..... to Sugar  

Visits to The Georgian House and the museums in Bristol and seeing the other fine buildings built by the merchants, gave a clear picture of the wealth made by those who were involved in supplying and operating slave ships, and those owners waiting for sight of the ships arriving back laden with 'white gold', as sugar was known. All those who worked in the support industries and supply chains also benefitted, but the spinners and weavers who laboured to produce Welsh Plains cloth saw little or none of this wealth after the traders and merchants took their cuts. 

Opportunities to visit Liverpool and the International Slavery Museum were also very valuable to researchers. Meetings and discussions with the team there and at the Centre for Slavery Studies identified that the very significant contribution made by Welsh people to develop the slave port of Liverpool and also to supply goods for the Plantation Trade has really been overlooked by researchers and provides opportunites for specific research into this link.

Unfortunately there are some useful links and articles that we have not been able to translate into Welsh. 

This is a very well written article by Stephen Hume in the Montreal Gazette 02 01 2010

http://www.montrealgazette.com/technology/tech-biz/sugar+bittersweet+history/4411444/story.html

or read it here as a printable article:  Sugar: A Bittersweet History 
- using the illustration of a sugar factory in Welchman (sic) Gully in St Thomas, Jamaica.

One of the research volunteers, Jenny, took up the idea of the link between Welsh Plains and the Slave Trade to create an instalation as part of her degree course in Fabric and Cloth, displayed interpretations of slave garments at The National Trust Wier Gardens which oened on Friday May 24th. 

Jenny says: I am a mature student at Hereford College of Arts doing a Contemporary Design Crafts degree.  My current work has been based around the Weir Gardens and its history.  This has led me to sugar, slavery and Welsh wool and this is where my interest in Welsh Plains came from.