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To those who travel there today, the West Indies are unspoiled paradise islands. Yet that image conceals a turbulent and shocking history. For some 200 years after 1650, the West Indies were the strategic center of the western world, witnessing one of the greatest power struggles of the age as Europeans made and lost immense fortunes growing and trading in sugar-a commodity so lucrative it became known as "white gold." As Matthew Parker vividly 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 became the foundation and focus of England's commercial and imperial greatness, underpinning the British economy and ultimately fueling the Industrial Revolution. Yet with the incredible wealth came untold misery: the horror endured by slaves, on whose backs the sugar empire was 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.
While sugar came to dictate imperial policy, for those on the ground the British West Indian empire presented a disturbing moral universe. Parker brilliantly interweaves the human stories of those since lost to history whose fortunes and fame rose and fell with sugar. Their industry drove the development of the North American mainland states, and with it a slave culture, as the plantation model was exported to the warm, southern states. Broad in scope, 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.
A rich, multifaceted account of the greed and slavery bolstering the rise of England's mercantile empire.
Considering the myriad international influences that vied for predominance in the West Indies, London-based author Parker (Panama Fever: The Epic Story of One of the Greatest Human Achievements of All Time-- the Building of the Panama Canal, 2008, etc.) wisely focuses on the pioneer British dynasties that built the sugar empires on Barbados and the English Leeward islands, such as the related Drax and Codrington clans, and later on Jamaica, the Beckfords. Sugar production was not initially an English enterprise—from New Guinea to India, Persia to North Africa, sugar-cane cultivation was carried ever westward by the Arabs, Spanish and especially the Portuguese, the last who "put to cane" the islands of Madeira, Principe and the vast colony of Brazil to corner the sugar market by the early 17th century. The enterprising Dutch elbowed into Barbados by the 1640s, creating the ideal conditions whereby James Drax, an Anglican immigrant, would learn by trial and error how to coax the fabulous new crop in the rich soil. Barbados became a magnet for the dumping of indentured servants, dissidents and the disaffected during the reign of Charles I, followed by refugees from the English Civil War, many of whom perished by ill treatment and disease within three years of arriving. However, sugar production was labor-intensive, and blacks from West Africa—already long established as labor within Portuguese possessions—were imported, apparently hardier and more tractable than the native Caribs. Parker delves skillfully into the important effects of the English Civil War, such as the passage of the Navigation Act of 1651, which created a formal system of mercantilism to benefit England's home vessels and ports; even Oliver Cromwell masterminded a "western design" into Hispaniola and Jamaica, to less-than-successful effect. Still, the English dug in, and their treatment of slaves to wring profits from vast plantations was predictably harsh and deplorable.
Parker achieves admirable clarity and focus in this sprawling, ugly, complicated story of the sugar revolution.
Maps vii
Simplified Family Trees xii
Chronology xv
Picture Sources xviii
Introduction 'Hot as Hell, and as Wicked as the Devil' 1
Part 1 The Pioneers
1 White Gold, 1642 9
2 The First Settlements, 1605-41 14
3 The Sugar Revolution: 'So Noble an Undertaking' 32
4 The Sugar Revolution: 'Most inhuman and barbarous persons' 44
5 The Plantation: Masters and Slaves 52
6 The English Civil War in Barbados 67
7 The Plantation: Life and Death 76
8 Cromwell's 'Western Design': Disaster in Hispaniola 88
9 The Invasion of Jamaica 97
Part 2 The Grandees
10 The Restoration 115
11 Expansion, War and the Rise of the Beckfords 132
12 'All slaves are enemies' 147
13 The Cousins Henry Drax and Christopher Codrington 161
14 God's Vengeance 169
15 The Planter at War: Codrington in the Leeward Islands 180
16 The French Invasion of Jamaica 192
17 Codrington the Younger in the West Indies 197
18 The Murder of Daniel Parke 211
19 The Beckfords: The Next Generation 219
20 Piracy and Rum 234
21 The Maroon War in Jamaica and the War of Jenkins's Ear 248
22 Barbados, the 'Civilised Isle' 259
23 Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica: 'Tonight very lonely and melancholy again' 270
24 Jamaica: Rich and Poor 285
25 The Sugar Lobby 296
Part 3 The Inheritors
26 Luxury and Debt 311
27 The War Against America 325
28 The West Indian 'Nabobs': Absenteeism, Decadence and Decline 333
29 Peace and Freedom 345
Epilogue The Sins of the Fathers 359
Source Notes 365
Select Bibliography 417
Acknowledgements 433
Index 435
Anonymous
Posted September 27, 2011
This book is very well written and an excellent history of the region. It provides and outstanding reference as to why the "new world" experienced the racial difficulties that it has.
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Posted February 19, 2012
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Posted March 29, 2012
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Posted October 3, 2011
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Overview
To those who travel there today, the West Indies are unspoiled paradise islands. Yet that image conceals a turbulent and shocking history. For some 200 years after 1650, the West Indies were the strategic center of the western world, witnessing one of the greatest power struggles of the age as Europeans made and lost immense fortunes growing and trading in sugar-a commodity so lucrative it became known as "white gold." As Matthew Parker vividly chronicles in his sweeping history, the sugar revolution made the ...