Digital Grainger

An Online Edition of The Sugar-Cane (1764)

Rat breaking sugar cane

Welcome

The first edition of The Sugar-Cane, a 168-page poem about eighteenth-century Caribbean sugar plantations, appeared in London in 1764. We have created one full-text version of the poem and a page-by-page reading experience, as well as excerpts that highlight counter-plantation themes within the poem. For a more detailed description of the project, see the About page.


Images for "The 1764 Edition" and "The Counter-Plantation" are courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. The image for "The 1764 Edition" is a lithograph from Pierre Jacques Benoit, Voyage à Surinam, Brussels, 1839, pl. 28. The image for "The Counter-Plantation" is a hand-colored stipple engraving from Michel Etienne Descourtilz's Voyages d'un naturaliste, v. 2, Paris, 1809, frontispiece. The image at the top of the page is an original work of art by Vanessa Lee.