professor of history at Claremont McKenna College.
An important contribution to understanding twists and turns in the history of race, empire, and the construction of the 'other' in Great Britain. . . . The book is pathbreaking in its unique effort to capture the dialectical process (between the home country and colony) that defined and shaped the nineteenth-century boundaries of whiteness in Great Britain and of class in Jamaica.--Brill Journals

Children of Uncertain Fortune is masterful. . . . Livesay's sophisticated analysis offers a model of solid and creative investigation.--William and Mary Quarterly

This book makes a significant contribution to the history of non-white migration between Britain and its colonies.--Choice

Contributes to new understandings of the long history of connection between Britain and the Caribbean and shifting patterns in racial thinking and racial practices. Work such as this can play a vital part in repairing at least some of the damage done by colonialism.--Catherine Hall, London Review of Books