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The Sugar Barons
Family, Corruption, Empire, and War in the West Indies
1 of 1 copy available
As Matthew Parker skillfully chronicles in his sweeping history, the sugar revolution made the English, in particular, a nation of voracious consumers, so much so that the wealth of her island colonies came to underpin the entire British economy, ultimately fueling the Industrial Revolution. Yet beside the incredible wealth came untold misery: the horrors of slavery and of slaves, on whose backs the sugar empires were brutally built; the rampant disease that claimed the lives of one third of all whites within three years of arrival in the Caribbean; the cruelty, corruption, and decadence of the plantation culture.
For those on the ground, the British West Indian empire presented a disturbing moral universe. Parker vividly interweaves the human stories—since lost to history—of visitors and slaves, overseers and soldiers, and of the families whose fortunes and fame rose and fell on sugar. Their wealth drove the development of the North American mainland states, and with it a slave culture, as the racist plantation model was exported to the warm southern states. Eventually opposition to sugar policy in London helped to unite the North American colonies against Britain.
Broad in scope and rich in detail, The Sugar Barons freshly links the histories of Europe, the West Indies, and North America, and reveals the full impact of the sugar revolution, the resonance of which is still felt today.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
August 16, 2011 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9781452622613
- File size: 470836 KB
- Duration: 16:20:54
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Although this book describes British imperialism over three centuries, it has the flavor of local history--with emphasis on great families, scandals of all sorts, vast houses, and local military expeditions. Jonathan Cowley's voice is clear and emphatic. The book focuses almost entirely on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Barbados, Jamaica, and Antigua and ends abruptly in the early nineteenth century with the emancipation of British West Indian slaves. It does not hold back on descriptions of the brutality of slavery. Cowley's Caribbean pronunciations are good. The drama he injects into the scenes is entirely consistent with the author's style. And yes, there are pirates. F.C. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine -
May 30, 2011
Tiny Caribbean islands generate outsized wealth, influence, and cruelty in this gripping history of the British West Indies. Historian Parker (Panama Fever) recounts the heyday of the planters of Barbados, Jamaica, and the Leeward Islands who made sugarcane cultivation into a fabulously profitable agribusiness from the 17th to 19th centuries. The riches their plantations generated made them imperial power brokers, provoked warsâin settling the French and Indian War, France gave up Canada to regain the minute sugar island of Guadeloupeâand sparked a culinary revolution. But Britain's glittering West Indian colonies were also some of history's most appalling societies, the author notes. A tiny minority of whites worked the islands' black slave laborers to death and meted out brutality and violenceâParker's accounts of atrocities inflicted on slaves are extremely disturbingâat the slightest disobedience. This is a rousing, fluently written narrative history, full of color, dash, and forceful personalities, but it's also a subtle social portrait of plantation life and governance: its live fast, die young ethos as Europeans dropped like flies from tropical diseases. Parker's vivid evocation of the elite evokes the queasy moral rot beneath la dolce vita. Photos.
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