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Caribbean Islands HISTORICAL SETTING
From May 5, 1494, when Columbus first set foot on what he
described as "the fairest isle that eyes have beheld," to its
emergence as an independent state on August 6, 1962, Jamaica passed
through three main periods. First, it served for nearly 150 years
as a Spanish-held way station for galleons en route to and from the
Spanish Main. Second, from the mid-1600s until the abolition of
slavery in 1834, it was a sugar-producing, slave-worked plantation
society. Thereafter it was a largely agricultural, British colony
peopled mainly by black peasants and workers.
The Spanish adventurer Juan de Esquivel settled the island in
1509, calling it Santiago, the name given it by Columbus. In the
period of Spanish dominance from 1509 to 1655, the Spaniards
exploited the island's precious metals and eradicated the Arawaks,
who succumbed to imported diseases and harsh slavery (see The Pre-
European Population, ch. 1). An English naval force sent by Oliver
Cromwell attacked the island in 1655, forcing the small group of
Spanish defenders to capitulate in May of that year (see The
European Settlements, ch. 1). Within 3 years, the English had
occupied the island, whose population was only about 3,000, but it
took them many years to bring the rebellious slaves under their
control.
Cromwell increased the island's white population by sending
indentured servants and prisoners captured in battles with the
Irish and Scots, as well as some common criminals. This practice
was continued under Charles II, and the white population was also
augmented by immigrants from the North American mainland and other
islands, as well as by the English buccaneers. But tropical
diseases kept the number of whites well under 10,000 until about
1740.
Although the slave population in the 1670s and 1680s never
exceeded roughly 9,500, by the end of the seventeenth century
imports of slaves increased the black population to at least five
times the number of whites. Thereafter, Jamaica's blacks did not
increase significantly in number until well into the eighteenth
century, in part because the slave ships coming from the west coast
of Africa preferred to unload at the islands of the Eastern
Caribbean. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the number
of slaves in Jamaica did not exceed 45,000, but by 1800 it had
increased to over 300,000.
Beginning with the Stuart monarchy's appointment of a civil
governor to Jamaica in 1661, political patterns were established
that lasted well into the twentieth century. The second governor,
Lord Windsor, brought with him in 1662 a proclamation from the king
giving Jamaica's nonslave populace the rights of English citizens,
including the right to make their own laws. Although he spent only
ten weeks in Jamaica, Lord Windsor laid the foundations of a
governing system that was to last for two centuries: a crown-
appointed governor acting with the advice of a nominated council in
the legislature. The legislature consisted of the governor and an
elected but highly unrepresentative House of Assembly.
England gained formal possession of Jamaica from Spain in 1670
through the Treaty of Madrid. Removing the pressing need for
constant defense against Spanish attack, this change served as an
incentive to planting. For years, however, the planter-dominated
Jamaica House of Assembly was in continual conflict with the
various governors and the Stuart kings; there were also contentious
factions within the assembly itself. For much of the 1670s and
1680s, Charles II and James II and the assembly feuded over such
matters as the purchase of slaves from ships not run by the royal
English trading company. The last Stuart governor, the Duke of
Albemarle, who was more interested in treasure-hunting than in
planting, turned the planter oligarchy out of office. After the
duke's death in 1688, the planters, who had fled Jamaica to London,
succeeded in lobbying James II to order a return to the pre-
Albemarle political arrangement and the revolution that brought
William III and Mary to the throne in 1689 confirmed the local
control of Jamaican planters belonging to the assembly. This
settlement also improved the supply of slaves and resulted in more
protection, including military support, for the planters against
foreign competition. This was of particular importance during the
Anglo-French War in the Caribbean from 1689 to 1713.
