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.