Sugar & Slaves book
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The Rum Library - Book Review by Margaret Ayala:
In this book, author Richard S. Dunn captures in great detail the effect of slavery in the British West Indies. The topic of slavery, although crucial in the establishment of tobacco and sugar empires based in the Caribbean, is often overlooked by modern rum distilleries and their consumers.
To read -and understand- the book is to embark on a journey of epic proportions, witnessing the rise of the “Planter Class” and its effect on displaced slaves from near and far. This Master Class was unprecedented and would go to impact daily life in the Caribbean for almost three centuries.
Many of the lessons recorded in the book are still applicable to today’s society, such as Dunn’s explanation that early English planters “made their beautiful islands almost uninhabitable . . . from New England to Virginia to Jamaica, the English planters developed the habit of murdering the soil for a few quick crops and then moving along. On the sugar plantations, unhappily, they also murdered the slaves.”
According to the book, in 1710 a Barbadian named Thomas Walduck wrote a letter to a London friend, condemning the new wave of Masters who were driving the colony into decay:
“Barbadoes Isle inhabited by Slaves And for one honest man then thousand knaves Religion to thee’s a Romantick storey Barbarity and ill got wealth thy glory All Sodom’s Sins are Centred in thy heart Death is thy look and Death in every part Oh! Glorious Isle in Vilany Excell Sin to the Height – thy fate is Hell.”
While the reality of sugar and rum production today is far from that described by Dunn, the demographic of the sugar-producing countries, the culture and lore surrounding the industries still resonates with the voices from the past.
This book is a must- read for anyone interested in the origins and the development of the sugar and tobacco industries in the Caribbean. While the atrocities described are hard to stomach, one must be able to recognize them as such if one is to fully appreciate the respective industries in their modern forms today.
Kudos to The University of North Carolina Press for re-printing this valuable document, originally written in the late 1960s.