Tobacco, indigo and cocoa soon gave way to sugar which became the main crop for the island. The sugar industry grew so rapidly that the 57 sugar estates in the island in grew to nearly by Enslaved Africans filled the large labour force required for the industry. The colonists were impressed with the performance and endurance of the Africans, as well as the fact that African labour was cheaper and more promising. They continued to ship Africans to the West Indies to be sold to planters who forced them to work on sugar plantations.
The slave trade became a popular and profitable venture for the colonists. The voyage was so named because the journey of a British slaver was 3-sided, starting from England with trade goods, to Africa where these were exchanged for slaves.
Afterwards, the journey continued to the West Indies where the slaves were landed and sugar, rum and molasses taken aboard for the final leg of the journey back to England. The slaves, however, were unhappy with their status, so they rebelled whenever they could.
Many of them were successful in running away from the plantations and joining the Maroons in the almost inaccessible mountains. James, led by Sam Sharpe. He has since been named a National Hero. The Maroons also had several wars against the English. In and after two major Maroon Wars, treaties were signed with the British. In the treaty of , they were given land and rights as free men. In return they were to stop fighting and help to recapture run-away slaves. This treaty resulted in a rift among the Maroons as they did not all agree that they should return run-away slaves to the plantations.
The frequent slave rebellions in the Caribbean was one factor that led to the abolition of the slave trade and slavery. Humanitarian groups such as the Quakers publicly protested against slavery and the slave trade. They formed an anti slavery committee which was joined by supporters such as Granville Sharp, James Ramsay, Thomas Clarkson and later on, William Wilberforce.
On January 1, the Abolition Bill was passed. Emancipation and apprenticeship came into effect in and full freedom was granted in The immediate post slavery days were very difficult for the poorer classes.
Though most of the English planters had left the islands and new owners were running the plantations, the old oligarchic system still remained.
The will of the masses was not deemed important and hence ignored. To add fuel to the already burning flame, the American Civil War resulted in supplies being cut off from the island. A severe drought was also in progress and most crops were ruined. In October , an uprising in St. Bogle and his men stormed the Morant Bay Courthouse while it was in session. A number of white people was killed including the custos of the parish.
The rebellion was put down by the Governor, Edward John Eyre. More than people were executed or shot, hundreds more flogged and 1, dwellings destroyed. George Gordon was a prominent coloured legislator who was sympathetic to the problems of the poor people and was blamed for the trouble caused by the masses.
Eyre was subsequently recalled to England but not before exchanging the ancient Constitution for the Crown Colony system. Education, health, and social services were greatly improved. Grange herself declined to give a figure.
The petition, with approval from Jamaica's National Council on Reparations, will be filed pending advice from the attorney general and three legal teams, Grange said. The attorney general will then send it to Britain's Queen Elizabeth, she added. The initiative follows growing acknowledgement in some quarters of the role played by slavery in generating wealth in Britain, with businesses and seats of learning pledging financial contributions in compensation.
The petition also coincides with increasing efforts by some in Jamaica to sever formal ties with the United Kingdom. In this racial tinderbox, a team of black policemen were sent to Stony Gut to arrest Bogle and disband his followers. Bogle's men defended themselves and beat up the policemen. Two days later, Bogle's agitated men set off for Morant Bay with the aim of destroying the Court House there. Local militia were employed to guard the Court House but an ineffective volley of fire did little to disperse Bogle's men.
The Court House was set alight and the magistrates who were in session desperately attempted to escape. They were hunted down in the streets and by the end of the day 17 white men had been killed including most of the magistrates and 31 injured.
Bogle's men went on to free the convicts from the jail. However, there was no widespread looting and no women or children were harmed.
The ecstatic rebels retreated back to Stony Gut in high spirits. When knews spread to the rest of the white community in Jamaica they were horrified. Racially outnumbered they recalled the slaughter of the planters that had occurred in Haiti when the black population had seized power there.
Eyre was petitioned to do something about the insurrection and he retaliated almost immediately with a firm hand. He declared Martial Law throughout the effected county of Surrey excepting Kingston itself.
He mobilised the strong regular British army soldiers on the island and called on the Royal Navy to provide ships and personnel. He even mobilised descendents of the Maroons. One of the prime concerns for directly ruled colonies was that they should be self sufficient and not be a burden on the home nation.
Therefore, despite the relative poverty of the majority of the population, taxation was maintained at relatively high levels compared to other colonies in the region.
At the height of their civilization, their population is estimated to have numbered as much as 60, Most Arawak lived in large circular buildings bohios , constructed with wooden poles, woven straw, and palm leaves.
The Arawak spoke an Arawakan language and did not have writing. Christopher Columbus is believed to be the first European to reach Jamaica. He landed on the island on 5 May , during his second voyage to the Americas. Columbus returned to Jamaica during his fourth voyage to the Americas. He had been sailing around the Caribbean nearly a year when a storm beached his ships in St.
