"By tracing the largely forgotten eighteenth-century migration of elite mixed-race individuals from Jamaica to Great Britain, "Children of Uncertain Fortune" reinterprets the evolution of British racial ideologies as a matter of negotiating family membership. Using wills, legal petitions, family correspondences, and inheritance lawsuits, Daniel Livesay ... follow[s] the hundreds of children born to white planters and Caribbean women of color who crossed the ocean for educational opportunities, professional apprenticeships, marriage prospects, or refuge from colonial prejudices"--

Daniel Livesay is assistant professor of history at Claremont McKenna College.