One man's personal discovery of his family's involvement in transatlantic slavery leads to his call for a wider reckoning among the descendants of slave owners



LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE

'Alex Renton has done Britain a favour and written a brutally honest book about his family's involvement with slavery. Blood Legacy could change our frequently defensive national conversation about slavery/race' Sathnam Sanghera

'Utterly gripped - An incredible book. Alex's work is my book in practice' Emma Dabiri

Through the story of his own family's history as slave and plantation owners, Alex Renton looks at how we owe it to the present to understand the legacy of the past. When British Caribbean slavery was abolished across most of the British Empire in 1833, it was not the newly liberated who received compensation, but the tens of thousands of enslavers who were paid millions of pounds in government money. The descendants of some of those slave owners are among the wealthiest and most powerful people in Britain today.

A group of Caribbean countries is calling on ten European nations to discuss the payment of trillions of dollars for the damage done by transatlantic slavery and its continuing legacy. Meanwhile, Black Lives Matter and other activist groups are causing increasing numbers of white people to reflect on how this history of abuse and exploitation has benefited them.

Blood Legacy explores what inheritance - political, economic, moral and spiritual - has been passed to the descendants of the slave owners and the descendants of the enslaved. He also asks, crucially, how the former - himself among them - can begin to make reparations for the past.