History is written by the winners, not the losers. As such, the writing that often comes to be accepted as history is normally from the perspective of those who wielded economic and political power during the period being covered. This produces in the finished text a history that is often biased and one-sided at best and outright dishonestly misleading when it comes to portraying the “whole” history of a period. Such a text is Richard S. Dunn’s Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planted Class in the English West Indies, a book that covers the enormous wealth acquired by the early white inhabitants of the English West Indies. In an attempt to chronicle the story of the rise of the English Protestant planter class, Dunn sprinkles more sugar on his work than produced on any plantation in an attempt to raise empathy for a despicable class of men who exploited the poor and uneducated through force and brutality for sheer economic gain.
The author utilizes many tactics to have us believe that the men who invaded the West Indies and by force enslaved a population of blacks and Indians were actually adventurous, industrious and even heroic explorers who deserve their tale preserved for history. This is nowhere more evident than in his revelation of his purpose, which is to answer these three questions: “How did the early English planters in the West Indies respond to the novelty of life in the tropics? To the novelty of large scale sugar production? And to the novelty of slave labor?” (Dunn xvi). Dunn’s trick here is the use of language to obscure or veil his point so that the truth seems less harsh than it was. He actually calls the enslavement of a people and the exploitation and conquering of a land “novelties.” This nauseating use of language sets the tone and context for the entire book, one whose validity and reliability are suspect even by the author who informs us in the Preface that his sources are limit...