Abstract
Anthony King suggests that in colonial towns — settlements founded or developed by Western, imperial powers, two or more ‘cities’ usually exist: ‘the indigenous, “tradition-orientated” settlement, frequently manifesting the characteristics of the “pre-industrial city”, and on the other hand, the “new” or “western” city, established as a result of the colonial process.’1 But Caribbean cities gainsay this duality. West Indian societies have virtually no pre-European inhabitants and the non-Western elements in their cultures are no more indigenous than the traits of their white elites. Caribbean cities are quintessentially colonial, products of early mercantilism. Their creole cultural characteristics were fashioned by white sugar planters, merchants and administrators who enslaved the blacks they imported from Africa, and with them bred a hybrid group — the free coloured people. West Indian colonial cities are characterised by a morphological unity imposed by Europeans, yet their social and spatial structures are compartmentalized by Creole cultural plurality.2
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Notes
Anthony D. King, Colonial Urban Development: Culture, Social Power and Environment (London, 1976), pp. 5–6.
See for example Colin G. Clarke, Kingston Jamaica: Urban Development and Social Change 1692–1962 (London, Los Angeles and Berkeley, 1975 ), and Suzanne Stephanie Goodenough, ‘Race, status and residence in Port of Spain, Trinidad’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Liverpool, 1976.
Harold Brookfield, Interdependent Development (London, 1975), especially, pp. 124–165.
A.G. Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil, revised edition (New York, 1969), p. 9.
Lloyd Best, ‘A model of Pure Plantation Economy’, Social and Economic Studies 17 (1968): 283–326.
J.S. Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice (London, 1948).
M.G. Smith, The Plural Society in the British West Indies (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1965).
Pierre L. van den Berghe, Race and Racism (New York and London, 1967), p. 34.
Gideon Sjoberg, The Pre-industrial City: Past and Present (Glencoe, 111., 1960), especially pp. 95–99.
King, Colonial Urban Development, p. 26.
Malcolm Cross, Urbanisation and Urban Growth in the Caribbean (London, 1979), p. 9.
F.W. Pitman, The Development of the British West Indies, 1700-63 (New Haven, 1917); W.J. Gardner, History of Jamaica (London, 1873), pp. 319-320.
F.W. Pitman, The Development of the British West Indies, 1700-63 (New Haven, 1917); W.J. Gardner, History of Jamaica (London, 1873), pp. 319-320.
Pitman, Development of the British West Indies, p. 236.
F. Armytage, The Free Port System in the British West Indies: A Study in Commerical Policy, 1766–1822 (London, 1953), p. 2.
Armytage, The Free Port System, pp. 92 and 123.
Pitman, Development of the British West Indies, p. 20.
J.W. Stewart, A View of the Past and Present State of the Island of Jamaica (Edinburgh, 1823), pp. 199–200.
S.W. Mintz and D.G. Hall, ‘The origins of Jamaica’s international marketing system’, Yale University Publications in Anthropology 57 (1960): 17.
These figures and the detailed sources are set out in Clarke, Kingston, Jamaica, Table 1, p. 141. Wilma Bailey, ‘Kingston 1692–1840: A colonial city’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, 1974, suggests there were only 140 white households in the town in 1700. There were 3,500 to be settled in Kingston after the Port Royal death toll. A population of 5,000 for early eighteenth century Kingston is likely to be an upper limit.
Clinton V. Black, ‘Kingston in the eighteenth century’, in: W.A. Roberts (ed.), The Capitals of Jamaica (Kingston, 1955), pp. 48–60, 58.
Between 1829 and 1832 slaves in Kingston recorded a birth rate of 19.4 and a death rate of 21.1 per 1,000, while more slaves left than entered Kingston parish. For details see B.W. Higman, Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 1807–1834 (London, 1976), Table 7, p. 58 and Table 8, p. 64.
Higman, Slave Population and Economy, Table 7, p. 58.
Clarke, Kingston, Jamaica, Table 1, p. 141.
R. Renny, A History of Jamaica (London, 1807), pp. 107–108.
Stewart, A View of the Past, pp. 195–200.
For a fuller account of occupational differences among the free population of various grades see Clarke, Kingston, Jamaica, pp. 21–22.
Higman, Slave Population and Economy, p. 40.
Edward Long, The History of Jamaica 3 vols. (London, 1774), II, p. 261.
Stewart, A View of the Past, P. 327.
Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial of the British Colonies in the West Indies, 5th ed., 5 vols. (London, 1819), p. 98.
W.J. Gardner, A History of Jamaica (London, 1873), p. 351.
Philip D. Curtin, Two Jamaicas: The Role of Ideas in a Tropical Colony, 1830–1865 (Cambridge, 1955), pp. 36–37.
Gardner, A History of Jamaica (London, 1873), p. 351.
Long, The History of Jamaica, II, p. 25.
For a discussion of the origins of Kingston see Clarke, Kingston, Jamaica, pp. 8–9; and Wilma Williams, ‘Old Kingston’, Jamaica Journal 5 (1971): 3–9.
Anon (J. Stewart), An Account of Jamaica and its Inhabitants (London, 1808), p. 14.
Pitman, Development of British West Indies, p. 40, footnote.
Bailey, ‘Kingston 1692–1840’, p. 199.
Bailey, ‘Kinston 1692–1840’, has a map of free coloureds in 1769 showing their general distribution throughout the town (p.258); a denser but similar distribution persisted into the nineteenth century (p. 267).
Anon (J. Stewart), Account, p. 14.
Higman, Slave Population and Economy, p. 60 includes a map of the distribution of slaves based upon data from the Kingston Parish and Poll tax Rolls for 1832. His cautious conclusion is that the greatest concentration of slaves was in the area south of Water Lane, around the wharves and merchant houses.
Higman, Slave Population and Economy, p. 61.
Gad Heuman, Race, Politics and the free coloured in Jamaica, 1782–1865 (Westport and Oxford, 1981); the free coloureds and Jews are also discussed in Wilma Bailey, ‘Social control in the pre-emancipation society of Kingston, Jamaica’, Boletín de Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe 24 (1978), pp. 97–110.
Lowell J. Ragatz, The Fall of the Planter Class in the British Caribbean (New York, 1928).
Gisela Eisner, Jamaica 1830–1930: A Study in Economic Growth (Manchester, 1961), p. 268.
For a fuller account of post-emancipation population change see Clarke, Kingston, Jamaica, pp. 29–33; and George W. Roberts, The Population of Jamaica (London, 1957).
Legislation Council minutes, Report of the commission on unemployment (Kingston, 1936), (appendix 41/1936), p. 6.
W.P. Livingstone, Black Jamaica: A Study in Evolution (London, 1899), p. 216.
Livingstone, Black Jamaica, p. 217.
Livingstone, Black Jamaica, p. 95.
This point is explored by Fernando Henriques, Family and Colour in Jamaica (London, 1953).
Curtin, Two Jamaicas, p. 168.
Gardner, A History of Jamaica, p.424.
Eisner, Jamaica 1830-1930, pp. 177–81, 337–345.
For a full discussion of Kingston in the periode 1943–1960 see Clarke, Kingston, Jamaica, pp. 54–126.
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Clarke, C.G. (1985). A Caribbean Creole Capital: Kingston, Jamaica (1692–1938). In: Ross, R.J., Telkamp, G.J. (eds) Colonial Cities. Comparative Studies in Overseas History, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-6119-7_9
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