Sugar in the Blood, Andrea Stuart
Sugar in the Blood, Andrea Stuart
List: $21.99 | Sale: $15.39
Club: $10.99

Sugar in the Blood
A Family's Story of Slavery and Empire

Author: Andrea Stuart

Narrator: Lisa Reneé Pitts

Unabridged: 14 hr 57 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 03/25/2013


Synopsis

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 to 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. It also 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.

About Andrea Stuart

Andrea Stuart was born and raised in the Caribbean. She studied English at the University of East Anglia and French at the Sorbonne. Her book The Rose of Martinique: A Life of Napoleon's Josephine has been translated into three languages and won the Enid McLeod Literary Prize. Andrea's work has been published in numerous anthologies, newspapers, and magazines, and she regularly reviews books for The Independent. She has also worked as a TV producer.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Jim on September 07, 2013

"Sugar in the blood" is a term often used to describe a certain type of illness. The title is particularly appropriate for this book in that it not only describes a sociological illness, but the product that runs as an influence over a culture, an island, and a family. A person can develop an addict......more

Goodreads review by Beverly on March 31, 2013

My thoughts: • The author effectively blends the history of Barbados with the history of her ancestors on the island – so it is both a history of Barbados and a history of her family – so the book is both universal and intimate • The reading experience was uneven for me – I thought the second half was......more

Goodreads review by Aron on June 11, 2013

This book was a conglameration of "heard-it-a-dozen-times-before" and "really?-that's-so-interesting!" The first category gave good context for the latter. I also rather enjoyed the author's personal great-great-great grandparent details because they gave a human face to the story of Barbados, about......more

Goodreads review by Eric on July 16, 2022

I give Andrea Stuart credit for writing a story so many of us who are Diasporan Africans would find all too painful to write. For her to center her slave-owning ancestors for so much of the story is unsettling, but it's the historical reality. There are records available for historians or journalist......more