The Caribbean island of Carriacou was ceded to the British by the French after the Seven Years’War (1763). Carriacou’s population of Englishmen, Frenchmen, Scots, and free people of color, along with their enslaved workers, comprised a distinctive slaveholding society in comparison to that of the old British colonies.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
342 p, First published in 1764, The Sugar Cane is a major work in the history of Anglophone Caribbean literature. It is the only poem written in the Caribbean before the twentieth century to achieve a place in the Western 'canon'. Grainger wrote a "West India Georgic", challenging assumptions about poetic diction and the proper subject matter of poetry, and boldly asserting the importance of the Caribbean to the eighteenth-century British empire. This is the first reliable text and critical study of the poem, setting it within the context of Grainger's life and work; Grainger interprets his own experience of the Caribbean through his wide reading of literature. This is a critical study of his poem "The Sugar-Cane." (Amazon)