For a year Columbus and his men remained stranded on the island, finally departing in June The Spanish crown granted the island to the Columbus family, but for decades it was something of a backwater, valued chiefly as a supply base for food and animal hides. In Juan de Esquivel founded the first permanent European settlement, the town of Sevilla la Nueva New Seville , on the north coast.
This settlement served as the capital of both Spanish and English Jamaica, from its founding in until , after which the capital was moved to Kingston. The Spanish enslaved many of the Arawak; some escaped, but most died from European diseases and overwork. The Spaniards also introduced the first African slaves. By the early 17th century, when virtually no Taino remained in the region, the population of the island was about 3,, including a small number of African slaves.
Disappointed in the lack of gold on the isle, the Spanish mainly used Jamaica as a military base to supply colonising efforts in the mainland Americas. After the Spanish repulsed this poorly-executed attack, the English force then sailed for Jamaica, the only Spanish West Indies island that did not have new defensive works. England gained formal possession of Jamaica from Spain in through the Treaty of Madrid.
Removing the pressing need for constant defense against Spanish attack, this change served as an incentive to planting. Due to the wars in Ireland at this time two-thirds of this 17th-century European population was Irish. But tropical diseases kept the number of Europeans under 10, until about Although the African slave population in the s and s never exceeded 10,, by the end of the 17th century imports of slaves increased the black population to at least five times the number of whites.
At the beginning of the 18th century, the number of slaves in Jamaica did not exceed 45,, but by it had increased to over , Although he spent only ten weeks in Jamaica, Lord Windsor laid the foundations of a governing system that was to last for two centuries: a crown-appointed governor acting with the advice of a nominated council in the legislature.
The legislature consisted of the governor and an elected but highly unrepresentative House of Assembly. For years, the planter-dominated Assembly was in continual conflict with the various governors and the Stuart kings; there were also contentious factions within the assembly itself.
For much of the s and s, Charles II and James II and the assembly feuded over such matters as the purchase of slaves from ships not run by the royal English trading company. The last Stuart governor, Christopher Monck, 2nd Duke of Albemarle, who was more interested in treasure hunting than in planting, turned the planter oligarchy out of office.
Following the conquest, Spain repeatedly attempted to recapture Jamaica. The Brethren was made up of a group of pirates who were descendants of cattle-hunting boucaniers later Anglicised to buccaneers , who had turned to piracy after being robbed by the Spanish and subsequently thrown out of Hispaniola. These pirates concentrated their attacks on Spanish shipping, whose interests were considered the major threat to the town. Around the same time that pirates were invited to Port Royal, England launched a series of attacks against Spanish shipping vessels and coastal towns.
By sending the newly appointed privateers after Spanish ships and settlements, England had successfully set up a system of defense for Port Royal. Jamaica became a haven of privateers, buccaneers, and occasionally outright pirates: Christopher Myngs, Edward Mansvelt, and most famously, Henry Morgan.
This settlement also improved the supply of slaves and resulted in more protection, including military support, for the planters against foreign competition.
However, the English colonial authorities continued to have difficulties suppressing the Spanish Maroons, who made their homes in the mountainous interior, and mounted periodic raids on estates and towns, such as Spanish Town. The Karmahaly Maroons continued to stay in the forested mountains, and periodically fought the English. Two-thirds of the town sank into the sea immediately after the main shock.
After the earthquake, the town was partially rebuilt but the colonial government was relocated to Spanish Town, which had been the capital under Spanish rule. Port Royal was further devastated by a fire in and a hurricane in Most of the sea trade moved to Kingston.
By the late 18th century, Port Royal was largely abandoned. In the midth century, sugarcane had been brought into the British West Indies by the Dutch, from Brazil. Upon landing in Jamaica and other islands, they quickly urged local growers to change their main crops from cotton and tobacco to sugarcane. With depressed prices of cotton and tobacco, due mainly to stiff competition from the North American colonies, the farmers switched, leading to a boom in the Caribbean economies.
Sugarcane was quickly snapped up by the British, who used it in cakes and to sweeten tea. The sugar industry was labour-intensive and the British brought hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans to Jamaica. By , the median-size plantation in Jamaica had about slaves, and nearly one of every four bondsmen lived on units that had at least slaves. In The Book of Night Women, author Marlon James indicates that the ratio of slave owner to enslaved Africans is James also depicts atrocities that slave owners subjected slaves to, and violent resistance from the slaves; numerous slaves died in pursuit of freedom.
After slavery was abolished in , sugarcane plantations used a variety of forms of labour including workers imported from India under contracts of indenture.
When the British captured Jamaica in , the Spanish colonists fled, leaving a large number of African slaves. These former Spanish slaves created three Palenques, or settlements. The third chose to join those who had previously escaped from the Spanish to live and intermarry with the Arawak people.
Each group of Maroons established distinct independent communities in the mountainous interior of Jamaica. They survived by subsistence farming and periodic raids of plantations.
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