The Transition to Wage Labour, in Stone, in North Wales, in Jamaica

Abstract Completed around 1821, a monument commemorating the enslaver and industrialist Richard Pennant and his wife, Anne Susannah Warburton, elides any mention of the family’s sugar plantations in Jamaica and instead celebrates the Pennants as benevolent modernizers who transformed their Welsh estate and tenants. A material artefact of national history writing, the monument severs this local story from imperial concerns. Yet a comparative study of the transition to wage labour on the family’s properties in North Wales and Jamaica reveals the work the Pennant memorial’s story was doing for both Britain’s local and its imperial labour projects. In North Wales, estate managers confronted labourers’ independence; in post-emancipation Jamaica, plantation authorities similarly faced freed people’s efforts to defend their autonomy. Racial ideology reconciled these parallel histories by constructing Black labourers as uniquely idle, thereby legitimizing restrictive post-emancipation labour regimes while masking coercion within Britain itself. By tracing the circulation of labour ideologies, moral vocabularies, and managerial practices across North Wales and Jamaica, this article challenges historical narratives that separate industrial Britain from slave and post-slave colonies, a tendency epitomized in the Pennant monument, and instead exposes the joint construction of national mythology and imperial rationality.