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White Jamaicans paid relatively high rates of taxation to support a powerful and assertive imperial state in schemes of settlement and security. They paid such taxes willingly because they were satisfied with what they got from the state. Furthermore, they believed they had a significant stake in the processes by which taxes were collected and spent. The power of the colonial state depended on the empire being a loose fraternal alliance. Nevertheless, what worked for imperial and colonial Jamaica did not necessarily work elsewhere. Jamaica provides a case study of how the imperial state worked satisfactorily for imperial rulers and those colonists whom they ruled when both the state and colonial settlers shared common beliefs and when negotiations made it clear that the interests of all parties coincided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early modern era, the hinterland of a Caribbean island encompassed more than the land sequestered by its sandy shorelines. This article uses the loggers of Barbados and the turtlers of Jamaica to explore how Caribbean colonists forged and maintained maritime hinterlands in order to supply island residents and feed urban populations. In timbering nearby islands and harvesting adjacent waterscapes, loggers and turtlers forged an interisland web of ecological and economic relationships that inextricably linked proximate islands to one another. Barbadians, for example, depended on timber from St. Lucia, and Jamaicans provisioned Port Royal with turtles from the Cayman Islands. In both instances, colonists and local officials claimed these nearby islands as "dependencies" of the larger colony and sought to defend them. By reorienting our understanding of hinterlands from interior lands to neighboring islands and seascapes, this article offers a new way of thinking about port cities, sufficiency, and industry, especially in plantation America. Rather than peripheral trades with little economic value, ventures such as timbering and turtling promoted vernacular industries, which in turn reduced reliance on imported goods, thereby enabling the islands of Barbados and Jamaica to become efficient, populous colonies within a profitable Atlantic empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a microhistory of Richard Tookerman, an alleged pirate who appeared in South Carolina, Jamaica, England, and other locations in the greater Atlantic world. Accused of trading with pirates and of assisting the pirate Stede Bonnet's escape from a South Carolina jail, Tookerman eventually resurfaced in Jamaica, where in 1721 he was apprehended by Admiral Edward Vernon. Sent to London to stand trial for crimes that included piracy and Jacobite activity, Tookerman went free by virtue of a writ of habeas corpus, which emboldened him to countersue Vernon for false imprisonment and negotiate a favorable cash settlement. The investigation of Tookerman's life reveals new dimensions of piracy by tracking individuals in local administrative records from several colonies in an attempt to connect piracy at sea with the land-based communities that supported it. Tookerman was a minister's son and self-styled "gentleman of South Carolina," and his rather ordinary life challenges the idea that pirates were a uniquely deviant kind of human being, thereby complicating the very idea of what it meant to be a "pirate." Tookerman's ability to evade the law in several maritime communities indicates a lingering sympathy for pirates, even as the British colonial governments tried to eradicate them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the long eighteenth century, elite free people of color in Jamaica petitioned the government for exemptions to some of the island's laws against those with African ancestry. In making these appeals, they highlighted advanced social and financial positions that put them above the average Jamaican of color. But perhaps most important, these petitions noted familial relations to white men on the island. These kinship connections were central in determining if a free person of color was deserving enough to receive "privileged" rights. In bestowing these privileges, Jamaican officials demonstrated that one's racial status on the island was determined, in part, by familial linkages to white colonists. Although only a fraction of mixed-race Jamaicans gained these legal exemptions, the practice nevertheless reveals how important family relation was in constructing racial identities, even in a place built on racialized oppression and slavery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the great Port Royal earthquake of 1692 in the context of other earthquakes that struck Jamaica in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It argues that although most commentators viewed the tremendous devastation caused by the 1692 disaster as a divine judgment against Port Royal, a few observers suggested that the extent of damage also reflected geographic and architectural factors. It further argues that the frequent experience of earthquakes in Jamaica altered how colonists interpreted such events. Large-scale disasters like Port Royal retained providential meaning, but colonists dismissed numerous other earthquakes, even though similar minor tremors occasioned an outpouring of sermons and moralizing in other parts of the British Atlantic world. As colonists in Jamaica gained more knowledge about the natural world in Jamaica, they learned that earthquakes were common occurrences. As a result, most earthquakes gradually ceased to appear as extraordinary or providential events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The English who captured Jamaica in 1655 found its Spanish colonial capital unfamiliar. Their adaptations of the Spanish cultural landscapes they occupied highlight alternative criteria for appraising townscapes. Spanish military resistance continued for five years, during which the English garrison started to reorient the old Spanish town. Theyretained the place even after the building of a new merchant port at Port Royal. Spanish Town remained an administrative center with a seasonal society. Tracing the process of anglicization and adaptation in the former Spanish town into the 1690s extends beyond identifying what was done and when, to show wider shifts in the new residents' understanding of the topography of this place seized. Physical continuity, in terms of a preexisting framework of streets and house lots, had to combine with very different expectations about towns. The social landscape of this Caribbean city in the wilderness came to be organized around its permanent residents, women and men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]