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The Dynamics of the
Slave Market and Slave Purchasing Patterns in Jamaica, 1655–1788
Trevor Burnard and Kenneth Morgan
| SLAVERY was the
most important institution in eighteenth-century Jamaica. Black
Africans provided the labor that made white Jamaicans wealthier
than any people in British America. How slaves were acquired, as
much as how enslaved Africans were employed after being purchased,
was vitally important. Prosperity or poverty depended on whether
sufficient Africans could be purchased at reasonable prices and
on whether they were long-lived and productive laborers. If a buyer
was unwise or unlucky, disaster followed. In 1784, Thomas Thistlewood,
an English migrant overseer and slaveowner, related in his diary
how a local grandee, Sir James Richardson, had lost 141 of 190 slaves
bought since 1770, "such bad luck has he." Richardson
thought, not surprisingly, that Jamaican planters "succeed
from a lucky combination of circumstances" rather than from
"prudence & industry."1
Thistlewood himself was either more skilled or more fortunate than
Richardson. Of ten slaves he bought in 1765, for instance, seven
were still alive at his death twenty-one years later. |
1 |
| Jamaica
had the largest demand for slaves of any British colony in the Americas.
It received one-third of retained slave imports shipped by Britain.
In some periods, such as in the 1720s and the 1790s, Jamaica's share
of Africans shipped by Britain to the Americas was between 40 and
50 percent. Such enormous importations made the island increasingly
important as the home of British Americans of African descent. In
1680, 23 percent of blacks living in the British empire lived in
Jamaica. That proportion increased to 26 percent by the mid-eighteenth
century and, after the separation of the United States from Great
Britain, to 39 percent by 1810. The numerical increase is even more
startling. Despite continuing high mortality, Jamaica's slave population
more than doubled, to nearly 120,000 slaves, between 1700 and 1750
and multiplied a further two and a half times to more than 300,000
slaves by the end of the century. |
2 |
| Within
the British Caribbean, Jamaica was a dominating presence: in 1748,
it accounted for about 43 percent of total West Indian population,
46 percent of British West Indian slave population, and 42 percent
of sugar imported into Britain. These shares of population and sugar
production remained constant until the close of the Atlantic slave
trade.2
Even more important, Jamaica was the destination of 37 percent of
all slave ships sent to British America and 44 percent of all slave
vessels dispatched to the British West Indies. Jamaica received
1.8 times as many ships as Barbados—the next most popular destination
for Guinea traders in British America—and 4.5 times as many
ships as the most frequent destination in mainland British North
America, the Carolinas. Jamaica alone was considerably more important
than all of British North America as a destination for slave ships:
2.4 times as many ships went to Jamaica as went to the mainland.3
Moreover, these ships were usually the largest in the British trade
and always carried more slaves than vessels supplying the rest of
the British Americas (see Table
I). Indeed, Kingston quickly became the major market not only
for slaves intended for the largest British sugar island, but for
those resold to most of Spanish America as well (see Map
V). |
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