Episode 236: Daniel Livesay, Mixed-Race Britons & the Atlantic Family

by Emily SneffApril 30, 2019

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Who do we count as family?

If a relative was born in a foreign place and one of their parents was of a different race? Would they count as family?

Eighteenth-century Britons asked themselves these questions. As we might suspect, their answers varied by time and whether they lived in Great Britain, North America, or the Caribbean.

Daniel Livesay, an Associate Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College in California, helps us explore the evolution of British ideas about race with details from his book Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833.

About the Show

Ben Franklin’s World is a podcast about early American history.

It is a show for people who love history and for those who want to know more about the historical people and events that have impacted and shaped our present-day world.

Each episode features a conversation with a historian who helps us shed light on important people and events in early American history.

Ben Franklin’s World is a production of the Omohundro Institute.

Episode Summary

Daniel Livesay, an Associate Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College in California, helps us explore the evolution of British ideas about race with details from his book Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833.

As we investigate eighteenth-century British notion of race and family, Dan reveals details about Jamaica, where it fit within the British Empire, and why it’s an ideal place to study ideas about race; How we can see ideas about race evolve by studying the lives of colonial Jamaica’s elite, mixed-race population; And, why and how studying the Caribbean can help us better understand early American history.

What You’ll Discover

Jamaica and the British Empire
Demographics of colonial Jamaica
Interracial relationships in eighteenth-century Jamaica
Colonial Jamaican views on mixed-race people and relationships
British legislators’ concern over Jamaica’s slave-majority demographics
Colonial Jamaica’s 3-generations law on whiteness
British law versus colonial Jamaican law
Opportunities for mixed-race Jamaicans
Navigating the British world as a mixed-race Briton
The English abolition movement
The American Revolution and taking stock of mixed-race people
Jamaican ideas on the North American mainland
How the Caribbean can help us better understand early America

Links to People, Places, and Publications

Daniel Livesay
Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833
Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World
Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812
Christopher Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism

Sponsor Links

Omohundro Institute
University of North Carolina Press (Save 40 percent with code 01BFW)

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Time Warp Question

In your opinion, what might have happened if the American Revolution had never happened? If the Revolution had not sent black loyalists out into the broader British Atlantic World, how would British conceptions of race and identity have evolved differently?