The Crown Colony of Jamaica and Dependencies was a Crown colony of the British Empire from 1655 to 1962. English forces launched an invasion of Jamaica in 1655, capturing the existing Spanish colony. Jamaica was primarily used for exporting sugarcane from plantations operated by African slaves, and experienced several rebellions over the course of British rule. The colony was granted independence in 1962.
History
17th century
English conquest
In late 1654, English leader Oliver Cromwell launched the Western Design armada against Spain's colonies in the Caribbean. In April 1655, General Robert Venables led the armada in an attack on Spain's fort at Santo Domingo, Hispaniola. However, the Spanish repulsed this poorly-executed attack, known as the Siege of Santo Domingo, and the English troops were soon decimated by disease, injured badly or possibly killed.
Weakened by fever and looking for an easy victory following their defeat at Santo Domingo, the English force then sailed for Jamaica, the only Spanish West Indies island that did not have new defensive works. Spanish Jamaica had been a colony of Spain for over a hundred years. In May 1655, around 7,000 English soldiers landed near Jamaica's Spanish Town capital. The English invasion force soon overwhelmed the small number of Spanish troops (at the time, Jamaica's entire population numbered only around 2,500)..
In the following years, Spain repeatedly attempted to recapture Jamaica, and in response in 1657 the English Governor of Jamaica invited buccaneers to base themselves at Port Royal on Jamaica, to help defend against Spanish attacks. Spain never recaptured Jamaica, losing the Battle of Ocho Rios in 1657 and the Battle of Rio Nuevo in 1658. Governor Edward D'Oyley succeeded in persuading one of the leaders of the Spanish Maroons, Juan de Bolas, to switch sides and join the English along with his Maroon warriors. In 1660, when Don Cristobal de Ysasi realised that de Bolas had joined the English, he admitted that the Spanish no longer had a chance of recapturing the island, since de Bolas and his men knew the mountainous interior better than the Spanish and the English. Ysasi gave up on his dreams, and fled to Cuba...
For England, Jamaica was to be the 'dagger pointed at the heart of the Spanish Empire,' although in fact it was a possession of little economic value then.
Early English colonisation Cromwell's Protectorate increased the island's white population by sending indentured servants and prisoners captured in battles with the Irish and Scots, as well as some common criminals..
This practice was continued after the restoration of Charles II, and the white population was also augmented by immigrants from the North American mainland and other islands, as well as by the English buccaneers. But tropical diseases kept the number of whites well under 10,000 until about 1740. The white population increased, through migration from Britain, to 80,000 in the 1780s..
Although the slave population in the 1670s and 1680s never exceeded roughly 9,500, by the end of the seventeenth century importing slaves from Africa increased the black population to at least three times the number of whites..
Beginning with the Stuart monarchy's appointment of a civil governor to Jamaica in 1661, political patterns were established that lasted well into the twentieth century. The second governor, Lord Windsor, brought with him
in 1662 a proclamation from the king giving Jamaica's non-slave populace the rights of English citizens, including the right to make their own laws. 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..
England gained formal possession of Jamaica from Spain in 1670 through the Treaty of Madrid.. Removing the pressing need for constant defence against Spanish attack, this change served as an incentive to planting. For years, however, the planter-dominated Jamaica House of 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 1670s and 1680s, 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..
In 1687, James II appointed the Duke of Albemarle as Governor, who pursued a policy of excluding the planter oligarchy from state offices. After the duke's death in 1688, the planters, who had fled Jamaica to London, succeeded in lobbying James II to order a return to the pre-Albemarle political arrangement and the revolution that brought William III and Mary to the throne in 1689 confirmed the local control of Jamaican planters belonging to the Assembly.
This settlement also improved the supply of slaves and resulted in more protection, including military support, for the planters against foreign competition. This was of particular importance during the Anglo-French War in the Caribbean from 1689 to 1713. However, even though the Spaniards no longer threatened Jamaica, the early English settlers had to ward off attacks from the French. In 1694, Jean-Baptiste du Casse led a force of three warships and 29 transport ships that landed at Port Morant in eastern Jamaica, where they burnt plantations, destroyed over 50 sugar-works, kidnapped hundreds of slaves, and killed and tortured many white colonists. Du Casse then sailed down the southern coast, eventually landing at Carlisle Bay, with the object of marching on to Spanish Town. However, a militia company of planters and their slaves defeated du Casse, who then destroyed Carlisle Bay, and withdrew to St Domingue..
