The Sugar Barons

Books : History : English
Publishers Weekly
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 wars—in settling the French and Indian War, France gave up Canada to regain the minute sugar island of Guadeloupe—and 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 violence—Parker\'s accounts of atrocities inflicted on slaves are extremely disturbing—at 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. (Aug.)

Library Journal
Parker (Panama Fever) traces the social, political, and economic history of the sugar trade in the British West Indies from the 17th to the 19th centuries through the stories of several families who ran enormous plantations with indentured and slave labor and amassed great wealth. Along with harrowing tales of the extreme hazards of harvesting sugarcane, the author also conjures incongruous images of the conspicuous consumption by the landowners who insisted on wearing full European wardrobes (wool coats and wigs) in tropical climates. In this concise volume, Parker manages to cover disease, race relations, slave rebellions, imperial rivalry, and more, leaving the reader impressed by his command of the sources—many of which are letters and diaries of the plantation owners and their visitors—and the comprehensiveness of the treatment. VERDICT Successful both as a scholarly introduction to the topic and as an entertaining narrative, this is recommended for readers of any kind of history. (Illustrations not seen.)—Megan Hahn Fraser, Univ. of California, Los Angeles, Lib.

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