Drax of Drax Hall: How One British Family Got Rich (and Stayed Rich) from Sugar and Slavery

"A family story straight out of Game of Thrones ... Old-school investigative reporting married with a fearless historian's eye for the truth. 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

"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

"This book is a must-read" Jon Lee Anderson, journalist, The New Yorker

Spanning 400 years, Drax of Drax Hall is a story of a plantation owning dynasty that has never been told. It all started when James Drax, one of the first settlers in Barbados in 1627, 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—he was the wealthiest landowner in the House of Commons. Today, he remains a hero amongst traditionalists and culture warriors for his refusal to make any public reparations for his family's historical role in slavery. 

Drax of Drax Hall lifts the lid on a grotesque period of the family's history. 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 confront.

PAUL LASHMAR is an investigative journalist and Reader in Journalism at City St George's, University of London. He has taken an interest in the history of slavery since he developed a Channel 4 series on Britain's slave trade in 1999. Paul has been on the staff of The Observer, Granada Television's World in Action current affairs series and The Independent. He is the author, co-author or co-editor of six books and lives in Dorset.