The Sugar Barons

The Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, Empire and War, by Matthew Parker, Hutchinson, RRP£25, 464 pages

In The Sugar Barons, Matthew Parker weaves a fascinating and bloody tale about the period from the early 1600s when English sugar-growing dynasties such as the Beckfords, Codringtons and Draxes ran Barbados, Jamaica and other islands.

Some were hard-working and inventive but inhumanity and greed were the prevailing character traits. Slaves faced punishments ranging from a punch in the face for allowing a fly to alight on their master’s butter to being flayed alive for dissent. Until the slave trade’s abolition in the 1830s, the sugar barons dismissed London’s efforts at regulation as unwarranted impingement on the “rights of individuals”. Some took off to implant slavery in such regions of the US as South Carolina.

“Hot as hell and wicked as the devil” was how one contemporary described the industry. The Sugar Barons is an antidote to the modern strain of neo-conservative history that says empire was a rather good thing.