by Paul Lashmar
Pluto Press
1/20/2026, paperback
SKU: 9780745352039
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.
Reviews:
"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 War
"An eye-opening book no one should ignore. Revelatory about how the wealth and status of 18 generations of one family benefited from barbaric roots in chattel slavery, Drax of Drax Hall illustrates how the past continues to inform the present, and why the call for reparatory justice resonates more loudly now than ever before (particularly for those - like me - with bloodlines directly linked to the island of Barbados as well as to the west coast of Africa, from where many were trafficked). Read, and be informed!" -- Margaret Busby, author of New Daughters of Africa
About the Author:
Paul Lashmar is 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. He has been an investigative journalist in television and print, and 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. He lives in Dorset.