Heiresses: Marriage, Inheritance, and Slavery in the Caribbean

From Jamaica to Charleston, Sierra Leone to India, Australia and back to England, 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 to find himself a Caribbean heiress. Their assets, the product of the exploitation of enslaved African men, women, and children, enabled them to marry into the top tiers of the aristo...