Blood Legacy: Reckoning with a Family's Story of Slavery

LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE

'An incredible work of scholarship' Sathnam Sanghera

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 British Caribbean slavery 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.

Blood Legacy explores what inheritance - political, economic, moral and spiritual - has been passed to the descendants of the slave owners and the descendants of the enslaved. He also asks, crucially, how the former - himself among them - can begin to make reparations for the past.

Author: Alex Renton
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 09/13/2022
Pages: 400
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.60lbs
Size: 7.70h x 5.00w x 1.00d
ISBN13: 9781786898890
ISBN10: 1786898896
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | Slavery
- History | Social History
- History | Europe | Great Britain | 21st Century

About the Author

Alex Renton 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 Times and a correspondent for Newsweek magazine. He lives in Edinburgh with his family.

@axrenton alexrenton.com