[5][6][7] Weakened by fever and looking for an easy victory following their defeat at Santo Domingo, the English force then sailed for Jamaica, the only Spanish West Indies island that did not have new defensive works.

[7] Despite the fact that Jamaica was an English colony, Cromwell increased the island's white population by sending indentured servants and prisoners captured in battles with the Irish and Scots, as well as some common criminals.

[11] Although he spent only ten weeks in Jamaica, Lord Windsor laid the foundations of a governing system that was to last for two centuries: a Crown-appointed governor acting with the advice of a nominated council in the legislature.

In 1694, Jean-Baptiste du Casse led a force of three warships and 29 transport ships that landed at Port Morant in eastern Jamaica, where they burnt plantations, destroyed over 50 sugar-works, kidnapped hundreds of slaves, and killed and tortured many white colonists.

[23] In the early eighteenth century, English-speaking escaped Asante slaves (hailing originally from West Africa, specifically Ghana) were at the forefront of the Maroon fighting against the British.

Under early English rule, Jamaica became a haven of privateers, buccaneers, and occasionally outright pirates: Christopher Myngs, Edward Mansvelt, and most famously, Henry Morgan.

The progressive irregularity of annual Spanish fleets, combined with an increasing desperation by colonies for manufactured goods, allowed Port Royal to flourish and by 1659, two hundred houses, shops, and warehouses surrounded the fort.

"[27] She added, "A report that the 300 men who accompanied Henry Morgan to Portobello in 1668 returned to the town with a prize to spend of at least £60 each (two or three times the usual annual plantation wage) leaves little doubt that they were right".

"[28] Forced trade was rapidly making Port Royal one of the wealthiest communities in the English territories of North America, far surpassing any profit made from the production of sugarcane.

[31] According to Robert Renny in his 'An History of Jamaica' (1807): "All the wharves sunk at once, and in the space of two minutes, nine-tenths of the city were covered with water, which was raised to such a height, that it entered the uppermost rooms of the few houses which were left standing.

With depressed prices of cotton and tobacco, due mainly to stiff competition from the North American colonies, the farmers switched, leading to a boom in the Caribbean economies.

"[45][46] Jamaica's Black African population did not increase significantly in number until well into the eighteenth century, in part because the slave ships coming from the west coast of Africa preferred to first unload at the islands of the Eastern Caribbean.

Such guerrilla warfare and the use of scouts, who blew the abeng (the cow horn, which was used as a trumpet) to warn of approaching militiamen, allowed the Maroons to evade, thwart, frustrate, and defeat any expeditions sent against them.

[59] Obeahmen (Caribbean magic practitioners) quickly circulated around the camp dispensing a powder that they claimed would protect the men from injury in battle and loudly proclaimed that an Obeahman could not be killed.

Thistlewood noted the stench of death emanating from nearby woods, where white colonizers also reported encountering hanging bodies of African men, women and children.

[61] The remaining rebels then fell under the leadership of an escaped slave named Simon, which took refuge in the Cockpit Country at a place called High Windward, from which they mounted a number of attacks on nearby plantations in Saint Elizabeth Parish.

However, some remaining rebels scattered in small bands continued operating from the forested interior of the Cockpit Country, and they conducted a campaign of guerrilla warfare for the rest of the decade, staging raids on plantations within their reach.

British Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger directed a concerted and ultimately unsuccessful effort to capture the colony from France while it was occupied with the French Revolution.

[68] Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville, who served the Secretary of State for War in the Pitt ministry, instructed Sir Adam Williamson, the lieutenant-governor of Jamaica, to sign an agreement with representatives of the French colonists in Saint-Domingue which promised to restore the ancien regime, slavery and discrimination against mixed-race colonists- a move which drew fierce criticism from British abolitionists William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson.

[69][70] In the 18th century, a number of slaves secured their freedom through a variety of means, such as enduring sexual slavery to white plantation owners, who viewed their sex captives as "mistresses".

Governor John Eyre sent government troops, under Brigadier-General Alexander Nelson,[96] to hunt down the poorly armed rebels and bring Paul Bogle back to Morant Bay for trial.

[11][88] Unable to convert the ex-slaves into a sharecropping tenant class similar to the one established in the post-Civil War South of the United States, planters became increasingly dependent on wage labour and began recruiting workers abroad, primarily from India, China, and Sierra Leone.

[11] The Jamaica House of Assembly and successive governors stumbled from one crisis to another until the collapse of the sugar trade, when racial and religious tensions came to a head during the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865.

[11][101] Although suppressed ruthlessly, the severe rioting so alarmed the white planters that governor Edward John Eyre and the Colonial Office succeeded in persuading the two-centuries-old assembly to vote to abolish itself and ask for the establishment of direct British rule.

The smooth working of the Crown colony system was dependent on a good understanding and an identity of interests between the governing officials, who were British, and most of the nonofficial, nominated members of the Legislative Council, who were Jamaicans.

Jamaica's white or near-white propertied class continued to hold the dominant position in every respect; the vast majority of the black population remained poor and disenfranchised.

[11] William Alexander Bustamante, a moneylender in the capital city of Kingston who had formed the Jamaica Trade Workers and Tradesmen Union (JTWTU) three years earlier, captured the imagination of the black masses with his messianic personality.

[102] Issued on 20 November 1944, the Constitution modified the Crown colony system and inaugurated limited self-government based on the Westminster model of government and universal adult suffrage.

[125] Unable to convert the ex-slaves into a sharecropping tenant class similar to the one established in the post-Civil War South of the United States, planters became increasingly dependent on wage labour and began recruiting workers abroad, primarily from India, China, and Sierra Leone.

[11] As was the case throughout the Commonwealth Caribbean in the mid- to late 1930s, social upheaval in Jamaica paved the way for the emergence of strong trade unions and nascent political parties.