James Drax

Sir James Drax (c. 1609—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.[1][2]

Early life and migration

James Drax was the son of William Drax, a gentleman of the village of Finham, in the parish of Stoneleigh, Warwickshire.[3] 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.[4] 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.[5]

Sugar planter

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.[6] 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.[7]

Slavery

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.[8] In 1644, he purchased another 34 slaves.[9] By the early 1650s, his huge estate Drax Hall Estate was manned by some 200 slaves of African descent.[10] 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.

Fortune and knighthood

Drax profited spectacularly from his sugar enterprise, allowing him to live “like a prince.”[11] With wealth and power came political controversy. He emerged during the 1640s as a key supporter of parliament during the civil war raging in England, and became a colonel in the island’s militia. As a result, when a royalist faction seized control of Barbados in 1650, James and William Drax were exiled from the island, along with other prominent parliamentarians. They returned to London, where they lobbied the House of Commons to send an expedition to retake the island. In 1651, Drax sailed in the fleet designed to re-conquer Barbados, and he was part of the team that went ashore to negotiate the surrender of the island.[12] Restored to his estates and power, Drax once again took up a leading role in the governance of the colony. It is thought that Drax Hall, the impressive seventeenth-century manor house in St. George parish Barbados, was built by him and his brother during the 1650s. He also played a role as patron of explorers of the North American coast, including Robert Sandford.[13] In 1658, Drax was rewarded for his loyalty with a knighthood from the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell.[14]

Return to England and death

By this point, Drax had returned to England, where he acquired a series of estates, pursuing his original ambition of setting himself up as a landed magnate at home, while continuing to profit from his vast properties in Barbados. He survived the transition of the Restoration, but died in early 1662, and was buried in the parish of St. John Zachary, London.[15] After his death, his son Henry continued to own and manage the family estate in Barbados.[16] The Drax descendants were particularly active in the development of Jamaica where there is a Drax Hall Estate in Saint Ann Parish, Jamaica

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References
  1. "Summary of Individual | Legacies of British Slave-ownership". www.ucl.ac.uk. Retrieved 2020-06-05.
  2. http://www.matthewparker.co.uk/the-sugar-barons/Drax-family-tree.pdf Retrieved 6 July 2020.
  3. George W. Marshall, ed., La Neve’s Pedigrees of the Knights Made by King Charles II., King James II, King William III. and Queen Mary, King William Alone, and Queen Anne, Publications of the Harleian Society, 8 (1873), 76-77; John Mathews and George F. Mathews, eds., Abstract of the Probate Acts in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, Year Books of Probates, Vol. 1, Part 2 (London, 1902), 145.
  4. Jerome S. Handler, “Father Antoine Biet’s Visit to Barbados in 1654,” Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society, 32 (1967), 69
  5. Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1657), 96.
  6. P.F. Campbell, Some Early Barbadian History (St. Michael, 1993), 239, 248; Thomas Dalby, An Historical Account of the Rise and Growth of the West-India Colonies (1690), 13-14
  7. Larry Dale Gragg, Englishmen Transplanted: The English Colonization of Barbados, 1627-1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 99-112.
  8. Campbell, Some Early Barbadian History, 99.
  9. Karl Bridenbaugh and Roberta Bridenbaugh, No Peace Beyond the Line: The English in the Caribbean, 1624-1690 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 78.
  10. Handler, Biet's Visit, 69
  11. Ligon, Barbados, 34.
  12. N. Darnell Davis, The Cavaliers and Roundheads of Barbados, 1650-1652 (Georgetown: Argosy, 1887), 145-149, 178, 190.
  13. Barber, Sarah, "Power in the English Caribbean: the Proprietorship of Lord Willoughby of Parham" in Roper, LH and Van Ruymbeke, B. “Constructing Early Modern Empires: Proprietary Ventures in the Atlantic World, 1500-1750, Leiden: Brill 2007 p. 193
  14. Mark Noble, Memoirs of the Protectoral-House of Cromwell, 2 vols. (3d ed., London: Robinson, 1787), 1: 445.
  15. Thomas Allen, A New History of London, Westminster and the Borough of Southwark, (London, 1839), vol. 3, 57; Will of Sir James Drax of the Parish of St John Zachary in London Knight, dated 15 Apr 1659, proved 14 Mar 1661[/2], Prerogative Court of Canterbury 35 Laud.
  16. "Henry Drax's Instructions on the Management of a Seventeenth-Century Barbadian Sugar Plantation," William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 66 (2009), 565-604
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