A West-India fortune

Richard Pares published in 1950 A West-India Fortune which, while reproducing the qualities of his previous works, added what was lacking in them. It leaves the easy well-trodden paths of the history of economic policy for the jungles of real economic history and traces the story of the business pursuits of a family of sugar-planters, who next changed into sugar-brokers, with the character of the men stamped on their work. Again infinite patience was required to ascertain the facts from ledgers and correspondence, and very remarkable ability is shown in summarizing them in a lucid narrative; and next in pointing the basic generalizations which emerge from the story (e.g. about agricultural or plantation finance, about the approach and methods of brokers, about profits-where and how they accrued). But above all, there is the rich human story, the picture of a cautious early capitalist willy-nilly drawn into risky adventures, a man who made a religion of his accounts and opened one with each of his children from the moment it was born, charging it with its midwife, christening fee, its share of the nurse, &c. The book can be read for sheer amusement, and Pares is seen in it as an artist no less than as a meticulously painstaking historian. A West-India Fortune, the first book in which Pares attained his full maturity as a historian, was also the last to be written before progressive muscular atrophy disabled him physically: his mind remained keen, clear, and alert to the very end.