Early in the eighteenth century, the Maroons took a heavy toll
on the British troops and local militia sent against them in the
interior; their rebellion ended, however, with the signing of peace
agreements in 1738. The sugar monoculture and slave-worked
plantation society characterized Jamaica throughout the eighteenth
century. With the abolition of the slave trade in 1808 and slavery
itself in 1834, however, the island's sugar- and slave-based
economy faltered (see The Post-Emancipation Societies, ch. 1). The
period after emancipation in 1834 initially was marked by a
conflict between the plantocracy and elements in the Colonial
Office over the extent to which individual freedom should be
coupled with political participation for blacks. In 1840 the
assembly changed the voting qualifications in a way that enabled a
majority of blacks and people of mixed race (browns or mulattos) to
vote. But neither change in the political system, nor abolition of
slavery changed the planter's chief interest, which lay in the
continued profitability of their estates, and they continued to
dominate the elitist assembly. Nevertheless, at the end of the
eighteenth century and in the early years of the nineteenth
century, the crown began to allow some Jamaicans--mostly local
merchants, urban professionals, and artisans--into the appointed
councils.
In 1846 Jamaican planters, still reeling from the loss of slave
labor, suffered a crushing blow when Britain passed the Sugar
Duties Act, eliminating Jamaica's traditionally favored status as
its primary supplier of sugar. The Jamaica House of Assembly
stumbled from one crisis to another until the collapse of the sugar
trade, when racial and religious tensions came to a head during the
Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865 (see Political Traditions, ch. 1).
Although suppressed ruthlessly, the severe rioting so alarmed the
planters that the two-centuries-old assembly voted to abolish
itself and asked for the establishment of direct British rule.
In 1866 the new crown colony government (see Glossary)
consisted of the Legislative Council and the executive Privy
Council containing members of both chambers of the House of
Assembly, but the Colonial Office exercised effective power through
a presiding British governor. The council included a few handpicked
prominent Jamaicans for the sake of appearance only. In the late
nineteenth century, crown colony rule was modified; representation
and limited self-rule were reintroduced gradually into Jamaica
after 1884. The colony's legal structure was reformed along the
lines of English common law and county courts, and a constabulary
force was established.
The smooth working of the crown colony system was dependent on
a good understanding and an identity of interests between the
governing officials, who were British, and most of the nonofficial,
nominated members of the Legislative Council, who were Jamaicans.
The elected members of this body were in a permanent minority and
without any influence or administrative power. The unstated
alliance--based on shared color, attitudes, and interest--between
the British officials and the Jamaican upper class was reinforced
in London, where the West India Committee lobbied for Jamaican
interests. Jamaica's white or near-white propertied class continued
to hold the dominant position in every respect; the vast majority
of the black population remained poor and unenfranchised.
Marcus Mosiah Garvey, a black activist and labor leader,
founded one of Jamaica's first political parties in 1929 and a
workers association in the early 1930s. The Ras Taffari brotherhood
(commonly called the Rastafarians--see Glossary), which in 1935
hailed Ethiopia's emperor Haile Selassie as its god (Jah), owed its
origins to the cultivation of self-confidence and black pride
promoted by Garvey and his black nationalist movement. Garvey, a
controversial figure, had been the target of a four-year
investigation by the United States government. He was convicted of
mail fraud in 1923 and had served most of a five-year term in an
Atlanta penitentiary when he was deported to Jamaica in 1927.
Garvey left the colony in 1935 to live in Britain, where he died
heavily in debt five years later. He was proclaimed Jamaica's first
national hero in the 1960s after Edward P.G. Seaga, then a
government minister, arranged the return of his remains to Jamaica.
In 1987 Jamaica petitioned the United States Congress to pardon
Garvey on the basis that the federal charges brought against him
were unsubstantiated and unjust.
Dissatisfaction with crown colony rule reached its peak during
the period between the world wars, as demands for responsible self-
government grew. A growing mulatto middle-class with increasingly
impressive education, ability, and even property identified with
British social and political standards, but white Jamaicans were
beginning to feel offended by a perceived British indifference to
their economic difficulties and political opinions. They also
resented British monopoly of high positions and the many
limitations on their own mobility in the colonial civil service,
especially if they were of mixed race.
