Colony of Jamaica

The wealthiest sugar colony in the British empire, and the one that produced the most sustained resistance to it. England took Jamaica from Spain in 1655 as a consolation prize after failing to capture Hispaniola, and within a century it was importing more enslaved Africans than any other British possession - the mortality rate on the estates was such that the population had to be continually replaced rather than sustained. The island's mountainous interior made the colony ungovernable in a specific way: Maroon communities, some descended from people the Spanish had freed, fought the British to treaties in 1739 and 1740 that recognised their land and self-government, a concession granted almost nowhere else. Port Royal, the pirate capital, sank in the 1692 earthquake. Tacky's War in 1760 and the Baptist War of 1831 under Samuel Sharpe were among the largest slave risings in the British Caribbean, and the second hastened emancipation in 1834. The Morant Bay rebellion of 1865 was suppressed so brutally by Governor Eyre that the assembly was abolished and the island made a Crown colony, a constitutional step backwards that lasted eighty years. Universal suffrage came in 1944. The colony became independent in 1962. Spanish Town remained the capital until 1872, when it moved to Kingston. The colony's population was around ninety per cent enslaved by the late eighteenth century. Coffee from the Blue Mountains and bananas followed sugar. Accompong, one of the Maroon towns, still marks the 1739 treaty each January. The colony administered the Cayman and Turks and Caicos islands as dependencies.

• Type: Polity
• Government: Colonial administration