Introduction In 1774, the white residents of Jamaica were the richest group of people in the British Empire. They probably had more influence within the British imperial state than any other colonial subjects of George III. On the eve of the American Revolution Jamaica was undoubtedly the jewel in the British imperial crown. It was the British colony that was most indispensable to imperial prosperity and the single colony that the British could least afford to lose to the French during the War of American Independence in the 1770s and 1780s. Consequently, Britain in 1781 was prepared to sacrifice its interests in the thirteen colonies to preserve its control over Jamaica. At present, such statements do not seem as outlandish as they seemed in 1987, when I took my first academic position as a lecturer in American history at the University of the West Indies at Mona and began to explore the riches of the various archives and libraries in Jamaica. At that stage, few historians of colonial British America ever thought very much about how Jamaica was at the forefront of imperial officials'' minds in the 1760s through the 1790s. Nor did many historians consider very seriously the idea that Jamaica had as much importance in America before 1776 as Virginia and Massachusetts.

The advent of Atlantic history in the 1990s and 2000s, however, has widened the geographical boundaries of early America so that the British West Indies, which was part of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British America but which did not join the United States of America after 1787, can be thought of as an early American place. Of course, there have always been works that put British North America and the British West Indies together. Richard Dunn''s magnificent account of the rise of planter societies in the seventeenth century from 1972 and Carl and Roberta Bridenbaugh''s account in the same year of seventeenth-century Englishmen leaving England for the New World, which included a considerable section on the West Indies, were two such notable works. In the last decade it has been relatively common for early American historians to write on West Indian topics. One such notable example is Vincent Brown''s meditation on mortality and cultures of death in eighteenth-century Jamaica from 2008. Another is the social analysis of mid-eighteenth-century Jamaica produced by my mentor, Jack P. Greene. And Richard Dunn has culminated his long research into Jamaica with a wonderful work comparing slave life on Mesopotamia plantation in western Jamaica with slavery in Tidewater Virginia.

Younger scholars place Jamaica within an Atlantic and early American context as a matter of course, as can be seen in books by Emily Senior, Sasha Turner, Katherine Gerbner, Aaron Graham, Daniel Livesay, Christer Petley, and Brooke Newman, all illuminating aspects of slavery within an Atlantic framework. Jamaica is no longer incidental, or aberrant, within larger Atlantic patterns, but emblematic of how the Atlantic system worked. Robert DuPlessis''s superb analysis of the material life and consumer habits of Atlantic peoples, for example, uses data from Jamaica to outline the fashioning of a wider Atlantic world. In addition, West Indian historians have long written about the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century West Indies using frameworks derived from the historiography of colonial and antebellum America. My work was informed by many of these historians, including people I worked alongside in Jamaica between 1987 and 1989. The most important of these historians has been my former colleague at Mona, Barry Higman, who has delved deeply into all aspects of West Indian social and economic history during the period of abolition, mostly works on subjects from 1807 to 1834, but including some works on subjects extending back into the middle of the eighteenth century. Without his works, none of us writing today would know very much at all about the underlying foundations of West Indian slave society. Another former colleague at Mona, Kamau Braithwaite, is a great poet, but before he devoted himself to that occupation he was an important historian, author of a highly suggestive work on Creole society in Jamaica around the time of the eighteenth century that not only has influenced what I thought about Jamaica but also was pivotal in shaping my understanding of Chesapeake society in my first work on eighteenth-century Maryland planters.

But the rich depth of local studies and quantitative histories that made the history of early America in the 1970s and 1980s so deeply exciting and which formed the social history foundation from which "the cultural history turn" of the 1990s developed was less rich when extended to eighteenth-century Jamaica. The relative paucity of empirical studies of Jamaica in this period meant that there were marvelous opportunities to do work on a variety of social history topics already covered by historians elsewhere. Few scholars had exploited Jamaica''s rich archives. These archives contain little of the traditional sources--letters, pamphlets, written testimony of all kinds--but wonderful material for the social historian--wills, deed, inventories, manumission records. The chapters in this book are heavily based on the now more than thirty years of work in these archives. If the quality of work on the history of Jamaica has often been very strong, the quantity of work is not as impressive as the scholarship on other parts of the Atlantic world in the eighteenth century. The reasons are quite straightforward. Jamaica was an indispensable colony in the eighteenth century, but its importance faded after the end of slavery in 1834 and even more after emancipation seemed to fail and as the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865 confirmed to imperialists that Jamaica was a hopeless case.

The island became by the early twentieth century a marginal colony of little importance in the wider world. It gained independence, but not prosperity, in 1962. By the late 1970s, the country had fallen on hard times, and its history in the last thirty years has been one of continual disappointment--everlasting economic crisis, debilitating rates of crime, heavy outmigration to Britain and to the United States, a culture marked by shameful homophobia, and limited geopolitical relevance. Even its once mighty cricketers stopped being world-beating sportsmen around 2000. Since the death of Bob Marley in 1981 no other Jamaican cultural figure has achieved worldwide fame, although the incomparable Usain Bolt and the magnificent Shelley-Ann Fraser-Pryce--the fastest man and the fastest woman in the world--and terrific writer and Booker Prize winner Marlon James continue to be Jamaicans with global name recognition. But Jamaica is hardly central to world culture, let alone to the global economy, in the way that it certainly was, for good or ill, in the period of the American Revolution. This marginalization of Jamaica has happened before. The division of the plantation regions of British America because of the American Revolution saw Jamaica disconnected from American history.

Jamaica remained a diminished place within the British Empire while the plantation colonies of North America formed part of an expanding and dynamic United States. This book uses the American Revolution as a pivot for Jamaican history because it was after that event, and the separation of the thirteen colonies that came to make up the United States, that the twinned histories of the British West Indies and British North America truly came apart, despite some divergences arising as early as the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89. The American Revolution marks a historiographical fissure. It disconnected the future United States--the first nation founded because of an anticolonial revolt--from a set of colonies, including Jamaica, that stayed in the British Empire. Indeed, the historiography of the American Revolution is curious when seen from a Jamaican perspective. The dispute split plantation America in two, with the northern half (from the Chesapeake to Georgia) rebelling and the southern part (the West Indies) staying loyal to Britain. There were still some similarities in the experience of both sections of the prerevolutionary British plantation world. The American Revolution had some negative economic consequences for all British American plantation colonies.

Indeed, the American Revolution was an economic disaster for much of the American South, especially for poor whites and blacks, leading to an economic depression hitherto unprecedented in American history, from which the American South has never quite recovered. Yet few accounts of the consequences of the American Revolution for the new American nation dwell on the costs that ordinary Americans paid for defeating the British. An economic boom after 1792 and Alexander Hamilton''s successful financial reforms made the depression of the 1780s appear a blip rather than a fundamental structural change in the relationship of the South to the North. By contrast, historians of the British Caribbean have argued that the American Revolution heralded the beginning of the end for the plantation system. The war itself, it has been argued, was economically devastating and encouraged Britons to believe that the economic value of the West Indian plantations was not sufficient to overcome the moral problems involved in the transatlantic slave trade. The weight of opinion now suggests that the American Revolution did not have as severe economic and political consequences as once thought, especially once troubles in neighboring Saint-Domingue removed Jamaica''s biggest competitor in international trade from the transatlantic economy. Yet it is hard to get past the historical consensus about the American Revolution in the British Caribbean marking an end to West India''s privileged position in the British Empire. Histori.