Katie Donington, The Bonds of Family: Slavery, Commerce and Culture in the British Atlantic World, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2019

By throwing the legacy of transatlantic slavery and empire into today’s society, Katie Donington’s book shows how the tight interconnections between colonialism and capitalism have shaped the world we live in. This broader aim is accomplished by means of a meticulous historical analysis of an ‘empire within the empire’: the commercial and proprietary empire of the extended British family of the Hibberts who were Manchester merchants, Anglo-Jamaican slavers and planters, London traders, insurance brokers, pro-slavery lobbyists, members of Parliament, and country landlords. Spanning over one hundred and fifty years of British history (from the early eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries) and travelling from England to Jamaica and back, the book sheds light on the complicities between the coercive and racialized system of West Indian slavery and the making and flourishing of a white family fortune in the two worlds over four generations.