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A Family's Story of Slavery and Empire
Knopf
February 2013
On Sale: January 22, 2013
384 pages
ISBN: 0307272834
EAN: 9780307272836
Kindle: B008QLXQQU
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction History
In the late 1630s, lured by the promise of the New World,
Andrea Stuart’s earliest known maternal ancestor, George
Ashby, set sail from England to settle in Barbados. He fell
into the life of a sugar plantation owner by mere chance,
but by the time he harvested his first crop, a revolution
was fully under way: the farming of sugar cane, and the
swiftly increasing demands for sugar worldwide, would not
only lift George Ashby from abject poverty and shape the
lives of his descendants, but it would also bind together
ambitious white entrepreneurs and enslaved black workers in
a strangling embrace. Stuart uses her own family story—from
the seventeenth century through the present—as the pivot for
this epic tale of migration, settlement, survival, slavery
and the making of the Americas.
As it grew, the
sugar trade enriched Europe as never before, financing the
Industrial Revolution and fuelling the Enlightenment. And,
as well, it became the basis of many economies in South
America, played an important part in the evolution of the
United States as a world power and transformed the Caribbean
into an archipelago of riches. But this sweet and hugely
profitable trade—“white gold,” as it was known—had
profoundly less palatable consequences in its precipitation
of the enslavement of Africans to work the fields on the
islands and, ultimately, throughout the American continents.
Interspersing the tectonic shifts of colonial history with
her family’s experience, Stuart explores the interconnected
themes of settlement, sugar and slavery with extraordinary
subtlety and sensitivity. In examining how these forces
shaped her own family—its genealogy, intimate relationships,
circumstances of birth, varying hues of skin—she illuminates
how her family, among millions of others like it, in turn
transformed the society in which they lived, and how that
interchange continues to this day. Shifting between personal
and global history, Stuart gives us a deepened understanding
of the connections between continents, between black and
white, between men and women, between the free and the
enslaved. It is a story brought to life with riveting and
unparalleled immediacy, a story of fundamental importance to
the making of our world.
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