HEIRESSES: MARRIAGE INHERITANCE AND CARIBBEAN SLAVERY (HB)

Following the lives of nine Georgian heiresses and tracing their tainted money from its origins in the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, Miranda Kaufmann reveals a murky world of inheritance, fortune-hunting and human exploitation. Alongside this, she pieces together the lives of the people these heiresses and their families enslaved. There’s Betsy Newton, who escaped from Barbados to London to confront her enslavers face-to-face, and Susanna Augier who became a powerful landowner, inheriting her white father’s properties. Her daughter, an eligible heiress, would marry into the British aristocracy.