Sugar and Slate: A labour history of the Pennants' Estates in Jamaica and North Wales 1700 - 1950

Penrhyn Castle in Bangor, North Wales is a lasting monument to the fortune of the Pennant family, Jamaican plantation owners and slate quarry industrialists in North Wales. The Pennants owned and managed sugar plantations in the Caribbean, worked on by enslaved, indentured and later free labourers, while at the same time running Penrhyn Quarry.

This research will consider the impact that developments in Jamaica and North Wales had on each other in order to present the reality of an entangled labour history. Studying both locations of labour alongside each other will enable the bidirectional exchange of ideas and practices to be examined. The project will empower historians and the wider public to better understand the impact that changes in Jamaica had on Britain's labour development and vice versa.

This study will identify where management thought and practice passed between the quarry and plantations. It will also explore the similarities and differences in labour resistance and protest in these two disparate but connected locations. Collective action and unionisation took place on both sites, enabling me to investigate the existence of cross-border awareness and solidarity.

Limited histories of the Pennant's estates currently exist, but many unused sources in the family's archives provide an opportunity to create a much fuller comparative labour history (Evans 2010, Burnard 2011, Lindsay 1974). This project will use a global approach to labour history to afford a better understanding of labour's development both in Britain and the Caribbean. It will also seek to provide suggestions for how the reality of an entangled history might be better understood by the public. This project aims to answer the following questions:
What are the parallels and differences between the labour histories of the Pennants' sugar plantation in Jamaica, and the Penrhyn slate quarry in North Wales? What is the significance of these parallels and differences?
How far did the dual role of plantation and quarry owner influence decisions made by the Pennants?
What are the similarities and differences of labour resistance and management's response in both locations?
What are the benefits of studying cross-geography labour histories and how does a comparative approach better reflect the reality of labour's global development?
How should Penrhyn Castle present the Pennant family's labour history to its visitors today?
To answer these questions, I will closely read letters, reports, minutes, and maps which relate to both British and Caribbean sites of labour with a quantitative and qualitative approach. I will compare the changes in labour management and experience in both places to reveal similarities and differences. I intend to construct data sets relating to company expenditure and income from the archival material in order to investigate the changing nature of labour over time in relation to the changing profitability of each site. This will enable me to contextualise the experience of labour and labour management with analysis of economic performance.

The result will be chronologically structured comparative history of the Pennant's sites of labour which enables similarities and differences between the colony and metropole to be recognised. This history will be presented within the context of broader developments in Atlantic and global capitalism.

The physical presence of the manifestation of the family's wealth, Penrhyn Castle, now a National Trust site, provides an opportunity for this history to be engaged with by the public. I hope to work with Penrhyn Castle to ensure that visitors can learn about the Pennants' global labour history and schoolteachers so that accessible materials for students can be created.