Journal of the History of Ideas

Richard Ligon’s True and Exact History of Barbados has been recognized as a major source of information on the emergence of planter society and slavery in the English Caribbean. Curiously, however, the centrality of the text’s discussion of business has been overlooked. Yet Ligon presents the History as a how-to manual on building and managing a sugar fortune. In doing so, Ligon self-consciously connects his work to Baconian ideas of improvement and useful knowledge to legitimize the position of the planters over others, and lend respectability to commercial accumulation.