This highly original book asks new questions about paintings and prints associated with the British West Indies between 1700 and 1840, when the trade in sugar and slaves was the most active and profitable. In a wide-ranging study of scientific illustrations, scenes of daily life, caricatures and landscape imagery, Dian Kriz analyses the visual culture of refinement that accompanied the brutal process in which African slaves transformed 'rude' sugar cane into pure white crystals. These works variously imagine Britain's Caribbean colonies as curious, frightening, deadly, pleasurable and even funny for viewers on both sides of the Atlantic.Refinement is usually associated with the metropole, and 'rudeness' with the colonies. And indeed, many of the artists considered here successfully capitalised on those characteristics of rudeness - animality, sensuality and savagery - that increasingly came to be associated with all the inhabitants of the sugar islands. But many of the images and texts that form the subject of this book complicate this geographical division. Artists such as the Italian Agostino Brunias, working for a British colonial administrator in Dominica, and Scottish Academician Joseph Kidd, whose brother was a merchant and local official in the north of Jamaica, produced paintings and prints that offered the possibility of colonial refinement, not just economic profit and sexual pleasure.