Customer Reviews

The Sugar Barons. Matthew Parker

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a well written history book. It covers the sugar trade and the families that ran it. Its far from a happy story in many respects. But its very illuminating on issues of business, trade, politics and the stories of individuals. The early parts of the book jump all over the place leading to a rather choppy narrative, but the story told is always interesting (if not exactly happy).

The sugar trade was empire in its pureist and most ruthless form. It killed most of those who became directly involved in the west indies (slave, soldier, businessmen). And the wealth all went back overseas to the ultimate owners who ran the whole thing on something like remote control. The book's ending seems rather abrupt and the author could have gone further in terms of looking at the history. But all in all a very good book.

Parker opened my eyes to the predominance of the sugar trade in the seventeenth century and beyond, the close relationship particulary between Barbados (and the English caribbean in general) with the thirteen North American colonies. He also gives another perspective on the slave trade. What I really enjoy about Mathew Parker's style is his ingenious way of getting you hooked with one or two personal stories of individuals and families; And once he has you, the process of historical extrapolation becomes much more readable. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the caribbean islands.

This was a valuable addition to my undergrad Honors US History syllabus this semester. The students were not aware that English colonial success in the Atlantic really began in Barbados, or that New England and the West Indies were so important to each other's growth as early as the 1640s. A couple of things surprised me, though. First, I thought they would understand that the conflicted way we tend to look at these sugar barons (partly as self-made heroes of a rags-to-riches romance, partly as monsters who enriched themselves on slave labor) is a problem that's endemic in history. I'll need to spell it out a little more, next time. But I think Parker presented it well, especially in the self-contradictory memoirs of Richard Ligon.

The other difficulty, which I think Parker contributed to, surrounds slavery. For the most part, the students accepted Parker's claim that racialized slavery was the fault of medieval Muslims. This is unfortunate. Generally, before the modern era, slavery was not so much based on rationalizations of inferiority, as on conquest. Conquered people became slaves, often in spite of the fact that they shared the ethnicity of their conquerors. My students will see another example of the racialization of slavery when we take up Virginia next week. With so many examples from the Anglo-Atlantic world, there's no reason to go looking in 8th-century Islam.

Despite this complaint, I like the narrative style and the focus Parker throws on this time and region, which too often gets only a paragraph in textbooks. Connecting the Caribbean with the mainland (especially New England) is really helpful, and shows the early colonial period in a whole different light. This will be very useful, when we get around to discussing the way historians have fought over the "market transition" and early "capitalism" in the colonies and young nation.

This book is a well-written history of Barbados, pointing up sugar's important role in shaping social patterns in colonial Americas.

The book is an easy to read,illustrative tale of the development of the West Indies that we know today. It is packed with gripping accounts of how the West Indies was knocked & pounded into shape; crafted in the context of the economic life of the metropole .
A Must-read for every Caribbean person & any others interested in knowing the "Why" & the "How", behind what is now. It helps in understanding the ideology still evident and reasserting itself in pretty much the same old ways.

When I think of what it took to build modern liberal empires I am often horrified. The history of England's sugar colonies in the Caribbean which Parker paints is a history of meanness, exploitation, dissipation, brutality and venality which has few competitors. We think of the US and Great Britain as standard bearers of the development of democracy and human rights. The slavery and imperialism of both gives lie to that claim. The only retribution that the sugar barons and their minions received were the diseases of the tropics which slew the exploiters in goodly numbers but certainly not sufficient as due punishment which would have stop their crimes.

I found this a somewhat hard book to read on two counts. First, the shear horror of treatment of slaves was almost unremitting. It is an important part of the book, and for those that would claim holocausts as the more terrible thing humans have inflicted on other humans, they might take pause to consider what slavers and masters wrought on millions of slaves forced into the plantation system. Certainly some descendants of Africans so enmeshed survived, but for hundreds of years their ancestors, died in droves and were subjected to life times of killing work, starvation, and ghastly punishments. Although early critics decried slaves' treatment, it wasn't till a hundred or more years of the practice it occurred to almost anyone that slavery was immoral no matter how slaves were treated. And when the anti-slavery movement got under way in the 18th century, British Caribbean sugar plantations were dying of soil exhaustion, absentee ownership, bad management, and competition. So when it came to tariffs and support that kept the institution alive, the sugar barons were outvoted in Parliament by anti-slavery and the increasing economic and political power of Asian sugar interests. The great wealth that the Caribbean sugar barons contributed to England (whether it help supply capital to the industrial revolution was not covered in the book)---was very much on the decline. So by the turn of the 19th century the sugar barons, no matter their accumulated wealth had lost influence.

The second difficulty that the book presented stems from the claims of maybe forty years ago among some academic historians that all history is biography. While the author is not an academic historian and probably unaware of that dated discussion, the book is heavy with too much biography, so reading it is sometimes slow and confusing as to who is who (and what readers might care). This is not really a fault, but maybe the inevitable result of the book being a history of the sugar barons. So the book does a good job on it avowed purpose.

What more can I say. I did not like reading of the inhumanity toward slaves, the carnality, the dissipation, the shear ugliness and decadence of what helped to make liberal Britain. Years ago I assigned Sidney Mintz's classical anthological and economic history of sugar Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History to my students. Parker reasserts Mintz's point (which may in fact go back to Marx, but maybe not) that plantation production of sugars was the first real factory system (and of course Southerners in the US asserted that slavery was more humane than the wage slavery of the North) but Parker's sugar barons where in an earlier political-economic context where that would not have meant anything. An interesting book but it is unlikely I will remember the names of Drax, Coddington, etc. who played such a big role in the sugar exploitation which helped to transform the world.

Charlie Fisher author of Dismantling Discontent: Buddha's Way Through Darwin's World