The Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, Empire, and War in the West Indies - Matthew Parker

Written by Matthew Parker
Read by Jonathan Cowley
Format: M4B
Unabridged

To those who travel there today, the West Indies are unspoiled paradise islands. Yet that image conceals a turbulent, dramatic, and shocking history. For some two hundred years after 1650, the West Indies became 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 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.

“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.”—PW

“… 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.”— AudioFile