Making sugar and slate: a labour history of the Pennant estates in Jamaica and North Wales 1765 - c.1900

Abstract

For over a hundred years, the Pennant family owned both sugar plantations in Jamaica and a slate quarry in North Wales. In 1765, when the family’s ownership of these disparate sites of labour first merged, their sugar plantations in Jamaica were well-established centres of industrial capitalism, while slate production on the Penrhyn estate in North Wales was emerging and capital poor. By the turn of the twentieth century, Penrhyn Quarry had become one of the largest slate quarries in the world, poised to cement its place in British industrial history with the three-year Penrhyn Lock Out. Meanwhile, the family’s sugar plantations had transitioned from enslaved and apprenticed labour to indentured and waged labour.

“Making Sugar and Slate” considers both locations of commodity production together to reveal the bidirectional exchange of ideas and practices between these sites of labour owned by the same family. Thematic in structure, this thesis demonstrates that contestations over land, labour, family, debt, and freedom occurred in an interdependent dynamic between the Caribbean and Britain. Labour management ideas and practices crossed the Atlantic in both directions, and labourers’ struggles in one context influenced the Pennants’ actions in another. The material and the ideological connected the Pennants’ dual management position and the labouring communities of these disparate sites of labour. Separated by the Atlantic Ocean, the Pennant family’s estates in Jamaica and North Wales were constitutive elements of the labour history of racial capitalism.