New book Drax of Drax Hall reveals how Britain's first slave plantation owners have profited from colonial wealth

Dr Paul Lashmar, Reader in Journalism at City St George's, University of London has published the book Drax of Drax Hall which unveils the colonial past and present of the Drax family.

The Draxes are unique in that they are the only colonising family to still own a plantation in the West Indies. Richard Drax, former Conservative MP for South Dorset, inherited the colonial sugar plantation in Barbados where his ancestors enslaved people for over 200 years. Nearly four centuries after James Drax arrived on the island as one of its first English settlers in 1627, his Dorset descendants remain among the wealthiest landowners in Britain.

The family’s staggering wealth includes a 15,000-acre Dorset estate, physical assets worth at least £150 million, and the historic Drax Hall plantation—a site that remains a lasting monument to the brutality of chattel slavery. Richard Drax has become globally known for his steadfast refusal to publicly apologise or make reparations for his family's role in colonial slavery.

Now, for the first time, Drax of Drax Hall, written by Dr Paul Lashmar, tells the full, unflinching story of the ancestors that pioneered the British sugar industry and created the blueprint for slave-based plantation economies.

From the violent origins of British colonialism in the Caribbean to the quiet entrenchment of inherited privilege in the English countryside, this is a history that lays bare the enduring legacies of empire—and the families who still profit from them.

Dr Paul Lashmar is an investigative journalist, academic and historian. He was previously Head of the Department of Journalism at City St George's. His career spans roles at The Observer, The Independent, and Granada Television’s World in Action.

He developed Channel 4's landmark series Britain’s Slave Trade (1998) and is the author of six books. A long-time resident of Dorset, Lashmar began researching into the Drax family following the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, driven by the reticence of then South Dorset MP, Richard Drax, on his family's slave-owning past. He has co-written sixteen articles for The Observer on the Drax dynasty.

Dr Lashmar said:

In the same way that the story of Richard Drax tells us much about British politics in the twenty-first century, I realised that an important strand of the history of the British Empire from the sixteenth century to the present day could be illuminated through this one family of landed gentry, the Draxes of Dorset and Barbados.