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Heiresses

Marriage, Inheritance and Caribbean Slavery

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Heiresses

By: Miranda Kaufmann
Narrated by: Jennifer M. Dixon, Miranda Kaufmann
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Through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it was a fact universally acknowledged that any man in want of a great fortune ought to find himself a Caribbean heiress. Their assets, the product of the exploitation of enslaved African men, women, and children, enabled them to marry into the top tiers of the aristocracy and influence society and politics. They fell in love (not always with their husbands), eloped, divorced, squandered fortunes, commissioned art, threw parties, went mad and (in once case) faked a daughter's death.

In her much anticipated follow up to Black Tudors, Miranda Kaufmann peers beneath our pastel-hued, Jane Austen inspired image of the Georgian heiress to reveal a murky world of inheritance, fortune-hunting, and human exploitation. She also unearths the stories of the people the heiresses enslaved, whose labor funded their lifestyles with whom their fates were intimately intertwined.

Heiresses provides a compelling and often shocking account of how Britain profited and continues to profit from enslavement. In the vein of landmark books such as Empireland, Natives, They Were Her Property, and White Debt, Heiresses promises to expand and challenge our understanding of history.

©2025 Miranda Kaufmann (P)2025 Highbridge Audio Americas Black & African American Caribbean & West Indies Europe Great Britain United States Caribbean Africa Marriage
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This is a fascinating book, but the reader rather spoils the experience. She has a curiously robotic delivery and consistently mispronounces proper names, especially adding an unnecessary “w” sound at the end of Antigua. This is particularly irritating since African and Caribbean proper names are important in this context. The West African tribe Temne is actually pronounced “Timni”, not as one might assume when written in English. A bit of research would have helped.

It would have been great to have the wonderful Adjoah Andoh reading it instead!

Spoilt by narrator

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