‘Prodigious Riches’: The Wealth of Jamaica Before the American Revolution

Abstract

W hen eighteenth-century Britons contemplated their possessions in W the West Indies what struck them most was the wealth of these small tropical islands. They were particularly impressed by the wealth of the largest British colony in the Caribbean, Jamaica. Despite Jamaica's well-deserved reputation as a white person's graveyard, Europeans flocked to the island in order to acquire great fortunes. Both for individuals and for the British government the wealth of Jamaica was its greatest attraction. As Charles Leslie wrote in the mid-eighteenth century, 'Jamaica is a Constant Mine, whence Britain draws prodigious riches.' Its wealth and strategic importance in the Caribbean made it, as Marshall notes, the most valuable colony in the eighteenth-century empire, and the colony whose loss the British could have least afforded.' This article reports new estimates about how much wealth Europeans possessed in Jamaica on the eve of the American Revolution. Historians have been interested in this question before, but mainly in order to assess the contribution of the West Indies to British economic development. In an article published in this journal in 1965, Sheridan presented data on the wealth of Jamaica supporting Williams's thesis that the economic contribution of the British West Indian slave colonies to British prosperity in the late eighteenth century was considerable. Sheridan's contentions elicited a fierce response from Thomas who used a counterfactual model derived from Sheridan's own data to deny that Jamaica had made a positive contribution to British economic development. The theoretical arguments as to whether or not Williams was correct will not be addressed in this article. I agree with the recent findings of Eltis and Engerman that sugar cultivation and the slave trade did not form an especially large part of the British economy, although, as Solow has shown, profits from the slave trade comprised nearly 8 per cent of total British investment in 1770 and a remarkable 39 per cent of commercial and industrial investment, assuming that all profits went into these channels. What this article concentrates on is the economic importance of Jamaica within the British American empire before the American Revolution. It revises Sheridan's set of statistical measures about the wealth of Jamaica before the American Revolution, empirical data that have hitherto been accepted