Heiresses: The Women Who Brought Caribbean Slavery Home

From Jamaica to Charleston, Sierra Leone to Bombay, China to Australia, back to England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, this is the story of the heiresses—and the role they played in the history of enslavement.

Through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it was a fact universally acknowledged that any man in want of a great fortune ought find himself a Caribbean heiress. Their assets, the product of the exploitation of enslaved Africans, enabled them to marry into the top tiers of the aristocracy and attracted the attention of fortune-hunters. They fell in love (not always with their husbands), eloped, divorced, squandered fortunes, threw parties, went mad and (in once case) faked a daughter’s death.

In her much anticipated follow up to Black Tudors, Miranda Kaufmann peers beneath our pastel-hued, Jane Austen inspired image of the Georgian heiress to reveal a murky world of inheritance, fortune-hunting and human exploitation.

Uncovering the lives of nine women who made their fortunes in the Caribbean slave trade, Heiresses provides a compelling and often shocking account of how Britain profited and continues to profit from the slave trade. In the vein of Empireland, Natives and White Debt, Heiresses promises a meticulously researched and readable exploration of the darker side of British history.