Sugar and Slaves (Norton library, N692) [Paperback]

Richard S. Dunn (Author)

Book Description

Series: Norton library, N692 | Publication Date: September 1973

First published by UNC Press in 1972, Sugar and Slaves presents a vivid portrait of English life in the Caribbean more than three centuries ago. Using a host of contemporary primary sources, Richard Dunn traces the development of plantation slave society in the region. He examines sugar production techniques, the vicious character of the slave trade, the problems of adapting English ways to the tropics, and the appalling mortality rates for both blacks and whites that made these colonies the richest, but in human terms the least successful, in English America.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Dunn's work is a model of contemporary historical research. He writes with admirable clarity.

London Financial Times

Dunn's is rich social history, based on factual data brought to life by his use of contemporary narrative accounts.

Willie Lee Rose, New York Review of Books

Professor Dunn has written an excellent book: not only is it informative, it is also readable.

Business History Review

A masterly analysis of the Caribbean plantation slave society, its lifestyles, ethnic relations, afflictions, and peculiarities.

Journal of Modern History

[This] elegantly written book is easily the finest on the subject and a major addition to colonial scholarship.

Journal of Economic History --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

From the Inside Flap

Drawing upon such sources as travelers' accounts, plantation records, census returns, wills, inventories, land patents, maps, and parish registers, Richard Dunn presents a composite portrait of plantation life in the Caribbean three centuries ago. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 359 pages
• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc; 1st Thus edition (September 1973)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393006921
• ISBN-13: 978-0393006926
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,286,382 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thorough and Readable Study of Plantation Development, March 26, 2000

By 

Brian O'Malley (Atlantic Beach, FL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sugar and Slaves (Norton library, N692) (Paperback)

Richard S. Dunn examines the British colonialization of the West Indies. Dunn considers numerous colonies, but Barbados takes early preeminence. Dunn discusses the adventurers of the first twenty years, mostly small-scale farmers; the cavalier-planters of the 1640s and '50s, Royalist exiles who fled the English Civil War; and the slaves who became a majority of the population in the period Dunn considers.

Dunn offers a detailed contrast between the lives of the planter elite and the enslaved majority. This is a landmark work in the history of plantation agriculture in the West Indies.

The work should also interest readers of Southern history. Dunn compares the rise of a cavalier elite in Barbados to the same development in Virginia. Planters from the West Indies, especially Barbados, dominated the early years of the colony of (South) Carolina.

Other works on this period of West Indian history are Richard Sheridan's Sugar and Slavery and Gary Puckrein's Little England. Works by Hilary Beckles examine the lives of women and Blacks in this period of West Indian history.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Research, February 25, 2006

By 

Tamii - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713 (Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American Hist) (Paperback)

Dunn does an excellent job of explaining the planter class in the West Indies. His research is excellent and his writing style is clear and devoid of that crazy academic jargon so often found in history books. This is my first book on planters and it gave me a good fund of knowledge on the histories of Barbados, the Leeward Islands, and Jamaica, and it outlined in detail how the planters made or lost money. For me, it's Dunn's careful unraveling of the planters' financial arrangements and entanglements that made this book absolutely hard to put down!

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the brutality of the West Indies slave trade, January 1, 2003

By 

Scholar "18th century student" (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713 (Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American Hist) (Paperback)

In "Sugar and Slaves," Richard Dunn shows not only the brutality of the West Indies slave trade that revolved around sugar, but also how slave owners "created a society...radically different from the one they left at home." He notes that while these planters brought with them to the islands their laws, church and social institutions, these settlers early on "developed their own lifestyle...bent by their eager embrace of African slavery." (46) Dunn persuasively argues that European planters who came to the West Indies traveled literally and figuratively "beyond the line" of normal, British social conventions, and created a world in which "everything goes," particularly the exploitation of slaves and natives in the creation of a dominant master class. These rapacious men, he argues, quickly adapted to harsh climatic conditions by abandoning the use of lower class but white indentured servants in favor of exploitable, controllable Negroes once the sugar boom created a demand. "The rape's progress was fatally easy," Dunn notes: "from exploiting the English poor to abusing colonial bondservants to ensnaring kidnaps and convicts to enslaving black Africans." (73) Unlike his Chesapeake or Lowcountry counterpart, the West Indies sugar lord produced nothing but his staple crop, and relied instead on imports for all other necessities. "In short, the English sugar planter was more strictly a businessman than the senhor de engenho of Brazil." (65) This was a marked difference from other English settlement and colonization patterns, which Dunn concludes is evidence of the atypical class of planter the Caribbean islands fashioned.