Drax of Drax Hall: How One British Family Got Rich (and Stayed Rich) From Sugar and Slavery 
Paul Lashmar, Pluto Press, £25

THE preposterously named Richard Grosvenor Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, owner of Charborough Hall in Dorset, is worth an estimated £150 million. An MP from 2010-24, he was the wealthiest landowner in the Commons, and his constituency contained some of the least socially mobile people in the country.

Drax’s politics are firmly on the right; he voted against a law requiring private landlords (like himself) to make their properties safe for human habitation, against tax rises for high earners, against rights and equality legislation and for curbing immigration. His political hero is, unsurprisingly, Thatcher.

Drax first came to general public attention when Extinction Rebellion demonstrated against his Commons voting record on climate change and local animal rights groups protested against his support for the South Dorset Hunt.

However Drax has gained even more notoriety for his stance against reparations for the descendants of the enslaved Africans on his Barbadian sugar plantations, saying: “It is deeply regrettable, but no-one can be held responsible today for what happened many hundreds of years ago.”

Lashmar, an investigative journalist and academic, has brought both branches of expertise into play to produce this history of the Drax family from James Drax in the 17th century to Richard Drax today. The history of British involvement in the slave trade is exemplified by the story of this one family and the class it represents.

Lashmar follows a detailed course through the centuries, shining a light on the Draxes who pioneered and developed West Indian slavery, using its profits to consolidate their privilege and power at home.

In the 1630s one James Drax established the first commercial sugar plantation in Barbados. Today Drax is the only original colonising family to still own a plantation in the West Indies.

At first Britain deported vagrants, convicts and workhouse inmates to Barbados to work as indentured labour, despatching around 8,000 between 1645-50. Drax soon dispensed with them in favour of enslaved Africans, whose life expectancy on arrival in Barbados was five years. He ran at least two slave ships and held about 200 slaves, placing him at the forefront of the building of Barbados as a slave-owning society.

Sir Hilary Beckles, chair of the Caribbean Community Reparations Commission, said “The Drax family has done more harm and violence to the black people of Barbados than any other family. The Draxes built, designed and structured slavery.”

Over the years judicious marriages ensured a prominent place in society for the Draxes, as well as an ever extending surname.

At home, the profits from slave plantations were funding the theft and privatisation of the common land. The Draxes extended their English estates at this time and today Richard Drax is the largest individual landowner in Dorset.

Lashmar is nothing if not thorough in his coverage of Drax history, not only in relation to enclosures at home and slavery abroad but also in the treatment of their rural tenants in England.

In the 1950s, in the time of Admiral Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, many tied cottages were falling into disrepair, but he felt that financial constraints caused by taxes and socialism prevented him from dealing adequately with this problem.

Although the Drax family received £4,293 (£614,000 today) compensation for the loss of their “property” ie 189 enslaved men, women and children, when slavery was abolished in 1833, and despite the fact that around 30,000 enslaved people died on Drax plantations over 200 years, there is nothing in Richard Drax’s family history that has persuaded him to offer financial reparations or even an apology.

Feelings in Barbados, now a republic, run high. Sir Hilary Beckles again: “Today when I drive through Drax Hall land l get a keen sense of being in a massive killing field. Black life mattered only to make millionaires of English enslavers and the Drax family did it longer than any other elite family. Richard Drax has to acknowledge the criminal enrichment that he is the recipient of.”