A new book, Heiresses: Marriage, Inheritance and Caribbean Slavery, by Dr Miranda Kaufmann (2001, History), exposes how, for almost two centuries, generations of women – some with family links to Christ Church –  became enslavers and plantation owners in their own right, and brought huge fortunes back to Britain.

Although we usually think of slave-owners as men, when slavery was abolished in 1834, 40% of the British individuals who received a share of the £20 million compensation for their loss of human ‘property’  were women.

In Heiresses, Dr. Miranda Kaufmann, author of the ground-breaking Black Tudors, tells the dramatic – sometimes scandalous – stories of nine women who inherited people and plantations in the Caribbean and used their tainted wealth to marry into British society and fund lavish lifestyles.

Money didn’t buy happiness. Their lives took dramatic twists and turns, the plot thickened by dastardly stepfathers, ardent suitors and lovers, disapproving parents and disappointing children, war and revolution, adultery and divorce, bankruptcy, suicide and insanity.

One woman – Jane Austen’s Barbados-born aunt – found herself on trial for shoplifting, facing transportation to Australia or the death penalty. Elizabeth Vassall, heiress to three estates in Jamaica, faked her daughter’s death to maintain custody after divorcing the older man she had been forced to wed as a teenager. Shortly afterwards, she scandalously married her lover, Christ Church-educated Lord Holland, who would go on to fight against emancipation in the 1820s.

Another heiress with family links to Christ Church (both her father and brother attended The House) was Frances Dalzell, the mixed-heritage daughter of a woman born enslaved in Jamaica. She wed the son of a Scottish Earl, whom she’d met in the famous marriage-mart of Bath.

Heiresses is a story with global reach, journeying from Jamaica to Sierra Leone, Charleston, South Carolina, and Germany; from Antigua to India, China and Australia; from St Kitts and St Vincent to France and Italy. Following in the heiresses’ footsteps leads Kaufmann to some unexpected places - from Versailles on the eve of the French Revolution to Aston Villa Football Club – and people - from Robert Burns to Napoleon.

Kaufmann’s meticulous research also unearths extraordinary stories about the people the heiresses enslaved. A Jamaican carpenter who collected caricatures of his enslavers; Dinah, an Antiguan heiress’s former nurse, who wrote to her former charge in India to demand her freedom; and Betsy Newton who travelled all the way from Barbados to London to confront her enslavers face-to-face.

This is not a story of the distant past, Kaufmann reminds us. The debt the government incurred paying out compensation in the 1830s  was fully paid off only in 2015. Which means British taxpayers – including those of Black Caribbean descent – helped pay that money back. The legacies of enslavement lie all around us: in public institutions including the British Museum and Oxbridge colleges like Christ Church, in infrastructure from Ayrshire’s roads to the Great Western Railway, in parish churches and stately homes across the country – even Westminster Abbey and Windsor Castle, and in individual families, including Kaufmann’s own. Most pressingly, Kaufmann shows how the racism and racial inequality that still poison our world are ongoing consequences of this dehumanising system. Kaufmann will be donating her proceeds from the book to reparative justice causes.

HEIRESSES: Marriage, Inheritance and Caribbean Slavery,  published by Oneworld, is out from 4 September 2025, and is available to order now. You can read more about Kaufmann’s work, and find details of her upcoming book tour, here.