Although there was much too much detailed political scene setting for the Richard Atkinson with the rum contract.

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. See our Remarkables Archive for some that are no longer in print, but which we are happy to try to track down.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. He was such a dynamic personality, such an incurable optimist, and it seemed unthinkable that he would no longer be present in this story.

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.Atkinson’s attempt to trace his family back through several centuries of British history is fascinating, if overlong and occasionally bogged down in details of eighteenth-century scams. the subject matter is Georgian-era merchants (an ancestor of the author in particular), early merchant banks, the War of American Independence, slavery, trade, war with France, sugar, slavery, trade, abolition.

Also fascinating given the increasing acknowledgement of the role or slavery in the development of the UK and the author faces that head on, and it gives it a contemporary resonance. 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. 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. He eventually became an MP and was a highly influential behind the scene fixer in some of the political shenanigans of the 18th century. This is real history, not from the top down or bottom up but from deep inside the heart of living individuals whose stories are all too human.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.