An excellent book on slavery in Barbados told through the story of a family and the descendants of a white Englishman who settled there and the survival of his descendants through revolution and the harshness of the work on the sugar plantations. A really good account of the brutality of the sugar trade in the islands of the Carribbean and the inter-connectedness of the slaves and whites there. An eye-opening story. If you think you know how harsh slavery was in the United States, read this book to learn how much worse it was in the Carribbean. ( )

Like a good piece of cake you can't put down. Reads without efforts. Andrea Stuart takes us thru 3 periods of her family's History; The Pioneer, The Plantocrat and The legacy. With her writing we can live her ancestors' day to day lives. Since she is a descendant from a mix of a master with his slaves, we can feel the compassion and the understanding tone of that era without forgetting the weight on future generation of the whites' action and beliefs' of that time. Well balanced between social explanations and her ancestors' lives.
Deeply enjoyed it ( )

Stuart uses her own family's history to tell the story of race, slavery and sugar in Barbados from the 17th century to the WW II period. The focus on one family does make one feel as if a lot of the historical background is being skimmed. But, the central purpose of the book is to illustrate aspects of the system through one family's history and she does that well. ( )

Sugar in the Blood: A Family’s Story of Slavery and Empire by Andrea Stuart tells the story of her
family’s history, and in doing so, the history of the island of Barbados. As a colony of England it’s main purpose was agriculture and many different crops were tried, but when sugar was planted, it created a rich planters’ society. Known as white gold, the demand for this product made a source of labour and manpower imperative and what they turned to was cheap slave labour. At first bringing in slaves from Africa and then finding that it was cheaper to breed rather than buy, a large slave population grew on the island.

Andrea Stuart is the result of the mixing of these white planters with a nubile slave girl and she can trace her great-great- great-great grandparents back to Robert Cooper Ashby, a fifth generation, well -to-do planter and an unnamed slave girl. A child from this relationship, born in 1803, was given a proper Christen name instead of a slave name and she can trace her family in great detail from there. The author is very clear on what this shackled existence meant to generations of her family.

The story of both the Ashbys and Barbados is a complex one, and this book gives the reader some disturbing views of class, race, gender, property and greed. Well researched and full of details, I still found Sugar In The Blood a rather dry look at how entwined the sugar market and the slave trade were. I actually found the second half of the book more interesting as the author wrote about emancipation and the political and social issues of the day. ( )

I'd expected more of a memoir - found this interesting, but a little dry. At least I know a lot more about the history of Barbados now, and I appreciate the horrific conditions that made the rich white men rich. ( )