University College of London & Norfolk Ponds Project working on The Secret Life of Ponds
WENCH is a poetic response to a Letter from apprentice James Millet to Sir William Codrington Bart. Millet complains of his ill treatment, poor diet and only having four white shirts. The poem reacts to the final passage of the letter, were James Millet requests to purchase the mother and 10-month child. This interprets the relationship between free people working at the plantation and the enslavement of people.
Poetry VS Colonialism, London Metropolitan Archives & Keats House
History of Coffee: In 1820’s, British Army officer George Bird established the first successful large-scale coffee plantation in Sri-Lanka: Many of the coffee plantations in Ceylon mostly failed before 1837. Robert Boyd Tytler had experience of planting in Jamaica and was regarded as the ‘Father of Ceylon Planters’. He introduced the ‘The West India system of cultivation’ where he brought with him a second-hand copy of Pierre-Joseph Laborie’s The Coffee Planter of Saint Domingo. This was based on slave-labour methods of coffee cultivation used in Haiti. This book laid the foundations of Sri Lanka’s estate system, becoming the coffee planters’ bible.
Ceylon: In 1972, the country became a republic named Sri Lanka
