"Coloured Citizens of the World": The Networks of Empire Loyalism in Emancipation-Era Jamaica and the Rise of the Transnational Black Press

Abstract

Founded just two years after the Freedom’s Journal (1827–29) inaugurated the first African American newspaper in the United States, Jamaica’s first black and antislavery newspaper, the Watchman and Jamaica Free Press (1829–36), steadfastly publicized the planter-dominated colonial government’s refusal to implement the civil rights that the British Crown had extended to the island’s free black and slave populations prior to the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. 1 Despite publishing in the face of the colonial government’s repeated attempts to force its suppression, the newspaper achieved a scope of influence that was well attested by a variety of nineteenth-century observers: British abolitionists credited it with providing the accurate reportage they needed to pressure their government to enact more quickly full slave emancipation in the West Indies, while colonial officials denounced the newspaper’s editor as a princi pal instigator of the massive slave rebellion that broke out in Jamaica in the early 1830s. 2 Yet the important contributions made by this and other ground-breaking Caribbean periodicals have since largely disappeared from the narrative of the emergence of black periodicals and print culture in the nineteenth century. One reason for this may lie in the differences between the Afro-Caribbean experience of print and the much better-known tradition of black writing in North America. Indeed, the historical legacies of both slavery and race diverged considerably between the early Caribbean and the United States; it is at best problematic to talk about “black” phenomena in the West Indies in a manner analogous to the North American context. 3 In the West Indies, the emergence of a non-white press was coterminous with the rise of the free people of color as a vocal cleavage in the island’s political public sphere. As the mixed-race descendants of traditionally white European fathers and free or enslaved African or Afro-Creole mothers, the colored or “brown” community inhabited a fraught middle area in the West Indian system of racial domination—a social pyramid constituted by a white planter minority at its apex and a base of