The capture of Jamaica by Sir William Penn in 1655 initiated a series of events that considerably altered the path of Jamaican history. When chancing across the island, the English fleet changed its plan to capture Hispaniola, and took Jamaica instead. The island was previously under the control of the Spanish who, through military officer Juan de Esquivel, had cultivated the island; reports to the King stated that Esquivel had promoted agricultural endeavours and introduced cattle, sheep and sugar cane to the island. Once captured by the British, colonial ambitions prevailed with agriculture proving to be the most promising avenue to financial success. Sugar soon gained ascendancy over tobacco but the cultivation and harvesting of sugar was an extremely labour-intensive practice, hence the need arose for an exploitable population of workers. This agricultural shift engendered by British arrival in 1655, demanding a workforce, dramatically changed the path of the Jamaican economy, population and social structure.
Slaves were imported into Jamaica from as early as 1517. As the potential for profitability from sugar was realised, the slave population grew at an exponential rate. After the British wrestled the island from the Spanish in 1655, records show that the number of slaves grew to 400 by 1662, and 9,504 in 1673. Overall Jamaica’s slave population absorbed over 610,000 new arrivals between 1680-1786, bringing about profound change to the country’s population. Between its conquest by the British in 1655, and the 1807 Act of Parliament, Jamaica had been transformed from a primarily subsistence agrarian economy into one of the world’s largest commercial crop regimes. For the indigenous Amerindian population of Jamaica, the arrival of the British led to rapid demographic and cultural decline. The introduction of European diseases, violent confrontations, enslavement, Crown-sanctioned forced labour, and the destruction of traditional cultural patterns resulting from this devastating contact with colonialism wiped out the indigenous population, replacing them with West African slaves. Such a considerable slave presence would ultimately transform Jamaica’s evolving culture, creating a labour system devoid of paternalist elements of English master-servant relations and a legal system that controlled all aspects of slaves’ lives.
Rather than being a relatively homogenous population, Jamaican society developed complex overlapping divisions of race, language and culture. Given that plantation slave labour was drawn from hundreds of ethnic groups, speaking as many languages, arriving slaves were deliberately dispersed, both ethnically and familially, to reduce their ability to communicate amongst themselves. The plantation became the heart of Jamaican language formation, with present-day creoles being the result of forced interactions between slave and master, and slaves themselves. The resulting patterns of sociocultural transformation are also particularly evident in the areas of culture and musical expression. Distinctive Jamaican musical art forms such as the calypso, with traditions of commentary, satire and social protest, have their roots in the practice of parody and dissent that emerged among the African slaves on the plantations. The songs of plantation workers showed early evidence of the rapid spread of information, proved by the Jamaican slaves singing of the Saint-Domingue revolution one month after it occurred in 1791. In addition, the folktales of the conteur masked the ability to ridicule the blissfully unaware plantation owner to his face in song, a tradition that would not have been necessary if not for the British conquest in 1655 introducing the hierarchy.
The demographic patterns put into place by slavery and its aftermath restructured the population of Jamaica significantly. With the labour shortage that followed the abolition in 1833, a large-scale importation of indentured labour began, drawing principally on the South-Asian colonial axis. Although the population of creole Indians was not as large as on other islands of the Caribbean, the remaining facts of ethnic admixture, presumptions of racial superiority and social stratification would structure the post-slavery population of the island well after British emancipation, due to the systems enforced during their settlement.
Statistics concerning the population of Jamaica are a relatively abundant resource but there is a suppression of information regarding key events of revolt and resistance. This selective exorcising of historical fact was integral to the maintenance of the colonial landscape, with all teaching materials being controlled by the British. The resulting emphasis on the British experience left the population of Jamaica knowing very little about their nation’s past, many only able to understand their ancestry through stories. The denial of such knowledge of ancestral history is yet another long-lasting impact of British occupation of Jamaica.
The first contact between Jamaica and British would-be settlers in 1655 had momentous and devastating impacts on Jamaica. The lasting effects of colonisation are still felt as the country attempts to recover its own culture that was wiped out by colonial domination. The wealth and power accumulated by the western world still makes it impossible for Jamaica to become truly self sufficient, as it was deprived of the necessary foundations when abandoned by foreign powers post-emancipation. The successive waves of British colonial influence eventuating the Jamaica known today embedded the hierarchies and hostilities of slavery into the social fabric of the country, leaving it starkly different, both in composition and culture, to what it otherwise may have been.
Grace - Upon - Paper 