Maroons
When the English captured Jamaica in 1655, the Spanish colonists fled. Since 1512, though slavery was forbidden due to the laws of Burgos there were no more than 400 African "free" workers living in the island. These former Spanish citizens created three Palenques, or settlements. Former citizens organised under the leadership of Juan de Serras allied with the Spanish guerrillas on the western end of the Cockpit Country, while those under Juan de Bolas established themselves in modern-day Clarendon Parish, Jamaica and served as a "black militia" for the English. The third chose to join those who had previously escaped from the Spanish to live and intermarry with the Arawak people. Each group of Jamaican Maroons established distinct communities of Free black people in Jamaica in the mountainous interior. They survived by subsistence farming and periodic raids of plantations. Over time, the Maroons came to control large areas of the Jamaican interior.
In the second half of the seventeenth century, de Serras fought regular campaigns against the English forces, even attacking the capital of Spanish Town, and he was never defeated by the English.Mavis Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica 1655–1796: a History of Resistance, Collaboration & Betrayal (Massachusetts: Bergin & Garvey, 1988), pp. 20-27. In the early eighteenth century, Maroon forces frequently defeated the British in small-scale skirmishes. In response, the British colonial authorities dispatched the colonial militia to attack them, but the Maroons successfully fought a guerrilla campaign against them in the mountainous interior, and forced the colonial authorities to seek peace terms to end the expensive conflict..
In the early eighteenth century, English-speaking escaped Asante slaves (hailing originally from West Africa, specifically Ghana) were at the forefront of the Maroon fighting against the British. Cudjoe (or "Kojo" in the original Akan) led the Leeward Maroons in western Jamaica, while Quao (or "Yaw" in the original Akan) and Queen Nanny were the leaders of the Windward Maroons in the Blue Mountains of eastern Jamaica. The rebellion finally ended, however, with the signing of peace agreements in 1739 and 1740...
White planters later tried to sow seeds of division among Maroon communities by pressuring them to re-capture any escaped slaves, and to protect British property in exchange for no longer being attacked by British forces. Although a small faction of the Maroons of Trelawny Town accepted these conditions (and were later re-captured and sold back into slavery, to be shipped off to Cuba and the American state of Georgia), overwhelmingly Maroon communities remained bastions of hope and freedom for escapees. Maroon warfare and continued successful attacks on plantations continued to serve as a driving force behind Britain's decision to emancipate the colony of Jamaica in later years.
Jamaica's pirate economy Spanish resistance continued for some years after the English conquest, in some cases with the help of the Jamaican Maroons, but Spain never succeeded in retaking the island. The English established their main coastal town at Port Royal. Under early English rule, Jamaica became a haven of privateers, buccaneers, and occasionally outright pirates: Christopher Myngs, Edward Mansvelt, and most famously, Henry Morgan..
In addition to being unable to retake their land, Spain was no longer able to provide their colonies in the New World with manufactured goods on a regular basis. The progressive irregularity of annual Spanish fleets, combined with an increasing desperation by colonies for manufactured goods, allowed Port Royal to flourish and by 1659, two hundred houses, shops, and warehouses surrounded the fort. Merchants and privateers worked together in what is now referred to as "forced trade." Merchants would sponsor trading endeavors with the Spanish while sponsoring privateers to attack Spanish ships and rob Spanish coastal towns.
While the merchants most certainly had the upper hand, the privateers were an integral part of the operation. Nuala Zahedieh, a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, wrote, "Both opponents and advocates of so-called 'forced trade' declared the town’s fortune had the dubious distinction of being founded entirely on the servicing of the privateers' needs and highly lucrative trade in prize commodities." She added, "A report that the 300 men who accompanied Henry Morgan to Portobello in 1668 returned to the town with a prize to spend of at least £60 each (two or three times the usual annual plantation wage) leaves little doubt that they were right".
The forced trade became almost a way of life in Port Royal. Michael Pawson and David Busseret wrote "...one way or the other nearly all the propertied inhabitants of Port Royal seem to have an interest in privateering."Michael Pawson and David Buisseret, Port Royal, Jamaica (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2000). Forced trade was rapidly making Port Royal one of the wealthiest communities in the English territories of North America, far surpassing any profit made from the production of sugarcane. Zahedieh wrote, "The Portobello raid [in 1668] alone produced plunder worth £75,000, more than seven times the annual value of the island’s sugar exports, which at Port Royal prices did not exceed £10,000 at this time."
However, many successful privateers and buccaneers became integrally involved in the growing sugar industry, human trafficking, and the acquisition of large numbers of enslaved Africans. In the 1670s and 1680s, in his capacity as an owner of a large population of humans he kept enslaved, Morgan led three campaigns against the Jamaican Maroons of Juan de Serras. Morgan achieved some success against the Maroons, who withdrew further into the Blue Mountains, where they were able to stay out of the reach of Morgan and his forces..
1692 earthquake and the collapse of Port Royal