======================================================================
Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
======================================================================
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/apr/02/sugar-barons-matthew-parker-review
The Sugar Barons by Matthew Parker - review
The cane fields of the West Indies hid a corrupt society
Ian Thomson
The Guardian, Saturday 2 April 2011
In Jamaica recently, I was invited to lunch at a Restoration-era
plantation house. The sound of crushed ice clinking against glass
greeted me, as bow-tied waiters served guests at a long table
draped in linen. The top brass of the island's sugar industry was
there. For three centuries the plantation's slave-grown sugar had
satisfied the British craving for cakes, confections and the
popular version of coffee and tea (that "blood-sweetened
beverage", the abolitionist poet Southey called it).
Modern Britain, according to Matthew Parker, was built on sugar.
There is hardly a manufacturing town on these shores that was not
in some way connected to the "Africa trade". The glittering
prosperity of slave ports such as Bristol and Liverpool was
derived in large part from commerce with Africa. In the heyday of
the British slave trade, from 1700 to 1808, West Indians (as white
sugar barons were then known) became conspicuous by their new
wealth. A popular melodrama of 1771, Richard Cumberland's The West
Indian, satirised them as boorish creatures who had settled in the
Caribbean to acquire a fortune and a social status they would have
been denied at home.
In The Sugar Barons, Parker provides a glittery history of the
British impresarios, heiresses and remittance men involved in
Caribbean slavery. Typically they cast Jamaica or Barbados aside
like a sucked orange in order to fritter their profits back home
in England. Outside of Georgian London, the greatest concentration
of retired West Indians was in the Bristol suburb of Clifton.
There, in their cocked hats and fashionably buckled shoes, the new
men of capital were disliked for their ostentation. George III,
the story goes, was peeved to encounter a West Indian in the
seaside resort of Weymouth whose coach was more resplendent than
his own. "Sugar, sugar, hey? – all that sugar!" the king
complained loudly.
In this racy, well-researched history, Parker concentrates on such
egregiously cruel sugar barons as Thomas Thistlewood, who ran a
slave plantation in west Jamaica between 1750 and 1786. By his own
precise account, Thistlewood had sexual intercourse on 3,852
occasions throughout his 40-year-long Caribbean rampage. His
strenuous licentiousness, chronicled in schoolboy Latin in a diary
he kept ("About 2am, cum Negro girls"), makes it clear that sex
was important to Britain's imperial project: the empire gave
planters like Thistlewood the licence to abuse their captive women
and indulge a predatory nature.
Needless to say, sugar barons had no scruple about the brutality
of the "Negro trade". At Drax Hall estate in north Jamaica, slaves
were flogged virtually into the grave in order to speed up
cane-cutting and crushing. (The Drax family gave its name to the
fiendish Sir Hugo Drax in Ian Fleming's 007 extravaganza Moonraker.)
Since the West Indies were riddled with disease, insects and
reptiles, British planters became absentee landlords if they
could, or else they liquidated their tropical holdings outright.
Still others never set foot in the West Indies at all. The Gothic
novelist William Beckford's sole attempt, in 1787, to visit his
father's property Drax Hall took him no further than Lisbon:
sea-sickness, combined with a fear of shipboard cockroaches,
detained him.
The few planters who did stay behind aimed to send their children
"home" to England for their education. Tobias Smollett (pictured),
the 18th-century Scottish novelist, having married a "home-comer"
from Jamaica, appointed a London agent to oversee the sale and
purchase of his wife's slaves. Typically, funds were slow to
arrive as British slaving agents were inefficient and, often as
not, drunk. "That cursed Ship from Jamaica", Smollett complained
in a letter of 1756, "is at last arrived without Letter or
Remittance." Smollett and his wife could hope to earn £80 for each
"Negro man" sold on their behalf – a considerable sum in those days.
To judge by Parker's account, sugar was the only reason for the
British Caribbean's existence. Barbados society was notably
created from slavery; Barbadian customs and culture were fashioned
by slavery. The effects of slavery are moreover plain to see in
the island's class and racial divides today. Though African
complicity in the British slave trade can hardly be ignored,
Parker makes nothing of it. The African side of transatlantic
slavery was exemplified by the slave castles the British operated
along the Gold Coast until the slave trade's abolition in 1807,
and which served as holding centres for Africans captured by and
sold into servitude by fellow Africans. Conceivably, the forebears
of British Jamaicans today passed through these
warehouse-dungeons. The Sugar Barons provides eloquent testimony
to the mercantile greed of a few and the manifest misery endured
by millions in the pursuit of sweetness.
Ian Thomson's The Dead Yard: A Story of Modern Jamaica (Faber) won
the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje award 2010.
________________________________________________
Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu
Set your options at:
http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com