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Edward Long (1734–1813), wrote the History of Jamaica (1774), in part, with the hope that his words would reshape the colony's frontier by drawing yeoman farmers from Britain to the island's unsettled interior. Long's vision was to remake the unimproved frontier into something approximating rural England, which would serve the planter class by reducing island food prices; denuding forested safe havens for runaways and rebels; and refashioning the colony into something that could better withstand nascent British antislavery critique. Long's rhetorical strategy obscured the harsh realities of Jamaica's slave economy while it pointed potential migrants away from commercial slave ownership. This article highlights how the planter-author juxtaposed his picturesque descriptions of the island with quantitative tables that were intended to attract migrants of a certain caste. It was Long's hope that these settlers would be liminally and forever fixed between the enslaved population and the ruling planter class. Long's plans for the creation of British settlements excited neither the ruling class nor potential migrants and therefore failed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Unsilencing Slavery: Telling Truths About Rose Hall Plantation, Jamaica" by Celia E. Naylor is a critical examination of the public narrative surrounding Rose Hall Plantation in Jamaica. The book focuses on the lives of enslaved people at Rose Hall who have been largely silenced in the presentation tour at the heritage site. Naylor uses archival records and storytelling techniques to shed light on the experiences of enslaved women and children at Rose Hall, challenging the power dynamics that operate through the silencing of alternative narratives. The book offers insights that are relevant to other historic plantation museums and will appeal to Caribbean historians, anthropologists, gender studies specialists, and literary critics. [Extracted from the article]

Following the end of slavery and apprenticeship in British Jamaica, the Jamaican House of Assembly instituted an immigration program to bring indentured workers to the island in order to counteract the ability of the emancipated black slaves to demand high wages. In 1840 Ireland became a target for the recruitment of such indentures, but almost immediately Irish humanitarians protested the ‘Jamaica Emigration Scheme’, calling it slavery under another name. Efforts to attract Irish laborers in Limerick to board the Robert Kerr, an emigrant ship bound for Jamaica, sparked their activity, and their agitation continued in the aftermath of its departure in January 1841. Irish abolitionists affiliated with the Hibernian Anti-Slavery Society and Irish nationalists affiliated with Daniel O’Connell’s Loyal National Repeal Association organized against the attempt to indenture Irish workers in Jamaica. This article explores the reasons why and the ways in which members of both organizations cooperated in their protests against the Jamaica Emigration Scheme. In particular, it examines what their interactions reveal about the motives of each organization, the relationship between antislavery activism and anti-emigration attitudes, and the ways in which the recruitment of Irish indentures complicated debates among reformers about the nature of free and unfree labor. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

At the end of the Seven Years' War, Jamaican planters were in an extremely strong position within the British Empire. Immensely wealthy, geopolitically important and constitutionally assertive, Jamaican planters used their strong position to win a series of political battles against colonial governors in the 1750s and 1760s. In doing so, they justified their self-asserted claims to being entitled to British rights and privileges. Nevertheless, contemporaneous developments in metropolitan thinking about empire and white people's place in empire undermined planters' fond estimation of their position within empire. British thinkers came to see British West Indians, especially during and after the American Revolution, not as fellow citizens but as imperial subjects. The result was a cultural and ideological crisis for Jamaican planters as abolitionism emerged as a powerful political force, in which their insistence that they were British and entitled to the rights and privileges of Britons was not accepted. Thus, white Jamaicans became the first in a long line of settler peoples of British descent to have their claims to Britishness denied by metropolitan opinion. This article thus contributes to a developing discussion about settler constitutional rights within the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British Empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theory of planter decline traditionally implied that social and sexual chaos in the West Indies produced a middle caste of mixed-race individuals who destabilized colonial life. This article contends that for most of the eighteenth century, interracial relationships were normative unions that did not undercut the central function of the sugar and slave economy. In Jamaica, colonial regulations against free people of color came with individual exemptions that allowed mixed-race elites to skirt the very laws intended to keep them marginalized. Despite differences of color, these personal and familial connections between free coloreds and white fathers helped to maintain strong social hierarchies among the island's wealthiest ranks. Abolitionist attacks against these family units, however, along with the ever present threat of enslaved revolt, changed conceptions of the Jamaican household at the close of the eighteenth century. Moreover, as Jamaica's mixed-race population grew and became more endogamous, personal connections to whites dwindled, escalating political conflict on the island. Interracial relationships, therefore, did not herald planter decline, but rather forestalled it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article examines the topic of enslaved-led anti-slavery wars in Jamaica. A small sample of narratives from the 1831-1832 emancipation war in the country is used to introduce history students to the voices of the activists themselves. The narratives can identify the articulated cause of the war, the so-called rebels, their challenges and war strategies.

This article examines the extent to which Afro-Jamaicans could live up to the metropolitan, middle-class ideal of marriage during the Apprenticeship System, that is the period 1834-1838 during which slaves in the British Caribbean were prepared for free-wage labour. It shows that the Abolition of Slavery Act issued by the Imperial Government in 1833, the various local Acts that had to give effect to this Act, and legal and extra-legal practices adopted by the planters, made it far more difficult for Afro-Jamaicans to mirror their relationship to the metropolitan ideal during the Apprenticeship System than during slavery. It explains this phenomenon by examining the planters' concerns about the change in their social and economic status and several factors that impinged upon the Imperial Government's ability to bring the metropolitan ideal within close range of the apprentices. This explanation confirms the thesis that the Apprenticeship System was worse than slavery and provides also an insight into the ways in which planters tried to retain the social hierarchy that had been established during slavery [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]