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Heiresses: Marriage, Inheritance and Caribbean Slavery
Meet the heiresses.
Their dresses are the latest fashion, their rooms Mayfair's most luxurious, their suitors Britain's most powerful men.
Their fortunes – blood and sugar.
'A sobering and significant achievement, this is a book you need to read.' Lucy Worsley
Georgian heiresses are inescapable in British culture. They flutter through Jane Austen’s novels and countless period dramas. Their portraits – painted by Gainsborough, Zoffany, Reynolds – crowd our museums while their lavish estates pepper the countryside. However, a less genteel story lurks beneath the veneer – those glorious balls, dresses and dowries were funded by the exploitation of enslaved men, women and children.
Following the lives of nine heiresses and tracing their tainted money from its origins in the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, Miranda Kaufmann reveals a murky world of inheritance, fortune-hunting and human exploitation. From Jane Leigh Perrot, Jane Austen’s light-fingered aunt, to Elizabeth Vassall Fox, who faked her daughter’s death to maintain custody during a tumultuous divorce, Heiresses traces the often scandalous lives of the women who helped build Britain’s empire.
Kaufmann also pieces together the lives of the people these heiresses and their families enslaved. There’s Betsy
Newton, who escaped from Barbados to London to confront her enslavers face-to-face. Meanwhile in Jamaica, Susanna Augier became a powerful landowner, inheriting her white father’s properties. Her daughter, an eligible heiress, would marry into the British aristocracy.
Enlightening, provocative and masterfully researched, Heiresses offers a vital history of enslavement in Britain and the Caribbean.
***
'A startling insight into the lives of the real “Mrs Rochesters”. The role of women in plantation slavery, as perpetrators and victims is uncovered by a historian at the height of her powers.' Anita Anand, author of The Patient Assassin and co-host of Empire
'A perfect balance of critical humour and searing historical insight. A must-read.' Paterson Joseph, actor and author of The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho
'Vivid, shocking and compulsively readable... Miranda Kaufmann is not just a fine investigative historian – she is a superb story-teller.' Alex Renton, author of Blood Legacy
Their dresses are the latest fashion, their rooms Mayfair's most luxurious, their suitors Britain's most powerful men.
Their fortunes – blood and sugar.
'A sobering and significant achievement, this is a book you need to read.' Lucy Worsley
Georgian heiresses are inescapable in British culture. They flutter through Jane Austen’s novels and countless period dramas. Their portraits – painted by Gainsborough, Zoffany, Reynolds – crowd our museums while their lavish estates pepper the countryside. However, a less genteel story lurks beneath the veneer – those glorious balls, dresses and dowries were funded by the exploitation of enslaved men, women and children.
Following the lives of nine heiresses and tracing their tainted money from its origins in the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, Miranda Kaufmann reveals a murky world of inheritance, fortune-hunting and human exploitation. From Jane Leigh Perrot, Jane Austen’s light-fingered aunt, to Elizabeth Vassall Fox, who faked her daughter’s death to maintain custody during a tumultuous divorce, Heiresses traces the often scandalous lives of the women who helped build Britain’s empire.
Kaufmann also pieces together the lives of the people these heiresses and their families enslaved. There’s Betsy
Newton, who escaped from Barbados to London to confront her enslavers face-to-face. Meanwhile in Jamaica, Susanna Augier became a powerful landowner, inheriting her white father’s properties. Her daughter, an eligible heiress, would marry into the British aristocracy.
Enlightening, provocative and masterfully researched, Heiresses offers a vital history of enslavement in Britain and the Caribbean.
***
'A startling insight into the lives of the real “Mrs Rochesters”. The role of women in plantation slavery, as perpetrators and victims is uncovered by a historian at the height of her powers.' Anita Anand, author of The Patient Assassin and co-host of Empire
'A perfect balance of critical humour and searing historical insight. A must-read.' Paterson Joseph, actor and author of The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho
'Vivid, shocking and compulsively readable... Miranda Kaufmann is not just a fine investigative historian – she is a superb story-teller.' Alex Renton, author of Blood Legacy
- GenresHistory
738 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 4, 2025
51 people want to read
About the author
Miranda Kaufmann
6 books118 followersDr. Miranda Kaufmann is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, part of the School of Advanced Study, University of London. She read History at Christ Church, Oxford, where she completed her doctoral thesis on 'Africans in Britain, 1500-1640' in 2011. As a freelance historian and journalist, she has worked for The Sunday Times, the BBC, the National Trust, English Heritage, the Oxford Companion series, Quercus publishing and the Rugby Football Foundation. She is a popular speaker at conferences, seminars and schools from Hull to Jamaica and has published articles in academic journals and elsewhere (including the Times Literary Supplement, The Times, The Guardian, History Today, BBC History Magazine and Periscope Post). She enjoys engaging in debate at the intersection of past and present and has been interviewed by Sky News and the Observer.
