The fresh new Glucose Barons by Matthew Parker – review

I n Jamaica has just, I found myself enjoy in order to lunch at a restoration-era plantation home. The newest voice off crushed frost clinking against mug met me personally, once the ribbon-fastened waiters offered tourist from the a long desk draped in linen. The major kissbrides.com hopp over til disse karene brass of one's island's glucose world try truth be told there. For a few many years the new plantation's servant-grown glucose got fulfilled british desire for desserts, confections therefore the preferred form of coffee-and beverage (that "blood-sweetened drink", the latest abolitionist poet Southey named they).

Modern The uk, according to Matthew Parker, is actually built on glucose. There is hardly a manufacturing city in these shores that was not for some reason linked to the "Africa trade". The fresh new glittering success out of slave ports instance Bristol and you may Liverpool was derived during the higher area off business that have Africa. Throughout the heyday of British slave-trade, away from 1700 so you're able to 1808, West Indians (just like the white sugar barons was indeed following identified) became conspicuous of the their new money. A well-known melodrama from 1771, Richard Cumberland's South west Indian, satirised them as boorish animals who had settled regarding Caribbean to get a lot of money and you may a social status they would have been refuted at your home.

Regarding the Glucose Barons, Parker brings an effective glittery reputation of the british impresarios, heiresses and you may remittance men doing work in Caribbean thraldom. Generally they shed Jamaica otherwise Barbados away including a great sucked tangerine so you're able to fritter its earnings back home in England.