Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement

Book excerpt: "This book asks new questions about paintings and prints associated with the British West Indies between 1700 and 1840, when the trade in sugar and slaves was the most active and profitable. In a wide-ranging study of scientific illustrations, scenes of daily life, caricatures, and landscape imagery, Dian Kriz analyses the visual culture of refinement that accompanied the brutal process in which African slaves transformed 'rude' sugar cane into pure white crystals. These works variously imagine Britain's Caribbean colonies as curious, frightening, deadly, pleasurable and even funny for viewers on both sides of the Atlantic."--Jacket.