The rise of nationalism, as distinct from island identification
or desire for self-determination, is generally dated to the 1938
labor riots that affected both Jamaica and the islands of the
Eastern Caribbean. William Alexander Bustamante, a moneylender in
the capital city of Kingston who had formed the Jamaica Trade
Workers and Tradesmen Union (JTWTU) three years earlier, captured
the imagination of the black masses with his messianic personality,
even though he himself was light-skinned, affluent, and
aristocratic (see Growth and Structure of the Economy, this ch.).
Bustamante emerged from the 1938 strikes and other disturbances as
a populist leader and the principal spokesperson for the militant
urban working class, and in that year, using the JTWTU as a
stepping stone, he founded the Bustamante Industrial Trade Unions
(BITU), which inaugurated Jamaica's workers movement.
A distant cousin of Bustamante's, Norman W. Manley, concluded
as a result of the 1938 riots that the real basis for national
unity in Jamaica lay in the masses. Unlike the union-oriented
Bustamante, however, Manley was more interested in access to
control over state power and political rights for the masses. On
September 18, 1938, he inaugurated the People's National Party
(PNP), which had begun as a nationalist movement supported by the
mixed-race middle class and the liberal sector of the business
community with leaders who were highly educated members of the
upper-middle class. The 1938 riots spurred the PNP to unionize
labor, although it would be several years before the PNP formed
major labor unions. The party concentrated its earliest efforts on
establishing a network both in urban areas and in banana-growing
rural parishes, later working on building support among small
farmers and in areas of bauxite mining.
The PNP adopted a socialist ideology in 1940 and later joined
the Socialist International, allying itself formally with the
social democratic parties of Western Europe. Guided by socialist
principles, Manley was not a doctrinaire socialist. PNP socialism
during the 1940s was similar to British Labour Party ideas on state
control of the factors of production, equality of opportunity, and
a welfare state, although a leftwing element in the PNP held more
orthodox Marxist views and worked for the internationalization of
the trade union movement through the Caribbean Labour Congress. In
those formative years of Jamaican political and union activity,
relations between Manley and Bustamante were cordial. Manley
defended Bustamante in court against charges brought by the British
for his labor activism in the 1938 riots and looked after the BITU
during Bustamante's imprisonment.
Bustamante had political ambitions of his own, however. In
1942, while still incarcerated, he founded a political party to
rival the PNP, called the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP). The new
party, whose leaders were of a lower class than those of the PNP,
was supported by conservative businessmen and 60,000 dues-paying
BITU members, who encompassed dock and sugar plantation workers and
other unskilled urban laborers. On his release in 1943, Bustamante
began building up the JLP. Meanwhile, several PNP leaders organized
the leftist-oriented Trade Union Congress (TUC). Thus, from an
early stage in modern Jamaica, unionized labor was an integral part
of organized political life.
For the next quarter century, Bustamante and Manley competed
for center stage in Jamaican political affairs, the former
espousing the cause of the "barefoot man"; the latter, "democratic
socialism," a loosely defined political and economic theory aimed
at achieving a classless system of government. Jamaica's two
founding fathers projected quite different popular images.
Bustamante, lacking even a high school diploma, was an autocratic,
charismatic, and highly adept politician; Manley was an athletic,
Oxford-trained lawyer, Rhodes scholar, humanist, and liberal
intellectual. Although considerably more reserved than Bustamante,
Manley was well liked and widely respected. He was also a visionary
nationalist who became the driving force behind the crown colony's
quest for independence.
Following the 1938 disturbances in the West Indies, London sent
the Moyne Commission to study conditions in the British Caribbean
territories. Its findings led in the early 1940s to better wages
and a new constitution (see Labor Organizations, ch. 1). Issued on
November 20, 1944, the Constitution modified the crown colony
system and inaugurated limited self-government based on the
Westminster model of government and universal adult suffrage. It
also embodied the island's principles of ministerial responsibility
and the rule of law. Thirty-one percent of the population
participated in the 1944 elections. The JPL--helped by its promises
to create jobs, its practice of dispensing public funds in pro-JLP
parishes, and the PNP's relatively radical platform--won an 18-
percent majority of the votes over the PNP, as well as 22 seats in
the 32-member House of Representatives, with 5 going to the PNP and
5 to other short-lived parties. In 1945 Bustamante took office as
Jamaica's first premier (the pre-independence title for head of
government).
