Abstract
He was anxious about his interview, and so was his family. Entry into the officer corps of the East India company had the potential to change one's life for the better, and this opportunity had not come about easily for James Taylor but, rather, thanks to the careful lobbying of his wealthy father and well-connected uncle. That uncle now fussed over him, trying both to calm and prepare him for the test that lay ahead the next day. It was 1805, and the East India Company had a ban on men of color serving as officers, which meant that Taylor would have to lie to the Company's interview committee. It seemed worth the risk. Becoming a Company officer would secure him a steady income. But, and perhaps more importantly, it would afford him the identity of a white British man, allowing him to ignore (if never entirely forget) that he had been born a slave in Jamaica: the mixed-race son of an enslaved woman and a white slave trader.
Taylor's story is one of the most poignant episodes in Children of Uncertain Fortune, Daniel Livesay's excellent book about elite mixed-race migrants in the British Empire. Livesay uses the Taylor family correspondence, along with a host of other evidence, to delineate the changing politics of race and empire in the British Atlantic of the long eighteenth century. Focused on wealthy people of color who travelled from Jamaica to Britain between 1733 and 1833, the book is a forceful reminder that empire was a family affair and that the histories of Britain and its colonies are so entwined that they may only be properly understood as a single topic. Eighteenth-century colonial migration created transatlantic families, as well as far-flung British family fortunes. The inequalities of empire were also rooted in family, ideas of social rank and racial belonging being dependent on lineage and inheritance. Slavery was an inherited status, passed down the maternal line. Family relationships determined questions about who was owed what, who could be “bought,” and who “belonged” to whom and how. Such questions could be adjudicated with brutal certitude, not only within the private realms of family life, but also by legislators, law courts, and slave traders. However, they were occasionally also open for discussion, as Taylor's story demonstrates; and as Livesay's careful study shows, they certainly changed over time.
Children of Uncertain Fortune is about mixed-race Jamaicans, and the focus on Jamaica is an obvious choice. The island was the largest and most populous colony in the British Caribbean during the eighteenth century, first prized because of its booming slave-run sugar economy. During the middle decades of the century, Jamaica became strategically vital to Britain due to the vast wealth and revenue it created within an expanding imperial economy. In the nineteenth century, the Jamaican sugar economy went into decline, but the island remained central to British conversations about colonies and imperialism, rising in notoriety as abolitionists publicized stories and statistics about the wonton waste and capricious cruelties of Jamaican slavery. Jamaica was also a place where exploitative interracial sexual relations between white men and black women were especially commonplace, where mixed-race families became widespread, and where most free-colored migrants to Britain were born.
Livesay's account traces the histories of those families and migrants, in the Caribbean and across the Atlantic in Britain, focusing most heavily on the relatively fortunate children of wealthy white fathers. During the first half of the eighteenth century, wealthy people of color occupied an ambivalent position within Jamaican society. They gained freedom from slavery through their relationships with whites, often as the result of a sexual or familial relationship with a white man, which was how James Taylor and his mother had become freed people. The fact that the free-colored children of wealthy whites were potential heirs to large estates caused some islanders to see that group as a threat to a social order predicated on white privilege; but others, particularly the wealthy white parents of free-colored children, saw a future for a more fluid free society in Jamaica—one in which mixed-race sons and daughters could augment their small white settler community, which was precariously outnumbered by enslaved Africans. Throughout the eighteenth century, the Jamaican legislative assembly negotiated these competing perspectives on the perils and possibilities of the mixed-race population by placing increasingly heavy legal restrictions on free people of color in general while agreeing to extend the privileges of particular elite individuals. Those individuals paid a large sum of money to petition the assembly for the favor. Hundreds of successful privilege petitions, containing information given in support of their requests, show that family ties to wealthy white patrons were keys to acceptance, as too was evidence of acculturation to white society via sojourns in Britain—a clear sign that this free-colored elite was a transatlantic group.
Many were accepted into British society, although integration was easier for some than it was for others. Ann Morse, the daughter of a wealthy white father and free mixed-race mother, for example, was able more or less to keep the character of her Jamaican origins a secret throughout much of her life. Her own husband claimed to have been ignorant of the African element in her family tree during their courtship, and Morse married into the opulent Middleton family, living at Townhill Park: a grand Hampshire manor house near the outskirts of Southampton. In cases like that of James Taylor, a darker shade of skin could complicate things. But Taylor managed, nonetheless, to convince his skeptical East-India-Company interviewers that he was a white man, eligible for inclusion in their ranks, by wearing his hair short and claiming that his mother had been a white Jamaican. Livesay details how Taylor made the most of his lucky break, expressing pride in his professional rank as well as in his British identity. In India James described the locals as “ignorant and careless fools,” “cursed rascals,” “expert thieves,” and as a “most effeminate set of wretches.” A “stout Englishman would be more than a match for ½ a dozen of them” (317), he wrote, displaying how it was not only their ties to British family and education, but also their acceptance of British prejudices and inequalities (including slaveholding), that helped many of these colonial children to pass muster.
