ABSTRACT
“The sugar colonies,” the agricultural writer Arthur Young estimated in 1770, “add three millions a year to the wealth of Britain; the rice colonies near a million, and the tobacco ones almost as much.” Young’s estimation doubtless was imprecise, but his remarks vividly underline a conviction widely shared by his contemporaries: the Caribbean sugar islands were both the most valuable of the British colonies in America and a major source of wealth for the mother country. Establishment of the family fortune, as Sheridan suggests was generally the case, was a slow process. Francis Price, founder of the fortune and a veteran of Cromwell’s army, had had a small estate on which he raised indigo, cocoa, and a little sugar for seven years before he acquired by patent in 1670 the original 840 acres of Worthy Park in a lush but remote inland valley.
