WEALTH AND FURY One man’s story of sugar, success and slaves
Sugar created a white elite in the Caribbean and fuelled the British Empire, but at a great moral cost
Two days before Christmas 1739, in the busy port-town of Kingston, Jamaica, Simon Taylor was born. His father was a successful merchant who had emigrated to the colony from Scotland, and his mother was the daughter of one of the island’s most prosperous English settlers. Taylor was born into privilege at the beating commercial heart of the wealthiest part of Britain’s 18th-century empire.