Can we who benefited from slavery acknowledge the continuing legacies?
“Courageous, deeply affecting and excoriatingly honest” - Philippe Sands, Financial Times
“Alex Renton has done Britain a favour and written a brutally honest book about his family's involvement with slavery. Blood Legacy could change our frequently defensive national conversation about slavery/race” - Sathnam Sanghera, The Times
“Fascinating… this book is truth not fiction” - Sir Geoff Palmer
“A deeply moving, brave and thought-provoking book” - Andrew Marr (read his review in the Sunday Times)
“This moving and powerful book asks one of the most important moral questions of our age: how are we to repair the historic damage done by transatlantic slavery?. . . We should not heal the sins of our past because we are pressured to do so. We should do it joyfully, because it is the right thing to do” - Richard Holloway
‘Moving and deeply researched, Alex Renton's account of his ancestors' slaveholding brings home the everyday brutality of Caribbean slavery and its contribution to the making of Britain both then and since. Blood Legacy sets the ordinariness of slaveholding in the eighteenth century monied world alongside accounts of the extraordinary lives of some of those they owned. This is a book that asks white Britons to look hard at our past and its consequences in the present.’
Professor Diana Paton, Edinburgh University
Available from 6 May as hardback, e-book and audiobook. Pre-order from Wordery, Bookshop, Hive (all supporting independent book stores) and Amazon
Included in the London Evening Standard’s