Sugar and Slaves

Dunn, Richard S., Sugar and Slaves; the rise of the planter class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713, Chapel Hill, Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Va.: University of North Carolina Press, 1972.

Richard Slator Dunn BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

From the Foreword of the 2000 edition by Gary B. Nash:

Sugar and Slaves is a brilliant depiction of the outlaw English planters who came to the Caribbean in the early seventeenth century. Because they were the first English colonizers to build an economy on African slave labor, their history provides a comparative perspective on the origins of slavery in England's mainland colonies. Writing at the beginning of the social history tectonic plate shift of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Richard Dunn takes the reader inside the tropical island plantation world where displaced Africans and English colonists built a tobacco and sugar economy that mocked all that the English believed their culture stood for. The book begins in 1624, when the English gained their Caribbean foothold on the tiny island of St. Christopher. From that lonely outpost emerged a "cohesive and potent master class" of tobacco and sugar planters that spread to Barbados, Nevis, Montserrat, Antigua, and Jamaica. The book vividly portrays how the English planters created a living hell in a Caribbean Garden of Eden and how they accommodated themselves to the human wreckage involved in turning the islands into highly successful sugar-producing colonies.