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November 24, 2025Heiresses, as Miranda Kaufmann admits, is indebted to scholarship which has revealed, over many decades, the extent of the ties between the British establishment and Caribbean slavery. Founded in 2009, UCL’s Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery database has become an important touchstone for any researcher wishing to understand how men – and women – benefited from the £20 million paid out by the British government to compensate enslavers for loss of their ‘property’ after the abolition of slavery in 1833. In recent years, organisations including the Church of England, Bank of England, and the Guardian newspaper, and families such as the Gladstones and Trevelyans, have acknowledged their institutional and personal indebtedness to slavery. Some have taken active measures, issuing public apologies, making financial reparations, or curating exhibitions to account for the lasting harms of slavery. Attention has fallen, almost exclusively, upon men. But, as UCL’s Centre has shown, over 40 per cent of the beneficiaries of compensation were women, half of whom were resident in Britain.
Kaufmann invites us to explore the lives of nine women – the ‘heiresses’ of the title – who benefited from slavery. Born in the early decades of the 18th century, most of them lived into their sixties (and even nineties), and witnessed seismic shifts in societies on both sides of the Atlantic. But Heiresses is as much about how these women’s lives were shaped by the law and societal expectations as it is about their relationships with Caribbean slavery. Their fortunes hinged on their ability to inherit property, but this was curtailed by primogeniture and coverture and, sometimes, issues of illegitimacy. Often, it was women’s inability to inherit property (including enslaved people) that helped conceal their complicity in slavery. Kaufmann’s subjects all did inherit enslaved people in the Caribbean, and include women as different as Isabella Bell Franks (1769-1855), the daughter of an Ashkenazi Jewish ‘mercantile dynasty’, and Frances Dazell (1729-78), the mixed-heritage daughter of an enslaved mother and enslaver father.
Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...
Misha Ewen is Assistant Professor in American History at the University of Sussex.
Kaufmann invites us to explore the lives of nine women – the ‘heiresses’ of the title – who benefited from slavery. Born in the early decades of the 18th century, most of them lived into their sixties (and even nineties), and witnessed seismic shifts in societies on both sides of the Atlantic. But Heiresses is as much about how these women’s lives were shaped by the law and societal expectations as it is about their relationships with Caribbean slavery. Their fortunes hinged on their ability to inherit property, but this was curtailed by primogeniture and coverture and, sometimes, issues of illegitimacy. Often, it was women’s inability to inherit property (including enslaved people) that helped conceal their complicity in slavery. Kaufmann’s subjects all did inherit enslaved people in the Caribbean, and include women as different as Isabella Bell Franks (1769-1855), the daughter of an Ashkenazi Jewish ‘mercantile dynasty’, and Frances Dazell (1729-78), the mixed-heritage daughter of an enslaved mother and enslaver father.
Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...
Misha Ewen is Assistant Professor in American History at the University of Sussex.
December 21, 2025
A superbly written account of a series of selected heiresses who inherited fortunes form enslavers. This aspect of the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans has been largely overlooked by historians, whose focus is usually upon the men involved. Kaufmann uncovers the elaborate lives of some of the women involved and how their slave fortunes shaped their lives and in some cases British society itself. A must-read factual historical book. Highly recommended.
December 5, 2025
Heiresses: Marriage, Inheritance and Caribbean Slavery by Miranda Kaufmann
A powerful and eye-opening history that uncovers the hidden links between wealth, status and the realities of Caribbean slavery. Miranda Kaufmann brings the lives of nine heiresses into sharp focus, showing both their influence and the human cost behind their fortunes. The book is deeply researched and told with clarity, weaving together personal stories, economic history and the voices of those who were enslaved. An important and compelling read for anyone interested in the true foundations of Britain’s imperial past.
A powerful and eye-opening history that uncovers the hidden links between wealth, status and the realities of Caribbean slavery. Miranda Kaufmann brings the lives of nine heiresses into sharp focus, showing both their influence and the human cost behind their fortunes. The book is deeply researched and told with clarity, weaving together personal stories, economic history and the voices of those who were enslaved. An important and compelling read for anyone interested in the true foundations of Britain’s imperial past.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews