Praise for A Dark Inheritance:

•  Winner of the 2019 Gold Medal for World History, sponsored by the Independent Publisher Book Awards.

•  Finalist for the 2019 Frederick Douglass Book Prize, awarded by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University

•  Selected as a 2019 Choice Outstanding Academic Title and a Choice editors’ pick.

 “A rich and deeply researched exploration of race-making in the colonial British empire”—Marisa J. Fuentes, New West Indian Guide

“[A]mbitious and meticulously argued … Newman's book deftly handles a wealth of fascinating evidence and contains many illuminating insights; it is a book that rewards careful reading.”—Kate L. Mulry, The William and Mary Quarterly

“This is a sophisticated book on themes that still resonate within contemporary British assumptions about national belong- ing. It is a timely intervention that should fuel discussion, shape future research, and become required reading for serious students of the British Atlantic empire and its afterlives”—Christer Petley, Journal of British Studies  

"This insightful book challenges the understanding of racial classifications and the birthrights of imperial subjects in the slave societies of the British Caribbean, especially Jamaica . . . A must-read for all scholars of Caribbean studies, race, and the African diaspora."—F. H. Smith, Choice

“[A]n important addition to our understanding of race and privilege in colonial Jamaica, the British empire, and broader Atlantic world.”—Katherine Johnston, Eighteenth-Century Studies

“In this richly researched and cogently argued book, Brooke Newman reveals how ideas about blood and law and the making of a slave society in colonial Jamaica helped to construct as well as deconstruct racial difference in the imperial order. Few historians have done a better job of analyzing the intersections of gender, sexuality, and race in the print culture of the British Empire. A must read for any historian of slavery and abolition.”—Manisha Sinha, author of The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition 

“This exhilarating and innovative study of race, sex, and subjecthood in Jamaica demonstrates how a concentrated examination of “blood purity” gives us an entirely fresh perspective on crucial issues in the formation of identity within black and white populations. A major and exciting advance in understanding the British Atlantic.”—Trevor Burnard, University of Melbourne

“Brooke Newman's fascinating account of colonial Jamaican racial politics reveals the British investment in concepts of inherited blood, birthright, and Christianity as the legal foundation for English privilege and enslaved African subordination.”—Kathleen M. Brown, University of Pennsylvania

“Ultimately, this book challenges much of what we have assumed about British slavery in the Caribbean and the rest of the Americas. Newman’s eye-opening findings are likely to influence the historiography of the Spanish, French, and Dutch Caribbean slave systems, where similar notions of hereditary servitude were a central element for the reproduction of structures of control and domination”—Frederick Douglass Book Prize Committee