Brooke Newman is a professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University and the author of A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica, a book that traces the evolution of racial definitions and sexual practices in one of 18th century Britain’s most valuable colonies. In this conversation, Newman discusses how notions of race and nation interacted with sex, gender, and class in often surprising ways during a brutal imperial occupation, and explains how Jamaica’s particular history reveals the deep, pathological contradictions at the heart of the Atlantic slave system.