Making Sugar and Slate: A Labour History of the Pennants Estates in Jamaica and North Wales 1765 – c.1900
Siân is a PhD candidate in Economic and Social History at the University of Edinburgh, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. She is particularly interested in labour histories and histories of racial capitalism. Her doctoral project focuses on sites of labour, sugar plantations in Jamaica and a slate quarry in North Wales, both owned by the same family, the Pennants. Her thesis demonstrates the entangled history of racial capitalism and labour transformation between Britain and the Caribbean. It considers the perspectives of labourers ranging from enslaved, apprenticed, indentured, free, waged, unwaged, and managers, revealing the connected contestations across the Atlantic over land, labour, family, debt and freedom.
Her research has been supported by the British Society for Study of Labour History, Harvard’s History of Economic Thought Fund, and Worlds of Related Coercion Action Group.