This is an important book and not just because it is a chilling account of slavery and commerce in the West Indies in the 18th and 19th centuries. It’s important because it establishes a vital link between then and now, cause and effect, history and its long and damaging legacy.
If Alex Renton’s last book, Stiff Upper Lip, exposed the wealthy’s perverse complacency about abuse in Britain’s boarding schools, Blood Legacy lays bare the ruling class’s most heinous historical crime: the brutal project to reduce human beings to the condition of working farm animals for financial profit.
Just as Renton used his own dubious privilege of a boarding-school education to bring a personal perspective to his previous work, so he draws on his family’s involvement in slavery as a moral touchstone here. One set of his ancestors were from Ayrshire, an area of Scotland whose large landowners disproportionately invested in plantations in the Caribbean (Scots owned more slaves per capita than any other nation in the UK).
The Fergussons of Kilkerran, of whom Renton is a direct descendant, were powerful members of the landed gentry. Sir Adam Fergusson was an 18th-century lawyer, MP and someone who knew many of the key figures in the Scottish enlightenment. He was thought of as a well-educated and highly cultured man. And he ran the
— source theguardian.com | Andrew Anthony | 23 May 2021