JAMAICA, the largest of the Commonwealth's sugar islands, taken from Spain in 1655 by an expeditionary force originally intended, on the Protectorate's own instructions, for the considerably better defended island of Hispaniola, and diverted to the weaker Spanish garrison at Jamaica only after that first design had failed. The island's early decades under the Commonwealth's flag were, by the returns this contributor has examined at the Board of Trade, a good deal less profitable than either its soil or its situation eventually made it: the sugar economy that came to define the island took the better part of two generations to establish itself on the scale the eighteenth century knew it by, the earliest settlers having occupied themselves rather more with privateering against Spanish commerce than with the patient capital investment sugar cultivation actually required.
That investment, once made, was made almost entirely in chattel labour rather than in land, the island's own hilly terrain limiting the acreage any single estate could profitably work in cane while placing no comparable limit on the number of bondsmen a prosperous planter might hold to work it; the returns of 1774, the fullest this contributor has been able to locate before the disruptions of the Severance (q.v.), record a chattel population outnumbering the free population of every description by above ten to one, the highest ratio recorded anywhere in the Commonwealth's dominions. The island joined the Act of Severance in 1837 with the rest of the Indies (q.v.), was retaken by the Commonwealth's own naval blockade within the year, its planting families having found themselves cut off from provision rather more completely and rather more quickly than the mainland rebellion's own leadership had apparently reckoned on when the Act was signed at Charleston.
The sugar trade has recovered its prewar tonnage on the Sugar Trade (q.v.)'s own returns for the present decade, worked now by free wage labour drawn in considerable part from the island's own former bondsmen rather than by fresh immigration, a continuity in the labouring population this contributor's tables find rather more pronounced in Jamaica than in the mainland provinces, where the free labour market has drawn a good deal more freely on migrants from outside the plantation counties themselves. (M. S. W.)