How One British Family Got Rich (and Stayed Rich) from Sugar and Slavery

We are delighted that celebrated journalist Paul Lashmar will be joining us for an evening at Housmans to discuss his latest book, Drax of Drax Hall: How One British Family Got Rich (and Stayed Rich) from Sugar and Slavery. A brilliantly detailed and probing study of a how powerful British family came by their wealth through the worst kind of brutal, dehumanising violence.

With a forward by David Olusoga, this book, which spans 400 years and 18 generations, tells a story that has never been told. While all the British landed gentry profited from chattel slavery in the West Indies, the Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax family of Dorset pioneered it.

It all started when James Drax, one of the first settlers in Barbados in 1627, effectively 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, the Drax Hall Estate—he was the wealthiest landowner in the House of Commons. Unseated in 2024, he remains a hero amongst hard-right culture warriors for his refusal to make any reparations for his family’s role in slavery.

Drax of Drax Hall lifts the lid on the grotesque history of this family. 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 fully confront today.

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.

Advanced Booking Strongly Recommended.

Doors open at 6:45, event starts 7:00.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book + entry’, your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00