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Mr Atkinson’s Rum Contract: The Story of a Tangled Inheritance

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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.

Not a dry book of historical facts but a lively, entertaining and absorbing story of a world long past. Dip Into NEW PAPERBACKS [jsb_filter_by_tags count="15" show_more="10" sort_by="total_products"/] A selection of recent paperbacks. Mr Atkinson’s Rum Contract is an extraordinarily original and captivating work of detective biography. Perennials PERENNIALS constant friends A selection of novels, memoirs and more by some of our favourite authors.Leave you with the author's trip to Jamaica and this passage: "appalled to think these people (the slaves) had been the lawful property (italics) of my family. The author, a distant kinsman of Richard 'rum' Atkinson, inherited a box of letters and started digging into his family history - and we are lucky that he has the knack of writing wonderfully readable prose.

The youngest son in a line of Westmorland tanners, he became a merchant and profiteer, a director of the East India Company, an MP, an Alderman of the City of London, a disappointed lover, a slave owner, and the posthumous initiator of the most almighty family feud. Rum’ Atkinson died young, at the height of his powers, leaving a vast inheritance to his many nephews and nieces, as well as the society beauty who had refused his proposal of marriage; forty years of litigation followed as his heirs wrangled over his legacy. 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.Still, the thing that’s most interesting about it is the fact that many of his ancestors were slaveowners, holding significant estates in Jamaica. Indeed reading this today with some current actual controversies in the foreground (eg PPE sourcing, the rich getting richer and lining each others' pockets, government borrowing) are very much retreads of earlier crises (eg provisioning the American war of independence, Rotten Boroughs, government borrowing). As ubiquitous as her admirer, Lindsay appears everywhere: we find her entertaining Dr Johnson at dinner, philosophising with David Hume in Edinburgh, and embarking on a European jaunt with Maria Fitzherbert, mistress to the Prince of Wales. Part social history (C18th marriage and romance between aristocracy and commerce, the end of plantations and slavery in Jamaica, how would you feel to find slave owners and traders were your forebears?

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