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

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Overall I found this book a thought provoking and important addition to my understanding of 18th century Britain and our involvement with slavery and the abolition of what we all now understand was a despicable trade. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Dip Into NEW PAPERBACKS [jsb_filter_by_tags count="15" show_more="10" sort_by="total_products"/] A selection of recent paperbacks.

The boards, binding and text block are all square, tight and clean, the dust jacket has light marks on the back panel.

By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. New Paperbacks NEW PAPERBACKS [jsb_filter_by_tags count="15" show_more="10" sort_by="total_products"/] A selection of recent paperbacks. Richard Atkinson was in his late 30s and approaching a milestone he had long feared - the age at which his father died – when one day he came across a box of old family letters gathering dust in a cupboard.

If the narrative flavour is caught in the author’s zeal, its texture comes from Atkinson’s reckoning with the fact that the ancestor he has grown to love is someone he does not know at all. Mr Atkinson’s Rum Contract is the story of a morally tangled inheritance, but it is also the story of Richard Atkinson the younger’s obsessive pursuit of Richard Atkinson the elder. This vivid tale of a single family, their lives and loves, set against a panoramic backdrop of war, politics and slavery, offers a uniquely intimate insight into one of the most disturbing chapters in Britain’s colonial past. Unable to have a family of his own, he threw in his lot with the one he already had, and duly discovered a Dickensian array of characters: litigious eccentrics, bone-idle fops, dutiful husbands and angelic nieces, all enjoying the profits of slavery.Brilliant book telling a wide ranging history, warts and all of one family, but actually of so much more. 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.

Although there was much too much detailed political scene setting for the Richard Atkinson with the rum contract. Still, the thing that’s most interesting about it is the fact that many of his ancestors were slaveowners, holding significant estates in Jamaica. I would compare this to Mank the film which at over two hours is rather imposing but if you battle through the first 20 minutes of the latter, so say first 30 odd pages of this tome, you are set fair and onto a damn good thing. A really interesting family history, such a wealth of sources and letters for the prominent members of the family in the 18th and early 19th centuries.The narrative accordingly now changes gear as Atkinson explores the fallout from Richard’s will on the second and third generations of the Atkinson family. Demonstrates how constitutions evolved in tandem with warfare, and how they have functioned to advance empire as well as promote nations, and worked to exclude as well as liberate.

Remarkable … A three-dimensional portrait, not just of Richard Atkinson MP but his world – nefarious, buccaneering, amoral, but also containing a genuine love story… Family history can become an obsession and often a bore. Still, what it does do is drive home how many perfectly average middle-class families in Britain today have benefited from the slave trade. This was an enjoyable read, with the author digging into the archives of his family to paint a portrait of Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries.This discovery set him on an all-consuming, highly emotional journey, ultimately taking him from the weather-beaten house of his Cumbrian ancestors to the abandoned ruins of their sugar estates in Jamaica. See our Remarkables Archive for some that are no longer in print, but which we are happy to try to track down. The author adds background interest to the story by detailing the campaign in Britain to first of all outlaw the importation of slaves to the British Empire, and then some 27 years later, to abolish the institution of slavery itself. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.