Mr Atkinson’s Rum Contract

The Story of a Tangled Inheritance

Shortlisted for the RSL Christopher Bland Prize 2021

‘Rarely has family history been so vivid’ JENNY UGLOW

‘An extraordinarily original work’ AMANDA FOREMAN

Shortlisted for the RSL Christopher Bland Prize 2021

‘Rarely has family history been so vivid’ JENNY UGLOW

‘An extraordinarily original work’ AMANDA FOREMAN

Like many well-to-do Georgian families, the Atkinsons’ wealth was acquired at a terrible cost, through the labour and lives of enslaved Africans. Drawing on his ancestors’ private correspondence, Richard Atkinson pieces together their unsettling story, from the weather-beaten house in Cumbria where they once lived to the ruins of their sugar estates in Jamaica. This extraordinarily original work of detective biography is also a uniquely personal account of one of the most disturbing chapters in Britain’s colonial past.

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