Under the new charter, the British governor, assisted by the
six-member Privy Council and ten-member Executive Council, remained
responsible solely to the crown. The Jamaican Legislative Council
became the upper house, or Senate, of the bicameral Parliament.
House members were elected by adult suffrage from single-member
electoral districts called constituencies. Despite these changes,
ultimate power remained concentrated in the hands of the governor
and other high officials.
After World War II, Jamaica began a relatively long transition
to full political independence. Jamaicans preferred British culture
over American, but they had a love-hate relationship with the
British and resented British domination, racism, and the
dictatorial Colonial Office. Britain gradually granted the colony
more self-government under periodic constitutional changes.
Jamaica's political patterns and governmental structure were shaped
during two decades of what was called "constitutional
decolonization," the period between 1944 and independence in 1962.
Having seen how little popular appeal the PNP's 1944 campaign
position had, the party shifted toward the center in 1949 and
remained there until 1974. The PNP actually won a 0.8-percent
majority of the votes over the JLP in the 1949 election, although
the JLP won a majority of the House seats. In the 1950s, the PNP
and JLP became increasingly similar in their sociological
composition and ideological outlook. During the cold war years,
socialism became an explosive domestic issue. The JLP exploited it
among property owners and churchgoers, attracting more middle-class
support. As a result, PNP leaders diluted their socialist rhetoric,
and in 1952 the PNP moderated its image by expelling four prominent
leftists who had controlled the TUC. The PNP then formed the more
conservative National Workers Union (NWU). Henceforth, PNP
socialism meant little more than national planning within a
framework of private property and foreign capital. The PNP
retained, however, a basic commitment to socialist precepts, such
as public control of resources and a more equitable income
distribution. Manley's PNP came to office for the first time after
winning the 1955 elections with an 11-percent majority over the JLP
and 50.5 percent of the popular vote.
Amendments to the constitution that took effect in May 1953
reconstituted the Executive Council and provided for eight
ministers to be selected from among House members. The first
ministries were subsequently established. These amendments also
enlarged the limited powers of the House of Representatives and
made elected members of the governor's executive council
responsible to the legislature. Manley, elected chief minister
beginning in January 1955, accelerated the process of
decolonization during his able stewardship. Further progress toward
self-government was achieved under constitutional amendments in
1955 and 1956, and cabinet government was established on November
11, 1957.
Assured by British declarations that independence would be
granted to a collective West Indian state rather than to individual
colonies, Manley supported Jamaica's joining nine other British
territories in the West Indies Federation, established on January
3, 1958, (see The West Indies Federation, 1957-62, ch. 1). Manley
became the island's premier after the PNP again won a decisive
victory in the general election in July 1959, securing thirty of
forty-five House seats.
Membership in the federation remained an issue in Jamaican
politics. Bustamante, reversing his previously supportive position
on the issue, warned of the financial implications of membership--
Jamaica was responsible for 43 percent of its own financing--and an
inequity in Jamaica's proportional representation in the
federation's House of Assembly. Manley's PNP favored staying in the
federation, but he agreed to hold a referendum in September 1961 to
decide on the issue. When 54 percent of the electorate voted to
withdraw, Jamaica left the federation, which dissolved in 1962
after Trinidad and Tobago also pulled out. Manley believed that the
rejection of his profederation policy in the 1961 referendum called
for a renewed mandate from the electorate, but the JLP won the
election of early 1962 by a fraction. Bustamante assumed the
premiership that April, and Manley spent his remaining few years in
politics as leader of the opposition.
Jamaica received its independence on August 6, 1962. The new
nation retained, however, its membership in the Commonwealth of
Nations and adopted a Westminster style parliamentary system (see
Appendix B). Bustamante, at age seventy-eight, became the new
nation's first prime minister and also assumed responsibility for
the new ministries of defence and foreign affairs. Jamaicans
welcomed independence, but they had already spent their
nationalistic passion over the emotional issue of federation. The
general feeling was that independence would not make much
difference in their lives.
Data as of November 1987
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