Drax of Drax Hall
How One British Family Got Rich (and Stayed Rich) from Sugar and Slavery
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Pluto Press
Publishing:20th Mar '25
£25.00
This title is due to be published on 20th March, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
While the British landed gentry were to profit from chattel slavery in the West Indies, the Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax family of Dorset pioneered it.
Spanning 400 years and 18 generations, Drax of Drax Hall is a story that has never been told. It all started when James Drax, one of the first settlers in Barbados in 1627, effectively founded the British sugar industry. His descendants went on to write the book on how to run a slave plantation. For more than two hundred years, the family enslaved up to 330 people at any time and became enormously rich.
Today, the bloodline is unbroken, and former Tory MP Richard Drax heads the family from his vast Charborough Estate in Dorset. With physical assets worth at least £150m—not to mention the 621-acre sugar plantation in Barbados, the Drax Hall Estate—he was the wealthiest landowner in the House of Commons. Unseated in 2024, he remains a hero amongst hard-right culture warriors for his refusal to make any reparations for his family's role in slavery.
Drax of Drax Hall is a history that lifts the lid on this grotesque family. Through enclosure at home and enslavement abroad, their exploits expose the ugly realities of colonialism and empire—the legacies of which we have yet to fully confront today.
'An important and timely book, in which Paul Lashmar uses the story of the Drax family’s history as enslavers in Barbados as a microcosm of Britain’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. What’s so striking is the extent to which the current day wealth of the Drax family can be linked to their ancestors’ enslavement of Africans beginning in 1627'
-- Laura Trevelyan, journalist and author of A Very British Family: The Trevelyans and Their World'A family story straight out of Game of Thrones - five centuries of exploitation, greed and horrific cruelty, and no regrets whatsoever. Old-school investigative reporting married with a fearless historian's eye for the truth produces this - shocking, fascinating, enraging. A brilliant book that anyone still trying to defend Britain's colonial history in the Caribbean will choke on'
-- Alex Renton, author of Blood Legacy: Reckoning With a Family’s Story of Slavery'A timely retelling of the story of how one Englishman led the introduction of sugar and racial slavery to the Caribbean, as well as an eye-opening exploration of how the vast resulting profits were consolidated and enjoyed by generations of his descendants'
-- Matthew Parker, author of The Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, Empire and WarISBN: 9780745350516
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
448 pages