Blood Legacy

Alex Renton Press Reviews

A courageous, deeply affecting and excoriatingly honest account of his family's role in enslavement -- PHILIPPE SANDS -

Financial Times -

Renton . . . dismantles the myths with the efficiency of someone shelling pistachios for a snack . . . remarkable . . . an incredible work of scholarship -- SATHNAM SANGHERA -

The Times -

An important book . . . one of the strengths of Renton's book is that it takes seriously the issue of class . . . In breaking class ranks, Renton has given voice to a long suppressed truth . . . [an] admirable book -

Observer -

In this unflinching, fascinating and very human account, drawn from his own family papers, Alex Renton takes a crucial first step towards reparation, by acknowledging the cruel reality of his ancestors' callous exploitation of enslaved people's labour from afar; detailing the damage done, and both asking and beginning to answer the question of what can be done to purge these sins and their legacies today -- MIRANDA KAUFMANN, author of Black Tudors Blood Legacy is a moving, timely, well-written and strikingly thoughtful book that makes an important contribution to the growing debate on the horrors that accompanied Britain's empire-building. Alex Renton's forensic and remarkably honest analysis of his own family papers, and the profound darkness they contain, highlights our continuing failure to acknowledge the extreme toxicity of so much of our Imperial history -- WILLIAM DALRYMPLE Utterly gripped - an incredible book. Alex's work is my book in practice -- EMMA DABIRI A deeply moving, brave and powerful book -- ANDREW MARR Moving and deeply researched, Alex Renton's account of his ancestors' slaveholding brings home the everyday brutality of Caribbean slavery and its contribution to the making of Britain both then and since. Blood Legacy sets the ordinariness of slaveholding in the eighteenth-century monied world alongside accounts of the extraordinary lives of those they owned. This is a book that asks white Britons to look hard at our past and its consequences in the present -- PROFESSOR DIANA PATON A fascinating family history of profit and loss made during slavery in the Caribbean. This book is truth not fiction -- PROFESSOR SIR GEOFF PALMER A useful counter to British self-congratulation on the ending of the Atlantic slave trade . . . It must make any reader question much of the received wisdom about the eighteenth-century Enlightenment -- ANDREW MARR -

Sunday Times -