The global significance of Welsh-made woollens in the Atlantic slave trade is the subject of a research project led by a Cardiff University academic.
Dr Charlotte Hammond collaborated with student artists from Coleg Menai in Bangor, Liz Millman of Learning Links International and Marcia Dunkley of Black Heritage Walks Network, to investigate this overlooked period of Wales' history. It has been supported by Higher Education Funding Council for Wales (HEFCW) Research Innovation Funding.
Welsh Plains was a durable 'plain' woollen cloth, woven in mid-Wales between 1650-1850.
Before it was eventually overtaken by cotton, wool was at the centre of the global textile industry of the eighteenth century. British merchants used the cloth to purchase and trade in African captives, kidnapped to work on plantations in the Americas in the transatlantic slave trade. Plantation owners in the Caribbean and US South used the hand woven woollen textile to clothe enslaved labourers.
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Welsh Plains became a popular textile for the jackets, waistcoats, smocks, petticoats and breaches worn by enslaved men, women and children in the Americas. In 1823, the South Carolina planter, Robert Maxwell, wrote that local manufacturers had tried to imitate Welsh Plains but found its qualities to be inferior. Maxwell preferred to buy cloth that had been "made by the farmers of Wales".
The research project and free bilingual book of the same name, Woven Histories of Welsh Wool and Slavery / Hanesion Cysylltiedig Gwlân Cymru a Chaethwasiaeth, published by Common Threads Press, aims to improve public knowledge of the ways local histories of woollen production in Wales are implicated in broader global histories of Atlantic slavery and empire.
Dr Charlotte Hammond, based at Cardiff University's School of Modern Languages said: "With this project, we have sought to highlight an area of history that has received little recognition until now.
"The students explored traces of this historical narrative that links the exploitation of weavers in rural Wales with the racial injustices of Atlantic slavery, and its reliance on the circulation of Welsh-made textiles.
"Our work has taken us from the ruins of pandy fulling mills in Dolgellau, Meirionnydd, via the packhorse trails that transported Welsh Plains cloth to England. There, it was dyed and finished in Shrewsbury, sent to London and Liverpool to be traded and then exported to the Americas.
"We have followed the cloth's colonial connections to the Caribbean and southern states of the US, where Welsh Plains was used to clothe enslaved field workers who toiled on the plantations.
"We traced a small swatch of 'plains' which is listed in a merchant's sample book (c.1800-1825) in the Joseph Downs Collection in the Winterthur Library, Delaware (US). This remnant shows the fabric to be coarse and probably quite uncomfortable to wear, a far cry from the expensive silks and linens worn by the plantation owners.
"The resulting artwork from the group of emerging artists and designers is their visual response to this history."
