The Loss of El Dorado: A Colonial History

A startling, original and gripping book about the most human kind of history, done with a novelist’s eye. It is the narrative about the New world, Empire, African slavery and Revolution. In this brilliant and thought provoking book V S Naipaul narrates two inked themes: the grinding down of aborigines during he long rivalries of the foolish El Dorado quest; and then two hundred years later, in the man made wilderness, the man made horror of the new slave colony. The Caribbean slave plantations were thought at the time to be more brutal than the American, and in this brilliantly researched book, with its accumulation of casual, awful detail, takes us as close as it can get us to day to day life in the slave colony. The book narrates the most human kind of history as perceived by a novelist. Living characters, large and small are rescued from the records and set in a larger, guiding narrative – about the new world, empire, African slavery, revolution – which is never less than gripping.