This book is about Jock Campbell's role in the shaping of British Guiana (Guyana) towards the end of the empire. Campbell, the head of the Booker Company which owned most of the sugar plantations in colonial Guyana, was a reformer whose Fabian socialist beliefs drove him to secure major benefits for sugar workers, in the 1950s-60s. It explores the interplay between Campbell's programme of reforms and the doctrinaire Marxism of Guyana's charismatic politician Cheddi Jagan. "Sweetening bitter sugar" is part biography, part history and politics.