Sugar in the Blood

By: Andrea Stuart

Narrated by: Lisa Reneé Pitts

Length: 14 hrs and 57 mins

Publisher's Summary

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.

©2013 Andrea Stuart (P)2013 Tantor

Critic Reviews

"Brilliantly weaving together threads of family history, political history, social history, and agricultural history into a vivid quilt covering the evolution of sugar." ( Publishers Weekly)

A sweet, historical gem

Who was your favorite character and why?

The author spent the most time on George Ashby, so I gleaned the most information about the history of the island through his lifetime.

Would you be willing to try another one of Lisa Reneé Pitts’s performances?

No! I found the narrator to be annoying and amateurish. Mispronunciations of words including nascent, miscegenation and (gasp!) cavalry interrupted the experience for me. The book was well-written, but the narrator did a bit of a hack job with her vocal representation of it. If I see an audio book with her name on it, I’ll make a point of not purchasing it.

If this book were a movie would you go see it?

Yes. The author created a virtual Barbados that I felt very comfortable in. I would enjoy seeing the history of the island brought to life and since reading the book, I'm interesting in visiting the island.

Any additional comments?

If you enjoyed Roots by Alex Haley, you'll enjoy Sugar in the Blood.

1 of 1 people found this review helpful

Transformative, like "Guns, Germs, and Steel."

Everyone should read this book.
A dazzling economic history of sugar, so profitable it lit the economies of England, France, the nascent United States on fire--built from labor provided by enslaved Africans.
In tracing her ancestors through the history of the British colony of Barbados, Andrea Stuart a powerful micro-history turned mind-bendingly macro. Her compassionate and vivid descriptions of her European and African ancestors breathe life into the dark moment in human civilization of the sugar plantation--that economically fueled the modern, Western world.

Slavery from a Caribbean Perspective

For me, this was a fascinating look at subjects—American slavery, the Haitian revolution, colonization, etc.—from a new angle. The author does a good job of balancing the fundamental conundrum, that some of her ancestors owned other ancestors.

Important story, well told

I read this book a year ago, and I have thought a lot about it since then. There is a lot of fact and detail, and what emerges is a highly readable history.