The productive and reproductive labour of the enslaved produced one form of capital; the gendered organization of marriage and inheritance amongst the planters and merchants produced another. If families such as the Longs were to survive, secure their land and increase their wealth, they had to reproduce themselves and ensure the continuity of their line: their hope was to establish a dynasty. Elite colonists reproduced the patterns of the landed English gentry, but with a difference, given their ownership of enslaved people. Merchants tended towards partible inheritance. Property was gendered in such a way as to try to assure the creation and accumulation of wealth. The work of white women was to produce heirs and bring capital to a marriage. Long believed in the importance of maintaining pure English blood and had clear views as to how ‘proper’ marriages and forms of family life were essential for an ordered colonial society. He abhorred the scale of miscegenation and illegitimacy and the irregular relations that characterized Jamaica. He loved his wife and children, and did much to support his mother and siblings. At the very same time, he refused those relationships to the enslaved and disavowed any connection between his family and those of the Africans on his plantation: they were naturally different.

Chapter 3 explores the consequences of the French Revolution's transformation of European politics through an Irish lens, linking the political thought of key Irish radicals to the emerging propaganda war between the rival empires of Britain and France. For Wolfe Tone and Arthur O’Connor, two key United Irish emissaries to France, French intervention in Irish politics presented an opportunity dismantle the Irish Kingdom’s sectarian property order and replace it with the peasant proprietorship being spread by French arms in the Low Countries, the Rhineland and northern Italy. Ireland’s poverty and instability was meanwhile held by a range of French and German observers to be a clear demonstration of the injustice and weakness of the British Empire, and the superiority of the French alternative. Following their defeat in 1798, key United Irish figures including O’Connor and William James MacNeven mounted powerful defences of Napoleonic empire. At least as far as its leaders were concerned, the 1798 rebellion was borne not of a radical repudiation of empire, but of an embrace of a French over a British variant.

Succession in Russia was a matter of paternal designation, a practice not a written law, until 1722. The 1722 law had no relationship to “absolutism,” but it did frame succession in a Western context. Succession was in actuality contentious throughout the eighteenth century, until Tsar Paul proclaimed primogeniture as the law in 1797.

The problem of succession to the throne in Russia. Historians have assumed primogeniture, but that was not the case. The practice was rather paternal designation. Succession also involved marriage politics and the education of the heir. That education evolved along with Russian culture, from traditionally Orthodox to entirely Western after 1700.

In the medieval and early modern West succession to the throne of monarchs proceeded by primogeniture, with some explicit legal basis. In medieval Russia political theory as such did not exist. Monarchy was understood in the context of Orthodoxy. The main form of discussion was in texts that provided images of good and bad monarchs, primarily chronicles, world histories, and the lives of saintly princes. In Russia succession was frequently collateral, a system that caused many disputes until the middle of the fifteenth century.