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

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Brilliant book telling a wide ranging history, warts and all of one family, but actually of so much more. Instead, though he does engage with it, it’s on a fairly superficial level, the general attitude being that this was not a great thing, but without dwelling much on the details.

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. It is a journey through British and colonial history, told with incredible and vivid detail, but also the moving and fascinating history of a family. Of particular interest was the author’s account of various of his ancestors who ran sugar plantations (with sizable numbers of African slaves) on the island of Jamaica. Leave you with the author's trip to Jamaica and this passage: "appalled to think these people (the slaves) had been the lawful property (italics) of my family. 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. Not a dry book of historical facts but a lively, entertaining and absorbing story of a world long past. very well written story of the rise of the Richard Atkinson and then the demise of the great fortune he made - as well as a good tale, it is also a portrait of the country at a time of massive change with lots of familiar characters. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

Lightly written - in a good way - makes this a decent page turner going through the various interlocking themes above. 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. 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. This book is a detailed history of Richard Atkinson's family, including much about its slave owning past in Jamaica. 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 rum comes from Jamaica where the Atkinsons had a couple of plantations and one goes on a moving journey with the author at the end as he visits the island where his family had slaves. It provided insights into the enslaved people's environment, the British abolition campaign, and what happened when the system ended.

Although there was much too much detailed political scene setting for the Richard Atkinson with the rum contract. 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. Rum’ Atkinson died young, at the height of his powers, leaving a vast inheritance to his many nephews and nieces, as well as the society beauty who had refused his proposal of marriage; forty years of litigation followed as his heirs wrangled over his legacy. The author of the Scots ballad “Auld Robin Gray”, which Wordsworth thought one of the best two ballads of the age, Anne was a woman of unusual abilities.He eventually became an MP and was a highly influential behind the scene fixer in some of the political shenanigans of the 18th century. 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.

Dip Into NEW PAPERBACKS [jsb_filter_by_tags count="15" show_more="10" sort_by="total_products"/] A selection of recent paperbacks. 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. As another review described, at the moment, this is an extensive family record as opposed to something for a wider audience.When she eventually married, aged 43, Anne went with her much younger husband to live in South Africa. Of course a lot of the history most people will know, but what is so interesting is the way well known events interact with the family and the way Atkinson managed to be if not at the centre of major events at least close by and talking to all the people who were. The paperwork that he produced and generated was mind-numbing; it’s no wonder Atkinson had to give up his day job.