100 books like Sugar and Slaves

If you want to know exactly what things looked like and what living in Barbados felt like in the 17th century, this is the book. Originally published in 1657, this is like a travelogue of the Island that became a prosperous English colony known for its sugar plantations, rum, and slave trade. Ligon was a royalist in exile during the English civil war.

This book tells the story of the Irish migrants who settled on the island of Montserrat from the early seventeenth century to the mid-eighteenth century. Through a masterful combination of different sources, Akenson reconstructs the colonial world of the Irish, and their ambitions to become rulers and no longer ruled within the lucrative and unruly context of the Caribbean.

This novel, set in the time of Oliver Cromwell, is about a girl kidnapped from her Galway home and shipped to Barbados to be sold as an indentured servant to work alongside African slaves. We learn of her life as she gives testimony to an English officer after a failed rebellion. Well researched and powerfully written, one can feel the anger and bitterness of her oppressed existence, and her fierce passion for her African rebel husband. It brings history to life.

For perhaps 200 years after 1650, sugar became such a valuable commodity it became known as “white gold.” This book gives the broad and sweeping history of the conflicts over control of the sugar trade, the slave trade, and the wealth that ultimately led to the Industrial Revolution. It also provides intimate details of the families whose fortunes depended on sugar.

This is not a book about history so much as one that has history suffused through it.

To me, it so perfectly captures what I love most about the Caribbean – the way that the past is always close to the surface. Derek Walcott writes so movingly about St Lucia, which is where my grandmother was born.

This is a book that is made for re-reading – I have read it at least three times now, and every time I spot a new line or a new image to savour.  

Every so often you come across a book that opens up a world you have never encountered before. This 1957 novel by Trinidadian noble laureate V.S. Naipaul is one such book. Its account of the enterprising Ganesh Ramsumair – a Trinidadian of South Asian descent – and his rise from obscurity to national prominence is recounted with a satirical wink and rendered in delicious prose. Every scene is meticulously observed, and every character impeccably drawn – particularly Ganesh’s cantankerous father-in-law and sometime rival, Ramlogan. Sly, sardonic, and Dickensian in its (generally good-natured) reflection upon human frailty, The Mystic Masseur remains as fresh and fun today as ever.

Pity Bertram Francis. After more than a decade in the United Kingdom, the protagonist of Caryl Phillips 1986 novel has returned to his home – an unnamed island in the Caribbean – on the eve of independence. But in seeking to find a place for himself, Bertram quickly discovers that long-simmering resentments and petty grudges (particularly on the part of the island’s soon-to-be prime minister) might very well undermine his high-minded commitment to the nation’s future. But is Bertram’s own idealism also part of the problem, manifesting itself in part as a kind of smug elitism born of his studies in the metropole? Exploring the fraught space between obligation, dependency, and autonomy (in matters of state as well as of the heart), this supple novel and its complex protagonist will linger long after you’ve finished reading.

Patrick Leigh Fermor is without question one of the greatest travel writers in the pantheon, and this early work clarifies that reputation. Providing a glimpse of the West Indies in the years immediately following the Second World War, Fermor’s book is rich in description, profound in understanding, exuberant in its overall moods and textures. The author is evocative without being effusive, providing a rich sense of cultural and historical context – island after island – without overloading the reader with a mere density of fact. As is not always the case with travel writers (and even very good travel writers), Fermor himself is never the subject. We see things alongside him, as he sees them – grateful at every moment for his learned, humane, and passionate sensibility. This is one of the first travel books about the West Indies to take the islands and their inhabitants seriously.

Although not exclusively focused on the Caribbean, the articles in this volume illuminate the long and complex history of sugar production in the early modern Iberian world, beginning with the Iberian Peninsula itself and expanding into the Atlantic island groups and across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and Brazil. The last article focuses on sugar production in seventeenth-century Barbados, underscoring that a long history of sugar cultivation preceded the better-known establishment of sugar production in the English and French islands. Here the reader will learn how sixteenth-century Europeans eagerly incorporated sugar into their cuisines and diet, at times consuming prodigious quantities. Together these articles present a fascinating and often surprising early history of a commodity that has had a huge impact on the world.

This book offers a lucid and very accessible study of the nuts and bolts of the eighteenth-century French sugar business. Readers get a clear understanding of the key aspects of the enterprise that made France the main sugar exporter in the world – from how it was financed, to how it relied on African slave labor, to its cultivation in the Caribbean sugar plantations. It also offers one of the best discussions of the local French domestic industries involved in the sugar business.