Jamaica Homes News
Independent Jamaican journalism worth supporting.
No algorithms. No noise. Just the stories that matter.
✅
You're subscribed!
Check your inbox to confirm.
Jamaica colonial history
Housing Jamaica Today: Crisis, Aspiration and the Question of Home The years since 2020 have placed Jamaica’s housing challenge in…
Development, Diaspora and Rising Prices: Jamaica’s Property Decade Between 2010 and 2020 Jamaica moved from economic fragility to modest growth…
Dollars from Abroad, Crisis at Home: Jamaica’s Housing Market in the 1990s The 1990s were a decade of paradox for…
Building Upwards, Leaving Others Behind: Jamaica’s Housing Market in the 2000s The first decade of the twenty-first century gave Jamaica…
The Land Belongs to the People: Manley, Socialism and the Jamaican Home Michael Manley arrived in power in 1972 carrying…
A Nation Born Into Housing Debt: Jamaica After Independence On 6 August 1962, Jamaica lowered the Union Jack and raised…
Housing a Nation Before Independence: Land, Politics and the Making of a New Jamaica Between 1938 and independence in 1962,…
Zinc Fences and Broken Budgets: Austerity and the Jamaican Home in the 1980s Edward Seaga came to power in October…
In the four decades before the close of the eighteenth century, Jamaica’s plantation economy reached its peak — and then began, almost imperceptibly, to fracture. Slave rebellion, imperial war, abolitionist agitation and the growing demands of the free coloured population all challenged a colonial order that appeared impregnable but was more fragile than its architects could admit.
Emancipation Begins with the Home When Britain abolished slavery in 1833, it paid £20 million to the planters who had…
Freedom, Free Villages and the Battle for Land Full emancipation on 1 August 1838 was the beginning, not the end.…
Crown Colony, the Banana Boom and the Making of Rural Jamaica The abolition of the Jamaica Assembly in 1865 handed…
Kingston, Earthquake, Empire and the Urban Poor In the first four decades of the twentieth century, Jamaica’s capital was shaken…
In the first half of the eighteenth century, Jamaica became the richest colony in the British empire — a machine for producing sugar built on the labour of hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans. The great houses that rose on the plantation hills were testaments not merely to architectural ambition but to the human cost of an economy that defined wealth and obscured suffering in equal measure.
The English seizure of Jamaica in 1655 unleashed forces that would transform the island’s landscape, society and economy within a single generation — replacing the modest Spanish pastoral colony with the beginnings of one of the most brutal and profitable plantation systems the world had ever seen.