Following a failed attempt to conquer Santo Domingo on Hispaniola, Admiral William Penn and General Robert Venables successfully led an invasion of Jamaica in 1655.
[5] By the 1670s, Jamaica had brought in more enslaved Africans to work on sugar plantations, which then made up the majority of the island’s population.
During the First Maroon War, Jamaicans who escaped from slavery fought against British colonialists, leading to another decline in Jamaica's white population.
Foreign writers applying their own countries' racial standards would sometimes identify them as white – writing for The New York Times, Nicholas Kristof observed that a "95 per cent black population elected a white man – Edward Seaga – as its prime minister".
The proportion of white people among the overall population in Jamaica has varied considerably since the establishment of a permanent Spanish settlement in 1509 by Juan de Esquivel.
[12] In 1774, Edward Long estimated that a third of Jamaica's white population were Scottish, mostly concentrated in Westmoreland Parish.
[16][17] In 2011, the CIA World Factbook estimated that the population of Jamaicans who are of mixed European and African ancestry is at about 96%.