Books like The Sugar Barons by Matthew Parker
To those who travel there today, the West Indies are unspoiled paradise islands. Yet that image conceals a turbulent and shocking history. For some two hundred years after 1650, the West Indies were the strategic center of the Western world's greatest power struggles as Europeans made and lost immense fortunes growing and trading in sugar-a commodity so lucrative it became known as "white gold." Matthew Parker vividly chronicles how the wealth of her island colonies became the foundation and focus of England's commercial and imperial greatness, underpinning the British economy and ultimately fueling the Industrial Revolution. Yet with the incredible wealth came untold misery: the horror endured by slaves, on whose backs the sugar empire was brutally built; the rampant disease that claimed the lives of one-third of all whites within three years of arrival in the Caribbean; the cruelty, corruption, and decadence of the plantation culture. Broad in scope, rich in detail, The Sugar Barons freshly links the histories of Europe, the West Indies, and North America and reveals the full impact of the sugar revolution, the resonance of which is still felt today.
First publish date: 2011
Authors: Matthew Parker
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Books similar to The Sugar Barons (7 similar books)
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A study of the West Indies in the mid-nineteenth century, this book draws together the experiences of more than a dozen different sugar colonies and forms them into a coherent historical account. The first part of the book examines the West Indies on the eve of emancipation in 1830-1865, a key passage in West Indian history. Green presents a clear general picture of the sugar colonies, society, economies, law and places British governmental policy toward the region in the context of Victorian attitudes toward colonial questions. He also looks at the great experiment: emancipation, apprenticeship, a free society, free labour, the impact of free trade, immigration (from India, China, Portugal as well as Africa), religion, education, colonial politics and constitutional reform.
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Explains the course of English overseas expansion and the beginning of the overseas empire.
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"Sugar and Slaves presents a vivid portrait of English life in the Caribbean more than three centuries ago. Using a host of contemporary primary source, 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."--BOOK JACKET.
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