The Sugar Barons

Although this book describes British imperialism over three centuries, it has the flavor of local history--with emphasis on great families, scandals of all sorts, vast houses, and local military expeditions. 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. F.C. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

May 30, 2011
Tiny Caribbean islands generate outsized wealth, influence, and cruelty in this gripping history of the British West Indies. Historian Parker (Panama Fever) recounts the heyday of the planters of Barbados, Jamaica, and the Leeward Islands who made sugarcane cultivation into a fabulously profitable agribusiness from the 17th to 19th centuries. The riches their plantations generated made them imperial power brokers, provoked warsâin settling the French and Indian War, France gave up Canada to regain the minute sugar island of Guadeloupeâand sparked a culinary revolution. But Britain's glittering West Indian colonies were also some of history's most appalling societies, the author notes. A tiny minority of whites worked the islands' black slave laborers to death and meted out brutality and violenceâParker's accounts of atrocities inflicted on slaves are extremely disturbingâat the slightest disobedience. 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. Photos.