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

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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. From the first page you are hooked - both by the link between these two relatives and the extraordinary details of the life led by the earlier historical man. 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? He is also the five-times great-uncle of the Richard Atkinson who produced this fascinating, exhaustive work of family history.

Like many well-to-do Georgian families, the Atkinsons’ wealth was acquired at a terrible cost, through the labour and lives of enslaved Africans.I’m particularly embarrassed to have chosen to read this for Black History Month, although in my defence I had hoped it might help with my WIP which touches on the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade in Cumbria, where the Atkinson family has its roots. It seems appropriate, as we enter the 19th century, that the second half of the book should read like the proceedings of Jarndyce v Jarndyce in Dickens’s Bleak House. Also fascinating given the increasing acknowledgement of the role or slavery in the development of the UK and the author faces that head on, and it gives it a contemporary resonance. Still, what it does do is drive home how many perfectly average middle-class families in Britain today have benefited from the slave trade. The timing of this book intrigues; had it been published even a month later, I wonder if Atkinson’s publishers would have asked him to address this shameful legacy more directly.

Perennials PERENNIALS constant friends A selection of novels, memoirs and more by some of our favourite authors. 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.

New Paperbacks 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. He was such a dynamic personality, such an incurable optimist, and it seemed unthinkable that he would no longer be present in this story.

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