Volume XXVII (27) · 2015

During the five year guerrilla campaign after the English seized Jamaica “the Spanish Negroes,” Africans formerly enslaved in the Spanish colony, proved a key group. Their assistance kept the Spanish settlers’ resistance alive. The decision in 1660 by Juan de Bolas, the leader of one community, to agree to terms with the English proved a decisive turning point in the war and quickly led to the Spaniards evacuating. De Bolas’s terms included land grants for his people and, despite his death in 1663, grants were made. The shift to sugar planting in the 1670s saw several of these grants bought out, but some of the former guerrillas and their families survived as a free black presence within the seventeenth-century colony.

This paper looks at a still-born late eighteenth century attempt to transfer South Carolina rice to Jamaica using the knowledge systems of loyalist refugees of the American Revolution. It argues that while the Jamaica Assembly's decision to receive loyalists was a reflection of obligation to Empire, it was also heavily influenced by domestic economic needs. Jamaican officials envisioned a local rice industry emerging from loyalists who could bring enslaved workers from southern North America to the island. The paper therefore contributes to a growing discussion of African knowledge systems and Lowcountry contributions to the Atlantic World, particularly as it concerns rice production. While much of the existing scholarship on rice in the Atlantic focuses on colonies where rice production developed successfully, transforming the colonial economies and the nature of slave agency within them, Jamaica's case-study adds a failed experiment with rice in a West Indian plantation society to the discourse. As such, the paper offers new insights on contested land use and attempts for greater economic self-sufficiency in Jamaica during the revolutionary period.

This paper challenges the long held assumption that the Jamaican tourism industry stagnated during World War I (1914–1918). Due to the fact that the British colony experienced a harsh wartime socio-economic climate and severe disruption in transportation it has been presumed that tourism could not survive under these conditions. The paper indicates that while the wars did impact the logistical issues to do with the movement of people for leisure purposes, the notion of a gap in the development of the industry between 1914 and 1918 is erroneous and hardly sufficient to explain the work that took place during the wars to keep the industry afloat. Through extensive research of contemporary local newspapers and archival material, we highlight that not only did tourists brave wartime conditions to travel to Jamaica, but that the picture of a dormant Jamaican tourist industry between 1914 and 1918 is inaccurate. The Jamaica Tourist Association and other related bodies worked assiduously in the war years to keep the industry afloat and therefore the paper concludes that the development of a booming tourism industry in the post-war era was only possible because of consistent work during the war years.

This documentary article represents the first publication of a letter from the Jamaica Committee of Correspondence to Stephen Fuller, Jamaica’s London agent, dated December 1764. This letter, from a body composed of the principal leaders of the Jamaica Assembly, thoroughly undermines a modern scholar’s assessment, that Jamaica’s political leaders made no constitutional objections to the British Stamp Act of 1765 and shows that, drawing upon their own experience with the British imperial constitution, they argued on the constitutional grounds of inheritance and custom that Jamaica was exempt from Parliamentary taxation and thereby placed Jamaica squarely within the mainstream of colonial American opposition to the proposed Stamp Act.

Shortly after leaving Jamaica for the U.S. in March 1916, Marcus Garvey penned a lengthy letter to the Jamaica Times newspaper, giving his early impressions of New York and the various people he had recently met there, including a comparison of the positive racial attitude of African Americans with that of the West Indians living there. Also included in the letter was a polemical review of the hostile reactions among some Jamaicans that Garvey complained about after launching the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), reactions that Garvey starkly contrasted with the favourable patronage he had received from high-ranking colonial officials and the gentry class in Jamaica. Ironically, while Garvey extolled his refusal to raise the race issue against the privileged class in Jamaica, at the same time he roundly criticised the lack of racial and social consciousness among his Jamaican critics. The picture that emerges from the letter reflects a very different Garvey from the one that is usually associated with that of his subsequent movement.