The British Prime Minister Lord North (the Prime Minister Who Lost America) Used to Say that Jamaican Planters Were the Only Master He Ever Had

The jewel in the British imperial crown in eighteenth-century plantation colonies was undoubtedly Jamaica. It may have been a failed settler society, with white population persistently low after the disasters of the 1690s, especially the advent of regular bouts of deadly epidemic disease. The proportion of black to white was too high for contemporary comfort, and the colony was full of transients with relatively little commitment to developing a coherent community ethos and collective identity in the ways that happened in established colonies of British North America. But Jamaica was a stunning success in imperial terms. It was not only the plantation colony par excellence, the colony in which the large integrated plantation was most dominant, and in which the values and structures of the plantation was most pronounced. Strategically, it was also immensely important to Britain as a strongly defended island set among the established American colonies of Spain and the growing colonies of France in the Antilles. Most important, it was the wealthiest part of the British empire. Overall colonial wealth might have been slightly higher in the longer settled and much more populous colony of Virginia, and individual planters in St. Kitts and Grenada may have been able to acquire more wealth from their enslaved population than Jamaicans; but no eighteenth-century British American colony matched Jamaica as the quintessential plantation colony, with the richest and most influential planter ruling elite.

By the eve of the Seven Years’ War in 1756, the natural historian Dr. Patrick Browne declared Jamaica “not only the richest, but the most considerable colony at this time under the government of Great Britain.” It was an island that surpassed “all the other English sugar-colonies, both in quantity of land and the conveniencies of life.” It was “so advantageously situated, in regard to the main continent, that it has been for many years looked upon, as a magazine for all the neighboring settlements in America” and “the quantity or value of its productions, the number of men and ships employed in its trade [and] the quantity of valuable commodities imported there from various parts of Europe.” Browne wanted to show in part how far Jamaica “may yet be improved.”

The British prime minister Lord North used to say of Jamaican planters that they were the only master he ever had. That was a considerable overstatement, but their wealth and political clout, exemplified in the mid-eighteenth century by the wealthy London magnate and absentee planter William Beckford (1709–1770), was sufficient for Jamaicans to get their way about most political matters affecting their island. The power that the small white population of Jamaica had was based on the extraordinary ability of its planters to grow sugar and the equally extraordinary abilities of its indigenous merchant class to extract bullion from Spanish America. Britons were mightily impressed. Despite its well-deserved reputation as a white person’s graveyard, Europeans flocked to the island to acquire great fortunes. Most died; some did indeed make fortunes. William Beckford’s family was one family that became immensely rich in Jamaica.

--Trevor Burnard, Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650-1820, American Beginnings, 1500-1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 157-158.