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Ethnic Distinctions and Wealth among Colonial Jamaican Merchants, 1685–1716

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Allan D. Meyers
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Extract

For most of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Jamaica was the center of trade and commerce in the English Caribbean. Its economic growth was influenced little by the planter class, which was slow to develop and would not fully emerge until the mid-eighteenth century (Dunn 1973: 204; Sheridan 1965: 292–311). Jamaica grew prosperous, instead, from a merchant class that mediated international trade on one level and distributed goods to the island's inhabitants on another. It was the capital derived from such trade and commerce that ultimately fueled the island's agricultural revolution (Zahedieh 1986b), because many merchants became affluent from trade and then financed investments in sugar plantations, livestock, and secondary staples (Claypole 1970: 174–95). So, unlike other colonies in the Caribbean, where most capital investment originated in England and was sustained by agriculture, Jamaica's capital was locally generated with predominantly external commodities. The early merchants thus have a prominent position both in the history of the island and in Caribbean history in general.

Type
Articles
Information
Social Science History , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , Spring 1998 , pp. 47 - 81
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1998

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