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A vivid account of how Scots operated sugar plantations in Jamaica, growing rich by bringing in slaves captured in Africa and subjecting them to harsh and degrading treatment. It is good that the account covers the activities of people on both sides of the Atlantic, a stain on Scotland, impossible not to censure. The unexpected elements of the account include stable and loving mixed-race families (it was not easy to get one's head round a white man paying rent on a woman slave from another plantation owner as the only means available to him to maintain a stable family life); woman slaves who generated sizeable sums from small-holdings and local trade lending money to their white owners (which suggests that although legally the Africans were the property of white people, their financial assets were their own); and the paradox that Africans had been transported into a fertile Caribbean environment where, once released from bondage, they could thrive as subsistence farmers, with no economic need for the gruelling plantation work. The compensation payments made to plantation owners when slavery was abolished have received much attention recently, but perhaps not the collapse of sugar plantations that followed. ( )