Sugar Barons

About this book

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. This compelling book 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 Englands richest colony powered by the human misery of tens of thousands of enslaved Africans. How this model of coercion and exploitation was exported around the region producing huge wealth for a few but creating a society poisoned by war disease cruelty and corruption. How Jamaican opulence reached its zenith and its subsequent calamitous decline;