Pitt Street, George Town have lived here for centuries. Pitt Street was named after William Pitt the Younger, who was the Prime Minister of Great Britain between 1783 and 1801. When Captain Francis Light founded Penang Island in 1786, he renamed the island the "Prince of Wales Island" in honour of the Prince of Wales, the new settlement of George Town after King George III and the first street within the settlement after himself. Worried that Prime Minister William Pitt may have felt offended as nothing was named after him, Light felt compelled to name Pitt Street after him. Pitt Street, created soon after
William Pitt the Younger when spies for the government were lurking everywhere, which captures well the tense, paranoid atmosphere of the 1790s when people were being encouraged to report "radicals" to the authorities. In 1793, Pitt decided to take advantage of a slave revolt in the French colony of St. Domingue (modern Haiti) to seize the richest French colony in the world, believing this was would strike a great blow at France while bringing St. Domingue into the British Empire and ensuring the slaves in the British West Indies would not be inspired to likewise revolt. Many of those who owned slave plantations in