Blood Legacy

My new book is out May 6 2021 published by Canongate Books. It uses archive and reporting to tell the story of my family and other Scots’ investments and involvement in transatlantic slavery and Caribbean plantations - and examines the legacy of that in Britain and the Caribbean today.

Some pre-publication comments:

William Dalrymple, historian and author

‘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.’

Professor Sir Geoff Palmer, scientist and activist

‘A fascinating family history of profit and loss made during slavery in the Caribbean. This book is truth not fiction.’

Dr Miranda Kaufmann, historian and author

‘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.’

Professor Diana Paton, historian and author

“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.”

Richard Holloway, author and former Bishop of Edinburgh

“This moving and powerful book asks one of the most important moral questions of our age: how are we to repair the historic damage done by transatlantic slavery? Reparation is the answer, but it is too grudging a word. We should not heal the sins of our past because we are pressured to do so. We should do it joyfully, because it is the right thing to do.”

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, author of Island People: The Caribbean and the World 

‘Alex Renton’s Blood Legacy is destined to at once prompt and help shape an urgent public conversation, long overdue, that we can only hope will be guided by Renton’s core contention here: that it’s the responsibility of all of us who belong to societies shaped by the Triangle Trade not merely to confront the torrid legacies of slavery, but to change them. Remarkably researched, searchingly told, this is an exemplary book—and a necessary one.’