For a while the planters tried, unsuccessfully, to maintain the workforce supply with convicts and war captives. But they also quickly succumbed to the murderous labour regime and to disease. When in 1713 the British broke the Dutch monopoly of the African slave trade as a result of the Treaty of Utrecht – which gave Britain the right to sell slaves to the Spanish colonies – they established a dominance in the Atlantic slave trade. This signalled the making of the Atlantic world, a powerful element in the constitution of what we call modernity.

By the end of the seventeenth century the planters, as an emergent social stratum, had developed an intricate mercantile system linking Jamaica and London, establishing significant leverage in political and financial circles in the English capital. Their influence was evident in the decision by the metropolitan government – after heavy pressure from the free-traders – to abolish the Royal African Company’s monopoly on the slave trade, colossally increasing the number of slaves bound for Jamaica. The Jamaican Assembly introduced a comprehensive slave code, based on the model of Barbados, such that the management of the slave population came to be a public matter, affecting the very lifeblood of the island. Sugar promised many quick fortunes to the planters, although the vulnerabilities of the crop, and the costs of the human means required for its production, spurred the creation of elaborate networks of credit. By the early eighteenth century the slaves outnumbered their masters by a factor of eight to one. When the European powers signed the Treaty of Utrecht, Britain’s plantations in Jamaica were well advanced, forming the indispensable core of the island’s economic and social structure.