Books like Sugar Barons — picked by fans

If you want to know exactly what things looked like and what living in Barbados felt like in the 17th century, this is the book. Originally published in 1657, this is like a travelogue of the Island that became a prosperous English colony known for its sugar plantations, rum, and slave trade. Ligon was a royalist in exile during the English civil war.

This book tells the story of the Irish migrants who settled on the island of Montserrat from the early seventeenth century to the mid-eighteenth century. Through a masterful combination of different sources, Akenson reconstructs the colonial world of the Irish, and their ambitions to become rulers and no longer ruled within the lucrative and unruly context of the Caribbean.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that modern historical scholarship focused upon the West Indies begins with Richard S. Dunn’s Sugar and Slaves. Blazing a trail that nearly all subsequent scholars in the field continue to travel, Dunn’s work brings a materialist and statistical awareness to the study of Caribbean history. Though this may sound like a recipe for aridity, the results are anything but dry. In his analysis of medical records, census data, mortality rates, and summaries of plantation inventories, Dunn opens up a picture of the English West Indies not as a society with slaves, but as a true slave society – one dominated by an institution that consumed countless lives with breathtaking indifference (and whose legacy continues to haunt the region today).  

This novel, set in the time of Oliver Cromwell, is about a girl kidnapped from her Galway home and shipped to Barbados to be sold as an indentured servant to work alongside African slaves. We learn of her life as she gives testimony to an English officer after a failed rebellion. Well researched and powerfully written, one can feel the anger and bitterness of her oppressed existence, and her fierce passion for her African rebel husband. It brings history to life.

Testing the Chains has become a classic for anyone who is interested in slave rebelliousness and their dramatic acts of resistance in the Atlantic world.

Craton wonderfully tells the exciting stories of slave rebels and Maroons and his research is a great starting point for anyone who hasn’t been exposed to the rebels’ stories.

Patrick Leigh Fermor is without question one of the greatest travel writers in the pantheon, and this early work clarifies that reputation. Providing a glimpse of the West Indies in the years immediately following the Second World War, Fermor’s book is rich in description, profound in understanding, exuberant in its overall moods and textures. The author is evocative without being effusive, providing a rich sense of cultural and historical context – island after island – without overloading the reader with a mere density of fact. As is not always the case with travel writers (and even very good travel writers), Fermor himself is never the subject. We see things alongside him, as he sees them – grateful at every moment for his learned, humane, and passionate sensibility. This is one of the first travel books about the West Indies to take the islands and their inhabitants seriously.

This is one of the seminal books in Caribbean history, by one of the region’s foremost historians and long-time Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, Eric Williams. For me, the book was a wonderful introduction to Caribbean history as it opened up doors to peoples and places that had been neglected during much of my education in the United States. The chapters concerning colonial plantation agriculture, its dependence on the enslavement of Africans, and the geopolitics around King Sugar are memorable.

This is probably the most powerful example of literary pastiche novels I’ve read, not just because it takes on one of the most beloved novels in English literature—Jane Eyre—but because it brutally turns that novel’s premises on their gentrified heads.

I am truly awed by how vibrantly Rhys inhabits Antoinette, Rochester’s doomed wife, weaving in themes of colonialism and gendered power into Charlotte Brontë’s Gothic romance and, in the process, making it a kind of subversive and gritty feminist and anti-colonial manifesto.

Rhys’s depiction of Antoinette’s descent into madness is so visceral and believable that you are (or at least I am) all but cheering as she literally burns the patriarchy to the ground. I also love that while it’s generally considered Rhys’s masterpiece, she wrote it in her seventies. 

This is the first book in what was conceived of as a series about various members of the (fictional) Crogan family and their adventures throughout different periods in history. This initial volume starts with a West Indies pirate adventure featuring “Catfoot” Crogan, who’s forced to join a pirate crew and winds up making a mortal enemy of another member of the crew. The series unfortunately seems to have stopped with only three books, but this first one is well worth reading on its own. Note that this book was initially published in black and white as Crogan’s Vengeance. 

While my previous three recommended memoirs feature French cooking, this one is about the Caribbean. In the early 1990s, the author and her husband rented their home and moved onto a 42-foot sailboat for a two-year sailing escapade.  

I loved this memoir for its descriptions of high adventure and the dangers of a sailing life. Vanderhoof’s wonderful selection of recipes stem from her experiences cooking in a tiny, sea-going kitchen. Starting with Chesapeake Bay crabcakes, Ann progresses to curried lobster, stewed conch, and Piῆa Colada cheesecake. 

Storms, friends, danger, repairs, the search for local food, and cooking combine to create a page-turning and delicious story—for me, a memoir similar to my own life-changing experience and resulting memoir.