The Dynamics of the Slave Market and Slave Purchasing Patterns in Jamaica, 1655-1788

Abstract

LAVERY 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 i90 slaves bought since i770, bad luck has he. Richardson thought, not surprisingly, that Jamaican planters succeed from a lucky combination of circumstances rather than from prudence & industry.l 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. 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 i680, 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 i8io. The numerical increase is even more startling. Despite continuing high mortality, Jamaica's slave population more than doubled, to nearly i20,000 slaves, between 1700