The Land Belongs to the People: Manley, Socialism and the Jamaican Home Michael Manley arrived in power in 1972 carrying a rod…

A Nation Born Into Housing Debt: Jamaica After Independence On 6 August 1962, Jamaica lowered the Union Jack and raised its own…

Housing a Nation Before Independence: Land, Politics and the Making of a New Jamaica Between 1938 and independence in 1962, Jamaica underwent…

Zinc Fences and Broken Budgets: Austerity and the Jamaican Home in the 1980s Edward Seaga came to power in October 1980 promising…

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 built their…

Freedom, Free Villages and the Battle for Land Full emancipation on 1 August 1838 was the beginning, not the end. The twenty-seven…

Crown Colony, the Banana Boom and the Making of Rural Jamaica The abolition of the Jamaica Assembly in 1865 handed power to…

Kingston, Earthquake, Empire and the Urban Poor In the first four decades of the twentieth century, Jamaica’s capital was shaken to rubble…

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.