Heiresses

The Women Who Brought Caribbean Slavery Home

Miranda Kaufmann

From Jamaica to Charleston, Sierra Leone to Bombay, China to Australia, back to England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, this is the story of the heiresses—and the role they played in the history of enslavement.

Through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it was a fact universally acknowledged that any man in want of a great fortune ought find himself a Caribbean heiress. Their assets, the product of the exploitation of enslaved Africans, enabled them to marry into the top tiers of the aristocracy and attracted the attention of fortune-hunters. They fell in love (not always with their husbands), eloped, divorced, squandered fortunes, threw parties, went mad and (in once case) faked a daughter’s death.

In her much anticipated follow up to Black Tudors, Miranda Kaufmann peers beneath our pastel-hued, Jane Austen inspired image of the Georgian heiress to reveal a murky world of inheritance, fortune-hunting and human exploitation.

Uncovering the lives of nine women who made their fortunes in the Caribbean slave trade, Heiresses provides a compelling and often shocking account of how Britain profited and continues to profit from the slave trade. In the vein of Empireland, Natives and White Debt, Heiresses promises a meticulously researched and readable exploration of the darker side of British history.

Miranda Kaufmann is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of London’s Institute of Commonwealth Studies. Her first book, Black Tudors, was shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize 2018 and was "A Book of the Year" for the Evening Standard and the Observer. She has appeared on Sky News, the BBC and Al Jazeera, and she’s written for The Times, Guardian and BBC History Magazine. She lives in North Wales.

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Endorsements & Reviews

Praise for Black Tudors

"This is history on the cutting edge of archival research, but accessibly written and alive with human details and warmth." David Olusoga, author of Black and British: A Forgotten History

"Splendid. A cracking contribution to the field."

Dan Jones, The Sunday Times

"Enlightening and constantly surprising. Far too many popular studies of the Tudors return the same faces. To its great credit, Black Tudors presents fresh figures and challenges the way we look at them."

Jessie Childs, The Financial Times

"Consistently fascinating, historically invaluable… the narrative is pacy... Anyone reading it will never look at Tudor England in the same light again." The Daily Mail

"That rare thing: a book about the 16th century that said something new." Evening Standard, Books of the Year