The sugar barons: family, corruption, empire, and war in the West Indies

The pioneers. White gold, 1642

The first settlements, 1605-41

The sugar revolution: 'so noble an undertaking'

The sugar revolution: 'most inhuman and barbarous persons'

The plantation: masters and slaves

The English civil war in Barbados

The plantation: life and death

Cromwell's 'western design': disaster in Hispaniola

The invasion of Jamaica

The grandees. The restoration

Expansion, war and the rise of the Beckfords

'All slaves are enemies'

The cousins Henry Drax and Christopher Codrington

God's vengeance

The planter at war: Codrington in the Leeward islands

The French invasion of Jamaica

Codrington the younger in the West Indies

The murder of Daniel Parke

The Beckfords: the next generation

Piracy and rum

The maroon war in Jamaica and the war of Jenkins's ear

Barbados, the 'civilised island'

Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica" 'tonight very lonely and melancholy again'

Jamaica: rich and poor

The sugar lobby

The inheritors. Luxury and debt

The war against America

The West Indian 'Nabobs': absenteeism, decadence and decline

Peace and freedom.