James Drax

Sir James Drax (d. 1662) was a Barbados plantation owner who accumulated extraordinary wealth as a pioneer of the sugar trade in the English colonies. The Caribbean sugar plantations established by James Drax and those who followed his example would be at the epicenter of the growing British and French empires, helping to fuel economic growth and imperial expansion.

James Drax was the son of William Drax, a gentleman of the village of Finham, in the parish of Stoneleigh, Warwickshire. In the late 1620s, James Drax became one of the earliest English migrants to the island of Barbados: he and his companions arrived and lived for a time in a cave, hunting for provisions, and clearing land for the planting of tobacco, which soon became the staple crop of the island. Drax later claimed that he had arrived with a stock of no more than £300, and that he intended to stay on the island until he had parlayed that initial investment into a landed fortune worth £10,000 a year back home.

By the late 1630s, Drax had accumulated a substantial portion of land on Barbados, together with his brother William Drax. Owing to a slump in tobacco prices, the late 1630s saw considerable economic difficulty in England’s fledgling colonies in the Caribbean, and colonists began to turn to other crops. According to tradition, Drax was one of the pioneers of the introduction of sugar to the island, and was reportedly the first planter successfully to cultivate sugar cane on a large scale. Drax allegedly relied heavily on Dutch expertise, learning the craft of sugar production and refinement from a Dutch settler, and then importing equipment from Holland. While these reports were recorded much later, and while the contribution of the Dutch is disputed, it is likely that at least some of the capital and techniques of production deployed in the early Barbados sugar trade came from the Dutch, who in turn had acquired their know-how and experience in the trade from Portuguese Brazil (which had been partially seized by the Netherlands in 1630). Sources indicate that the early experiments of Drax and others Barbados settlers began c. 1640, and there was certainly sugar arriving in London from the island by 1643. Barbados quickly became a major supplier for Europe, and by the mid-1650s, sugar production had largely supplanted tobacco and all other crops as the dominant economic activity of the island.

Concurrent with the rise of sugar came large-scale and intensive exploitation of slave labor, and here too Drax was a notorious pioneer. Prior to 1640, the primary source of labor in Barbados had been European indentured servants. Although there were African slaves in Barbados before this point, it was only after 1640, and frequently in tandem with the cultivation of sugar, that slave labor began to supplant indentured servitude as the chief mode of production. Drax was deeply involved in this transition, acquiring 22 slaves in early 1642, just as he was getting involved in sugar. In 1644, he purchased another 34 slaves. By the early 1650s, his huge estate was manned by some 200 slaves of African descent. The model of intensive slave labor, organized into work gangs, and disciplined through ubiquitous violence, also quickly spread through the Caribbean, going hand-in-hand with sugar production.

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