Mr Atkinson’s Rum Contract: The Story of a Tangled Inheritance

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Richard “Rum” Atkinson was an 18th-century adventurer of the kind you might find in a picaresque novel. Perennials PERENNIALS constant friends A selection of novels, memoirs and more by some of our favourite authors. Mr Atkinson’s Rum Contract is the story of a morally tangled inheritance, but it is also the story of Richard Atkinson the younger’s obsessive pursuit of Richard Atkinson the elder. Friends with the merchant banker Francis Baring and the prime minister Pitt the Younger, he negotiated his way around every drawing room, every boardroom, every battlefield and every bank. Mr Atkinson’s Rum Contract is an extraordinarily original and captivating work of detective biography.

The author's namesake is some mover and shaker whether it be Government contracts to supply the redcoats battling George Washington with rum one of the much needed supplies or domestic political shenanigans battling Fox and co. The boards, binding and text block are all square, tight and clean, the dust jacket has light marks on the back panel. It seems appropriate, as we enter the 19th century, that the second half of the book should read like the proceedings of Jarndyce v Jarndyce in Dickens’s Bleak House. If the narrative flavour is caught in the author’s zeal, its texture comes from Atkinson’s reckoning with the fact that the ancestor he has grown to love is someone he does not know at all. As another review described, at the moment, this is an extensive family record as opposed to something for a wider audience.Dip Into NEW PAPERBACKS [jsb_filter_by_tags count="15" show_more="10" sort_by="total_products"/] A selection of recent paperbacks.

The author of the Scots ballad “Auld Robin Gray”, which Wordsworth thought one of the best two ballads of the age, Anne was a woman of unusual abilities. New Paperbacks NEW PAPERBACKS [jsb_filter_by_tags count="15" show_more="10" sort_by="total_products"/] A selection of recent paperbacks. Not a dry book of historical facts but a lively, entertaining and absorbing story of a world long past.The rum comes from Jamaica where the Atkinsons had a couple of plantations and one goes on a moving journey with the author at the end as he visits the island where his family had slaves. The book’s appearance during our hiatus could not be better: my guess is that many readers will now find themselves inspired to unlock their own time capsules and slip into another century. Also fascinating given the increasing acknowledgement of the role or slavery in the development of the UK and the author faces that head on, and it gives it a contemporary resonance. Overall I found this book a thought provoking and important addition to my understanding of 18th century Britain and our involvement with slavery and the abolition of what we all now understand was a despicable trade.

By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file.Leave you with the author's trip to Jamaica and this passage: "appalled to think these people (the slaves) had been the lawful property (italics) of my family. As ubiquitous as her admirer, Lindsay appears everywhere: we find her entertaining Dr Johnson at dinner, philosophising with David Hume in Edinburgh, and embarking on a European jaunt with Maria Fitzherbert, mistress to the Prince of Wales. His nickname was born of an outrageously good deal he negotiated for himself in a government contract to provide Jamaican rum for the British army in the American war of independence. Brilliant book telling a wide ranging history, warts and all of one family, but actually of so much more. It provided insights into the enslaved people's environment, the British abolition campaign, and what happened when the system ended.

This discovery set him on an all-consuming, highly emotional journey, ultimately taking him from the weather-beaten house of his Cumbrian ancestors to the abandoned ruins of their sugar estates in Jamaica.Although there was much too much detailed political scene setting for the Richard Atkinson with the rum contract. This vivid tale of a single family, their lives and loves, set against a panoramic backdrop of war, politics and slavery, offers a uniquely intimate insight into one of the most disturbing chapters in Britain’s colonial past. Indeed reading this today with some current actual controversies in the foreground (eg PPE sourcing, the rich getting richer and lining each others' pockets, government borrowing) are very much retreads of earlier crises (eg provisioning the American war of independence, Rotten Boroughs, government borrowing). Instead, though he does engage with it, it’s on a fairly superficial level, the general attitude being that this was not a great thing, but without dwelling much on the details. the subject matter is Georgian-era merchants (an ancestor of the author in particular), early merchant banks, the War of American Independence, slavery, trade, war with France, sugar, slavery, trade, abolition.