PDF The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld by Herbert Asbury in History

Description

In the late 1630s; lured by the promise of the New World; Andrea Stuart’s earliest known maternal ancestor; George Ashby; set sail from England to settle in Barbados. He fell into the life of a sugar plantation owner by mere chance; but by the time he harvested his first crop; a revolution was fully under way: the farming of sugar cane; and the swiftly increasing demands for sugar worldwide; would not only lift George Ashby from abject poverty and shape the lives of his descendants; but it would also bind together ambitious white entrepreneurs and enslaved black workers in a strangling embrace. Stuart uses her own family story—from the seventeenth century through the present—as the pivot for this epic tale of migration; settlement; survival; slavery and the making of the Americas. As it grew; the sugar trade enriched Europe as never before; financing the Industrial Revolution and fuelling the Enlightenment. And; as well; it became the basis of many economies in South America; played an important part in the evolution of the United States as a world power and transformed the Caribbean into an archipelago of riches. But this sweet and hugely profitable trade—“white gold;” as it was known—had profoundly less palatable consequences in its precipitation of the enslavement of Africans to work the fields on the islands and; ultimately; throughout the American continents. Interspersing the tectonic shifts of colonial history with her family’s experience; Stuart explores the interconnected themes of settlement; sugar and slavery with extraordinary subtlety and sensitivity. In examining how these forces shaped her own family—its genealogy; intimate relationships; circumstances of birth; varying hues of skin—she illuminates how her family; among millions of others like it; in turn transformed the society in which they lived; and how that interchange continues to this day. Shifting between personal and global history; Stuart gives us a deepened understanding of the connections between continents; between black and white; between men and women; between the free and the enslaved. It is a story brought to life with riveting and unparalleled immediacy; a story of fundamental importance to the making of our world.