The History of Jamaica under British Rule

Jamaica was the richest of the British West Indian colonies and, in the long run, the most troubling. Captured from Spain in 1655, the island produced a third of Britain’s Caribbean sugar at the high point of the plantation economy in the 1770s; by 1940, the sugar economy was dead, and the island’s economy was based on bananas, bauxite, and the tourist trade. The history of Jamaica under British rule is the history of this transformation, and the unresolved tension between the high promise of the colonial period and the difficult post-independence reality. As the historian Patrick Bryan has put it, “Jamaica was a country the British built and unbuilt, in roughly equal measure.”

The British Conquest of Jamaica

The capture of Jamaica from Spain in 1655 was a significant event. The expedition, led by Admiral William Penn and General Robert Venables, was originally intended to capture Santo Domingo, but the failure of that attempt led to the seizure of Jamaica as a consolation prize. Jamaica had been a Spanish colony since the early sixteenth century, and its seizure by the English was part of the broader English challenge to Spanish dominance in the Caribbean. The English colonisation of Jamaica was a slow process, and the Spanish population was not fully expelled until 1660. The English Caribbean colonisation project was one of the most significant episodes in the early history of the British Empire, and Jamaica was the largest of the English Caribbean colonies.

The Sugar Economy and Slavery

The development of large-scale sugar plantations in Jamaica, worked by enslaved Africans, made the island one of the richest colonies in the British Empire. By the late eighteenth century, Jamaica was the largest single producer of sugar in the British Caribbean, and it was the centre of the British slave trade. The slave trade in the British Empire supplied the labour for the plantations, and the enslaved population of Jamaica grew rapidly in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The sugar economy of Jamaica was, in the judgment of the historian Trevor Burnard, “the most productive slave system in the Americas.” By 1770, Jamaica’s planters produced some 70,000 tons of sugar a year, and the enslaved population of the island — perhaps 250,000 in 1775 — was larger than that of any other British Caribbean colony. The Maroons — the escaped slaves who established autonomous communities in the interior of the island — were a persistent reminder that the system could not, in fact, control the people it depended on.

The Maroons and Resistance

The Jamaican Maroons were escaped slaves who established autonomous communities in the interior of Jamaica. The Maroons fought a series of wars against the British colonial government in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and they eventually negotiated treaties that recognised their autonomy. The First Maroon War of 1655–1740 ended with a treaty that recognised the autonomy of the Leeward Maroons, and the Second Maroon War of 1795–1796 ended with the deportation of the Windward Maroons to Nova Scotia and later to Sierra Leone.

Tacky’s War of 1760, an important slave revolt led by the Akan chief Tacky, was another major example of slave resistance. The 1831 Christmas Rebellion, led by Samuel Sharpe, was among the most consequential events leading up to the abolition of slavery in Jamaica. As Sharpe reportedly told his fellow rebels: “we must all be free, for the King of England has said so.” The British authorities, less than three years later, hanged him for his pains. The 1831 rebellion, in which perhaps 200 enslaved people were killed and property worth millions destroyed, persuaded the Colonial Office that the system could not be maintained.

The Abolition of Slavery and Its Consequences

The abolition of slavery in 1834 had profound consequences for Jamaica. The plantation economy went into decline, and the freed population, now legally entitled to wages, demanded better working conditions and political rights. The indentured labour system that replaced slavery brought Indian and Chinese workers to Jamaica, although the number of indentured workers was smaller than in Trinidad or British Guiana. The post-emancipation Caribbean faced major economic and social challenges, and Jamaica’s relative economic decline continued through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The decline of the sugar economy was particularly important, and the search for new crops, including bananas and coffee, was a central feature of the post-emancipation period.

The 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion, led by the Baptist deacon Paul Bogle, was the most serious post-emancipation disturbance in Jamaica. The rebellion, in which perhaps 18 people were killed and 31 sentenced to death, was suppressed with severity by Governor Edward Eyre, who ordered the executions of some 400 people, including Bogle. The controversy over Eyre’s actions produced, as the historian Bernard Semmel showed in The Governor Eyre Controversy (1962), one of the great Victorian debates over the proper limits of imperial authority. John Stuart Mill and Thomas Hughes campaigned against Eyre; Thomas Carlyle and Charles Dickens supported him. Jamaica’s economy, in the meantime, continued to slide.

The Path to Independence

The twentieth century saw a long struggle for political rights in Jamaica. The 1938 labour rebellion, led by Alexander Bustamante, was a major turning point. Bustamante, a trade unionist who had returned from work in Cuba and the United States, founded the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union in 1938, and the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) in 1943. Norman Manley, a lawyer and constitutional reformer, founded the People’s National Party (PNP) in 1938. The two parties dominated Jamaican politics in the postwar period, and the rivalry between Bustamante and Manley, and between their respective parties, was the central feature of Jamaican political life. Jamaica became independent on 6 August 1962, and the country became a republic in 1970.

The Post-Independence Period

The post-independence history of Jamaica has been marked by political rivalry between the JLP and the PNP, the growth of the tourism industry, and the long-running challenge of economic development. The country has produced some of the most distinctive cultural expressions of the modern Caribbean, including the reggae music of Bob Marley and the Rastafari movement. The legacy of the British period is still felt in the legal and educational systems, and Jamaica continues to be a member of the Commonwealth with the British monarch as head of state. The British period in Jamaica produced the foundation of the modern Jamaican state, and the long transition from slavery to independence continues to be the central chapter of Jamaican history.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of British Jamaica was, for a long time, dominated by the economic and social histories of the sugar economy — the work of the Lowell Ragatz, Eric Williams, and the more recent work of Trevor Burnard and Christer Petley. The post-independence revisionist literature, led by the work of Patrick Bryan, Verene Shepherd, and the more recent writing of the Caribbean historians of the reparations movement, has produced a more politically engaged picture, in which the British period is read as a contested terrain on which the British and the Jamaicans were both active agents. The current debate, exemplified in the recent work of Matthew Smith and the contributors to the Oxford History of the British Empire, is over how far the post-emancipation political and economic decline of Jamaica was the result of British mismanagement and how far it was the consequence of deeper structural problems of the plantation economy.

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