The Making of Modern Jamaica

The definitive editorial history of Jamaica told through the evolution of its homes, land ownership, communities and built environment.

Commentary

The Making of Modern Jamaica | 1760–1800: Resistance, Rebellion and a Colony Beginning to Change

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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.

Commentary

The Making of Modern Jamaica | 1700–1760: Sugar, Wealth and the Rise of the Great House

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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.

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