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    The Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, Empire, and War in the West Indies
    The Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, Empire, and War in the West Indies
    The Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, Empire, and War in the West Indies
    Audiobook16 hours

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

    Written by Matthew Parker

    Narrated by Jonathan Cowley

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    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.

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateAug 16, 2011
    ISBN9781452672618
    Author

    Matthew Parker

    Matthew Parker was born in Central America and spent part of his childhood in the West Indies, acquiring a lifelong fascination with the history of the region. He is the author of Panama Fever, the story of the building of the Panama Canal, and Monte Cassino: The Hardest Fought Battle of World War II. He lives in London. Visit his website at www.matthewparker.co.uk.

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    4/5

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    • 3/5
      This reasonably interesting survey of the roots of the First British Empire is at its best when dealing with the settlement of Barbados and Jamaica, how sugar came to be the predominant cash crop, and the con-commitment to slavery as the prime means of production. Parker's narrative rapidly tails off when he reaches the conclusion of the Seven Years War, and then moves as quickly as possible to London's abolition of African slavery. Considering that Parker seems to be as interested in how piracy came to be the poor man's alternative to agribusiness, perhaps starting with a narrow focus on the origins of the sugar barons wasn't the best narrative choice; writing more of an account of London's West Indian empire from both sides of the Atlantic might have been a better strategy. Again, there's nothing actually wrong with this book, it just feels a bit thin.