Cargoes of despair

Not long ago, I was invited to lunch at a plantation home in Jamaica. The sound of cocktail-making (a clinking of crushed ice against glass) greeted me at Worthy Park as bow-tied waiters served the guests at a long table draped in linen. The top brass of Jamaica’s sugar industry was there, enjoying the French wine and the chilled soursop juice. The waiters, with their plantation-bred obsequiousness, hurried to whisk flies away from our plates. For nearly three centuries the slave-grown sugar of Worthy Park has satisfied the British craving for tea (that ‘blood-sweetened beverage’, the abolitionist poet Southey called it), as well as for coffee, cakes and other confections.

Modern Britain, one might say, was built on sugar: there is hardly a manufacturing town on these shores that was not in some way connected to the ‘Africa Trade’. The glittering prosperity of slave ports such as Bristol and Liverpool, indeed, was derived in large part from commerce with Africa.