Katie Donington in Slavery & Abolition

Blood Legacy: Reckoning with a Family’s History of Slavery, Alex Renton, Edinburgh, Canongate, 2021, ix, 388 pp, £16.99, ISBN 978-1-78689-886-9

Published July 2022, Slavery & Abolition, A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0144039X.2022.2099144

Alex Renton’s fascinating book offers a unique personal insight into the ways in which transatlantic slavery impacted on the lives of both the enslaved and the enslavers. It is a story of two halves – the enrichment of the metropole and the under-development of the colonies. Throughout the book, Renton details the ways that slavery generated profit for individual families and the British state, whilst systematically exploiting the labour of enslaved people and extracting wealth and resources from the Caribbean. The book is a meditation on inheritance which he conceptualizes across a range of different areas, the transmission of property, capital, and class status but equally important racial inequality, history, and memory. Using his own family’s involvement with slavery as a way of exploring these issues, he shifts from personal questions of guilt, responsibility, and repair to broader questions about how the former slaving European nations should reckon with this past and its legacies.

Drawing on an archive belonging to his Scottish ancestors – the Fergussons – the book tracks the family’s initial interest in the plantation economy in Tobago in the 1770s through to its final withdrawal from Jamaica in 1875. The periodization is based on his family’s involvement in Caribbean trade, and it allows Renton to explore how freedom was made and circumscribed within post-emancipation society. This framing is important, particularly as the book has been written for a popular audi- ence. For too long public understandings of and interest in Caribbean history have hinged on the abolition campaign, as if the passing of the Abolition Act of 1833 drew a definitive line under the iniquities of slavery. Throughout the book, Renton uses the present tense to guide his readers through the actions of his predecessors. This literary choice closes the distance between then and now, as does his insistence on shifting between the historical material and personal reflections on its meaning in the present. One of the structural devices of the book is the inclusion of chapters at the end of each geographic section exploring Tobago and Jamaica today. Commentary on the economic dependence on tourism, the corrosive effects of colourism, and the inadequate access to basic public amenities are connected to the ghosts of slavery and colonialism. This is not a book which is solely written about or preoccupied with history: it is about how that history has created the societies we inhabit now.

Renton is open when discussing his own positionality in relation to the history. ‘I am an heir of slavery’s past’, he writes, and ‘it marks my mind, my culture, my DNA’ (1). This connection does not cause him to shy away from recounting the violence and suffering that his family were complicit in. He weaves together business correspondence and family letters to demonstrate the duality of those respectable pillars of society who engaged in profiteering from human life. This archival imbrication enables the reader to see Sir Adam Fergusson, whose letters are drawn on most frequently, as a learned Enlightenment thinker, a kind relative and a man who presided over the deaths of 285 enslaved people (218).

Renton takes seriously the ways in which slavery was shaped by and shaping of the family. Although not explored at length, he is careful to note the role that women played in expanding networks and accessing capital and property. He outlines how the business was managed through the ties of kith and kin. Whilst the archive prioritizes the thoughts and actions of its originators – the slave-owning Fergussons – he uses the records to piece together other family stories. One of the most compelling tells the story of Annie, an enslaved mixed heritage woman on the family’s Rozelle planta- tion in Jamaica. Annie became involved in a relationship with Archibald Cameron, the white overseer. The relationship reveals the complex power dynamics of the plantation, where race, gender and class had to be negotiated in relation to the management of both personal and business interests. When Cameron lost his position, Annie and her chil- dren lost their place in the plantation hierarchy. Cameron’s initial interest in and later abandonment of the purchase of his family from Sir Adam is painful. Annie’s agency (however limited) was entirely contingent on her proximity to white power, and its withdrawal demonstrated the precariousness of family bonds for enslaved people.

Throughout the book Renton is careful not to lose sight of the enslaved as individ- uals. He highlights acts of resistance and engages in his own attempts at historical recovery and memorialization. The inclusion of a transcribed letter (128–130) authored by an enslaved man named Augustus Thomson who ran away from Rozelle and made it to London where he confronted Sir Adam about conditions on the plantation is remarkable. For most enslaved people such acts of liberation were impossible, indeed Renton points out that only six people escaped the plantation. In section entitled ‘The toll’, he fills three pages with the names of the enslaved and their causes of death. ‘These ruined and anguished lives’, he writes, ‘are the true cost of the modest income’ (217) generated by Rozelle plantation.

The book engages with the issue of reparations and is itself a form of historical repair. Renton makes it clear that the ability to write this history is bound up with the privileges that slavery afforded him. When he speaks with a museum worker in Tobago about the family papers she responds: ‘We have absolutely nothing like this’ (80). When slavery ended the slave-owners, including the Fergussons, were awarded £20 million in compensation. Very little of this money was reinvested back into the Caribbean. Education, infrastructure, and the creation of new industries to support the emancipated workers were not forthcoming, and this created the conditions of impoverishment that many in the Caribbean continue to endure. Renton ends by asking ‘what to do?’ It is a question that former slaving nations will continue to grapple with.

katie.donington@open.ac.uk