The newest Sugar Barons from the Matthew Parker — comment
We letter Jamaica recently, I was allowed to supper from the a renewal-time plantation home. The fresh new voice off floor ice clinking against glass greeted me personally, given that ribbon-tied up waiters offered site visitors within a long desk draped from inside the linen. The top metal of one’s island’s glucose globe is here. For three ages the new plantation’s servant-grown up sugar got found british urge getting cakes, confections additionally the prominent variety of coffee and teas (you to «blood-sweetened beverage», the new abolitionist poet Southey named they).
Modern Britain, based on Matthew Parker, was constructed on glucose. There is barely a manufacturing area within these shores that has been maybe not in some way attached to the «Africa trade». The latest glittering prosperity off slave harbors such as for example Bristol and Liverpool was derived in the high region out-of trade that have Africa. On heyday of your Uk slave trade, off 1700 so you can 1808, Western Indians (once the light glucose barons was basically next understood) became conspicuous from the their brand new riches. A popular melodrama regarding 1771, Richard Cumberland’s South-west Indian, satirised them while the boorish pets who’d paid about Caribbean to acquire a king’s ransom and a social status they might possess become refuted in the home.
On Glucose Barons, Parker provides a glittery reputation of the british impresarios, heiresses and you can remittance dudes involved in Caribbean thraldom. Generally they shed Jamaica or Barbados out such as for instance an excellent sucked orange so you’re able to fritter the winnings back home during the England. (далее…)