Matthew Parker

Historian Matthew Parker discusses the history behind one of the greatest power struggles of the 17th to 19th centuries as Europeans made and lost immense fortunes growing and trading in sugar--a commodity so lucrative it became known as "white gold'--in the tiny Caribbean islands of Barbados, Jamaica, and the Leeward Islands.

Moving from London to Kuala Lumpur, Australia to the West Indies, a critically acclaimed historian paints a vivid portrait of the British Empire at the peak of its global reach in the 1920s and the moment it began to collapse.