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

A quest to understand a family's history and a panoramic portrait of 18th century Britain

This remarkable book tells the story of how Richard Atkinson uncovered the history behind his family's eighteenth-century Jamaican fortune, exploring at the same time a turbulent century in British colonial and trading history. When the first of the Atkinsons sailed out to Jamaica in the 1780s, sugar was king, the slave trade was in full swing, and the island was the jewel in the imperial crown; when the last member of the family left in the 1850s, it was a neglected backwater.

This lively saga, which draws on hundreds of intimate letters, encompasses not only war, politics and slavery, but also family feuds, unrequited love, illegitimate children and brushes with famous historical figures. Atkinson writes about the unsettling experience of uncovering his ancestors' slave-owning past with rare candour, and in unsparing detail.

A fascinating and important book that uses the keyhole of one family's history to cast light on what made Britain great — and also far from great.