Eighteenth‐Century Jamaica's Ambivalent Cosmopolitanism

Abstract

AbstractEighteenth‐century Jamaica's brutal society appears inimical to the values that the Enlightenment promoted, yet Enlightenment‐era scientific inquiry, printing and some self‐critical debates took place in the island's towns. Sugar‐profits could fund books and instruments. Jamaica's eighteenth‐century towns sustained a social life that allowed wider aspects of Enlightenment‐era cosmopolitanism to take root. In these transient societies ‘ordinaries’ and coffee‐houses stocked the latest newspapers, while the new Freemasons’ lodges integrated the colony's white males. The urban networks of assembly rooms, journal subscriptions and scientific memberships in Kingston and Spanish Town were inclusive – for those whites who could afford them – while some basic research did draw on enslaved plant collectors’ expertise. Data from West Indian botanists and historians informed European scholars’ theorizing, but for slave‐holding Jamaicans the humanitarian ideas developed in mid‐eighteenth‐century Europe proved a tendentious import. In the 1780s the first Methodist missionaries, the next metropolitan intellectual wave to reach the island, piggy‐backed onto existing urban intellectual networks before reaching out to a wider Jamaica. By the century's end a fearful colonial elite found the Enlightenment's free exchange of ideas suspicious rather than supportive.