Livesay argues that the free-colored elite encountered a relatively receptive welcome in the Britain of the mid-eighteenth century, when markers like education, dress, family attachments, and diction appear to have counted for about as much as skin shade. But later on, that culture of qualified acceptance gave way to something more forbidding and cold, as concerns about color, “racial infiltration,” and the “character” of the British nation intensified. During the age of abolition, racist attitudes hardened. Livesay argues that this was in part because abolitionists (and many of their opponents) saw interracial sex as a symptom of degeneracy in the Caribbean—an impediment to the growth of the white population and to the propagation of morals and marriage amongst enslaved people. The revolution in French Saint Domingue further aroused suspicion of mixed-race people, largely because the mass uprising of enslaved people there had been preceded by a rebellion led by free people of color educated in the metropole. Wealthy Britons were also increasingly anxious about the potential for children born out of wedlock to complicate patterns of inheritance or dilute family fortunes; and the attractions of West Indian heirs and heiresses were otherwise on the wane, as sugar colonies went into decline and the British economy developed in new directions. In Britain, therefore, the prospects for children of color became more uncertain, so that, by the time parliament was debating a final end to slavery in 1833, even those wealthy people of color willing to accommodate themselves to white society faced far more suspicious hostility in Britain than they had a century earlier.
In Jamaica, by contrast, their prospects brightened, mainly because of the demographic decline of the whites and a rapid increase in the number of free people of color. By 1813, the wealthy planters who ran the Jamaican legislature decided to try to consolidate their ties with the mixed-race elite, abolishing laws that restricted their legal rights and economic opportunities. Finally, in 1830, the legislature decided to place all free people of color on equal legal footing with whites—a last-gasp effort to shore up an alliance that they hoped might rescue the embattled slave system, which the British parliament nonetheless chose to dismantle in the ensuing decade. Throughout these transformations, many white islanders remained ambivalent about accepting free men of color as equals. However, British imperial administrators were by now prepared to ignore such misgivings, recognizing that the mixed-race elite would somehow have to perform a role in the future government and administration of their once-cherished Caribbean colony.
Children of Uncertain Fortune tackles a complicated set of topics over an extended period of time. Its main arguments are about the changed status of free people of color in Jamaica and Britain under the influence of revised ideas about empire, demography, slavery, family, inheritance, and race. Those arguments are skillfully crafted using a startling array of evidence, from petitions and probate records to novels and letters. Livesay's research took him to archives and libraries in Scotland, England, Wales, Jamaica, and throughout the United States. Moreover, his book draws on scholarship, old and new, about such seemingly disparate themes as the laws surrounding illegitimacy and marriage in Britain, representations of race in eighteenth century print culture, the politics of slavery in the Americas, the rise of the British abolition campaign, and more besides. Livesay draws stimulating connections between these themes in British, Atlantic, Caribbean, and imperial history, and his book ought to be of long-lasting interest to scholars in a range of sub-disciplines, not least the history of the family. Its only significant faults lie in a sometimes clumsy structure that struggles to balance a central narrative about change over time with detailed case studies and analysis of specific sources. A much more detailed index could also have been useful to readers wanting to trace the various family and life histories that braid their way through this complex book.
One of Livesay's achievements is to demonstrate how a changing empire and new ideas about race and nation were shaped as much by quotidian family life as by wars, revolutions, or treatises. He argues that when “mixed-race colonists came to the imperial center, they showed Britons the true face of colonialism, not simply its professed ideal” (19). Their presence in the metropole demonstrated not only that empire entailed mixture and negotiation but also that it involved intimate connections between colonies and the “mother country.” Nevertheless, and as Children of Uncertain Fortune repeatedly reveals, there were many aspects of colonial life that transatlantic migrants chose not to show. There could be few better examples than of a young mixed-race man, born a slave in Jamaica, anxiously preparing to ingratiate himself with the officers of the East India Company in London. Consciously, or unconsciously, James Taylor must have been aware of the unusualness of his situation. All the evidence points to a near-desperate desire to erase those parts of a family history that connected him to the vast enslaved communities whose suffering and work underpinned the imperial enterprise of the British Atlantic world. His success in that pursuit is a reminder that the politics of empire were intensely personal, and as dependent then, as now, on selective memories that could hide or ignore an inconvenient past.