The main thread of the tale is excellent encompassing so much of major moments in history including William Wilberforce and his fellow anti-Slavery crusaders little by little eradicating it, doing deals with the remarkable Toussaint Louverture in Saint Domingue to the redevelopment of Newcastle and restoring Hadrians Wall all courtesy of the Atkinson family. New Paperbacks NEW PAPERBACKS [jsb_filter_by_tags count="15" show_more="10" sort_by="total_products"/] A selection of recent paperbacks. Richard Atkinson was in his late 30s and approaching a milestone he had long feared - the age at which his father died – when one day he came across a box of old family letters gathering dust in a cupboard. 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. 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 ruins of their sugar estates in Jamaica.

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.

Brilliant book telling a wide ranging history, warts and all of one family, but actually of so much more. 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. 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. It may sound like a stretch to say that it's given me a new lens with which to view today's turbulent world.

This was an enjoyable read, with the author digging into the archives of his family to paint a portrait of Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries. very well written story of the rise of the Richard Atkinson and then the demise of the great fortune he made - as well as a good tale, it is also a portrait of the country at a time of massive change with lots of familiar characters. 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. 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. Like many well-to-do Georgian families, the Atkinsons’ wealth was acquired at a terrible cost, through the labour and lives of enslaved Africans.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. Still, the thing that’s most interesting about it is the fact that many of his ancestors were slaveowners, holding significant estates in Jamaica. 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.

He was such a dynamic personality, such an incurable optimist, and it seemed unthinkable that he would no longer be present in this story. This is real history, not from the top down or bottom up but from deep inside the heart of living individuals whose stories are all too human. 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. 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.

The narrative accordingly now changes gear as Atkinson explores the fallout from Richard’s will on the second and third generations of the Atkinson family.