1655 to 1775 · Caribbeanspan
Jamaica took six hundred thousand captives in a single century
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Jamaica was the largest destination for enslaved Africans anywhere in the British Empire, receiving over six hundred thousand people in the century before the American Revolution. Most came from the Bight of Biafra and the Gold Coast, which reflects the trading connections of the Bristol and Liverpool merchants who dominated the traffic. British vessels accounted for nearly every documented arrival, a measure of how tightly the empire held its own market closed. What a continuous inflow from two regions produced is legible in Jamaican life: Akan influence from the Gold Coast in naming, in the maroon communities of the interior and in the rising led by Tacky in 1760, and Igbo influence from the Biafra ports in speech and belief. Jamaica lies about a hundred miles west of Saint-Domingue and was its closest rival in sugar until the French colony outproduced it. The two islands drew their labour from different stretches of Africa and ended the eighteenth century in very different conditions.
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