The nature of port records and other primary sources in this prestatistical age make it difficult to assess what Saint-Domingue’s total plantation exports might have been at midcentury. But it is clear that production from France’s largest Caribbean colony had caught and probably surpassed that of Jamaica and perhaps that of the entire British West Indies. Charles Frostin estimates that in 1740 Saint-Domingue’s sugar production of forty thousand tons surpassed that of the whole British Caribbean production of thirty-five thousand tons the same year.27
Because the sugar plantation was the emblematic feature of the landscape in both Jamaica and Saint-Domingue, by the last decades of the eighteenth century the wealthiest owners of these estates wanted to see images of the properties that supported them. In the 1770s, William Beckford, the wealthiest man in Jamaica, commissioned George Robertson (1735–1821) to paint views of Beckford’s Westmoreland sugar estates. Four of Robertson’s landscapes were popular enough that John Boydell made them into copperplate engravings in 1778. All four of the paintings featured tropical vegetation with rushing rivers in the foreground, with black men or women washing, fishing, or tending animals. One showed Beckford’s Fort William estate in the background with the Roaring River in the foreground (Figure 5). Robertson drew Beckford’s sugar works, and above it, on a hill, the planter’s residence. Smoke rises from the boiling house, suggesting a proto-industrial estate, but, in the twilight scene, the enslaved blacks with their baskets and livestock look more like exotic peasants than mill workers. In the center of the image, Beckford’s large white house dominated. Robertson thus suggests that the planter has successfully tamed not only the wild Jamaican landscape but also alien African workers.
Figure 5. “A View in the Island of Jamaica, of Fort William Estate, with Part of Roaring River, belonging to William Beckford, Esqr. Near Savannah La Marr, Westmoreland, 1778,” drawn on the spot by George Robertson, engraved by Thomas Vivares. © Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island.
All mid-eighteenth-century British America plantation societies entered into a prolonged period of affluence that lasted from around the 1730s until the end of the Seven Years’ War, as they also did in the French Antilles.28 Boydell’s engraving of Robertson’s painting reflects that prosperity. Profits in the West Indies, however, were far greater than those in the southern colonies of British North America. From the 1740s through to the mid-1770s, British West Indian returns on capital were over 10 percent per annum, reflecting the efficiencies of the integrated plantation model.29 Jamaica became the leading exporter of sugar in the eighteenth-century British Empire. Productivity was extraordinarily high. Between 1750, when per capita productivity per annum based on both the white and the black population was around £8 sterling, and 1800, when per capita productivity per annum was £29.2, or 675 livres, Jamaican productivity expanded to reach probably its natural limits. The Jamaican economy performed strongly not only in comparison with other plantation economies but also relative to emerging industrial nations. On the eve of the American Revolution, when individual wealth (if not productivity) probably peaked, Jamaica was as important to Britain in terms of wealth creation as a large British county.30 Saint-Domingue may have exceeded it in average wealth, but we do not have the figures to justify this assertion. Jamaican sugar planters were among the most accomplished capitalists of their time. Today we see them as ruthlessly using and discarding hundreds of thousands of men and women of African descent. But contemporaries viewed them as entrepreneurs who successfully manipulated a complex agro-industrial technology, supplying their compatriots with a highly desirable product at an ever cheaper price. Their activities were the lynchpin of an Atlantic trade network, linking Africa and Europe with the Caribbean.31
Jamaica’s sugar plantations increased in number from approximately 150 in 1700 to 775 in 1774. Sugar output increased from five thousand tons in 1700, to sixteen thousand tons by 1734, twenty thousand tons in 1754 and to forty thousand tons by 1774. At the same time total exports, of which somewhat over half were sugar exports, increased nearly eight-fold between 1700 and 1774, from £325,000 in 1700 to £1,025,000 in 1750 and £2,400,000 (or 55 million livres) in 1774.32 Sugar was produced by industrial-sized plantation units, customarily containing between 150 and 300 enslaved persons. Such labor forces were the largest in British America, far larger than the crews of around fifty slaves that worked large tobacco plantations in the Chesapeake and the slightly larger forces that labored on rice plantations in South Carolina.33
From the mid-1740s, Jamaica entered into an explosive period of growth. The establishment of peace with the Maroons (independent communities of people of African descent living in the Jamaican interior who from the early eighteenth century fought a twenty-year war against the British government) in 1739 allowed sugar planting to expand into the northwestern parishes of St. James and Hanover as well as into the eastern parish of St. Thomas-in-the-East. It is noteworthy that these years saw only very slow white population growth. The number of whites barely increased in the disease-ridden years between the earthquake at Port Royal in 1690s and the start of the American Revolution. The only firm figures we have are that there were 7,768 whites in 1673 and 8,230 in 1730 and probably no more than ten thousand by the start of the Seven Years’ War. In 1774, a census, most of the details of which are lost, suggested a white population of 12,737. Thus, the number of whites on the island, despite considerable migration from Britain, had grown by only 4,969 between 1673 and 1774 or by less than fifty people per annum.34 At the same time the black population increased rapidly, entirely owing to an ever expanding slave trade. The number in slaves in Jamaica catapulted in the eighteenth century to 74,523 in 1730 and to 192,787 in 1774.35 Outnumbered eighteen to one, whites understood that this influx of workers was the source of their rising prosperity.36
The wealth of Jamaica was extracted out of the bodies of enslaved people. Apart from those in Saint-Domingue and perhaps Dutch Guiana, the lives of the enslaved population in Jamaica were the most miserable in the Atlantic World, especially in the first half of the eighteenth century, when planters were carving out plantations from frontier land and when the great majority of slaves were traumatized, brutalized, and alienated migrants from Africa. The sources for this period, nearly all produced by whites, militate against any true appreciation of what slaves went through. But it seems certain that the first half of the eighteenth century marked the nadir of black life in Jamaica. Slavery had always been brutal in British America, but the level of violence exercised against Africans dramatically increased as the slave population grew.37
British Jamaica was always an incredibly violent place, even before the sugar planters arrived. In the seventeenth century, royal authorities subjected pirates to gruesome executions while masters commonly whipped and chained their white servants. Africans, however, got the worst of the treatment. John Taylor, writing in 1688, dwelt almost lovingly on the barbaric tortures that planters forced on slaves caught in rebellions. He was convinced that it was only through terror that Africans could be controlled. He told a lengthy story about how “Collonel Ivey” discovered a plot against him and how he cornered his slaves and read out details from Jamaica’s slave code (a book that “is hated by those slaves, and they still say ’tis the divile’s book”). Ivey acted as judge and jury of his frightened slaves. He “caused all his slaves to be bound and fetter’d with irons, … and then caus’d them to be severely whip’t, caused some to be roasted alive, and others to be torn to peices with dogs, others he cutt off their ears, feets and codds, and caused them to eat ’em; then he putt them all in iron feters, and soe with severe whipping every day forced them to work, and soe in time they became obedient and quiet, and have never since offer’d to rebel. Thus did