Ben Franklin's world is a production of the

Omaha Institute. Hello and welcome to episode 236 of Ben Franklin's world.

The podcast dedicated to helping you learn more about how the people and events of our early American past have shaped the present

day world we live in.

And I'm your host, Liz Kovart.

Who do we count as part of our family?

Do we count parents, siblings, nieces, nephews, grandparents, and cousins?

What if a relative was born in a foreign place and one of their parents was of a different race?

Would they count as family?

These are questions that each race. Would they count as family?

These are questions the 18th century Britons ask themselves.

They ask themselves these questions in Great Britain, North America, and in the Caribbean.

And as we might suspect, there are answers to these questions

varied by time and place. So why the variation? This was a question that Daniel

Live say, an associate professor of history at Claremont

McKenna College in California, sought to answer in his book, Children of Uncertain

Fortune, Mixed-Grace Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733 to 1833. Now it was during his quest for answers

that Dan was able to chart the evolution of British ideas about race and today

he's going to share some of his findings with us.

Now as we investigate notions of race and family within the 18th and early 19th

century British Atlantic world, Dan reveals details about Jamaica, where it fit within the British Empire, and why it's an ideal place to study ideas about race.

How we can see ideas about race evolve by studying the lives of colonial Jamaica's elite mixed-race population.

...