Sugar barons : family, corruption, empire and war /Mathew Parker.

Focuses on key moments in British imperial history; the sugar revolution in Barbados which made the English a nation of voracious consumers and transformed the island from a backward outpost into the richest English colony in the world, powered by tens of thousands of enslaved Africans; the change to state-driven imperialism with Cromwell's disastrous 'Western Design' and the bitter wars against the French; the zenith of Jamaican opulence, and the island's subsequent calamitous decline; and, the growing revulsion against slavery that led to Emancipation.