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.
[10] 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.
[15] 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".
[9] The Spaniards ruled Jamaica for 161 years,[9] thus the proportion of white people among the overall population varied considerably since the establishment of a permanent Spanish settlement in 1509 by Juan de Esquivel.
By 1600, a vast majority of the native Taíno people were decimated, resulting in the island's population being predominantly European.