Resistance and the Enslaved

Abstract

In the wake of the conquest of Jamaica in 1670, the English, and then British, developed the third largest island in the Caribbean into an economically vital sugar-producing powerhouse. Scholars have spent decades studying how the colonization of Jamaica transformed the Caribbean and the Atlantic world, including foundational work by Dunn (1972) and more recent studies such as Pestana’s (2017) exploration of the conquest itself. Central to any story of Jamaican history are the enslavement, violent trafficking, fatal punishments, torture, and overworking of African slaves. Plantation owners in the West Indies established slave agriculture as the cornerstone of economic growth within the British Empire, and this system of labor provided the foundation of a trans-Atlantic trade network so influential that, according to Eric Williams (1994, p. 52), it created a “triple stimulus to British industry” and helped spur on the Industrial Revolution a century later. But slavery was not an institution built on stable ground, and the violent and oppressive regimes of white overlords were answered in kind by armed resistance from the enslaved. During over two centuries of British rule in Jamaica, a series of violent clashes between the enslavers and the enslaved erupted, and each played a substantial role in shaping the history of the island. They also had a role in the broader history of the British Empire. This paper seeks to understand how two of those moments of resistance, the 1760 uprising by African slaves known as Tacky’s Rebellion and the 1832 upheaval of Afro-Jamaicans known as the Christmas Rebellion or the Baptist War, played a role in shaping how observers thousands of miles away understood slavery, race, and empire.