The Sugar Barons

The contemporary image of the West Indies as paradise islands conceals a turbulent, dramatic and shocking history.
For 200 years after 1650, the West Indies witnessed 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 that it was known as white gold.

In this compelling book, Matthew Parker tells how the islands became by far most valuable and important colonies in the British Empire. How Barbados, scene of the sugar revolution that made the English a nation of voracious consumers, was transformed from a backward outpost into England’s richest colony, powered by the human misery of tens of thousands of enslaved Africans.
At the heart of The Sugar Barons are the human stories of the families whose fortunes rose and fell with those of the West Indian empire: the family of James Drax, the first sugar baron, who introduced sugar cultivation to Barbados, along with extensive slavery; the Codringtons, the most powerful family in the Leeward Islands, who succumbed to corruption and decadence; and the Beckfords, Jamaica’s leading planters, who amassed the greatest sugar fortune of all, only to see it frittered away through profligacy.
The Sugar Barons explores the impact of the West Indies on Britain, where it still constitutes perhaps the darkest episode in our history.