Jamaica was a relatively desolate island when British captured it from Spanish in 1655. Compared with Cuba and Hispaniola, there were few settlements and plantations in Jamaica. To exploit the island, British government demands a lot of manpower to be imported to Jamaica. The first wave of immigrants were mainly British colonists who came from other British colonies of West Indies such as Barbados. These British immigrants built up a series of new colonies and decided to set up a plantation system as Barbados. At the beginning of the period of British rule, many Irish prisons banished by Oliver Cromwell from their hometown were shipped by government to the Jamaica. These group of Irish were mainly young people and they were mostly servants, bondsmen, or indentured servants. Irish and indentured servants from other parts of Europe usually had to bear the hard work and terrible condition as slaves, however, they themselves were not chattel and they could get freedom when the contracts were finished.
From seventeenth century the, sugar were popular and profitable in Europe and British made Jamaica gradually become one of the world's leading center of sugar production. Sugar production required a greater labor supply than the available European servants. Therefore, British decided to import a great number of African slaves regularly. As a result, African slaves became the major labor in the sugar plantations and persons with African ancestry became the majority of Jamaica population in the late seventeenth century. In the early nineteenth century, for example, fewer than five percents of the population in Jamaica were whites while the blacks made up of more than ninety percents of population of Jamaica.
Sugar cultivation was both an agricultural and an industrial regime and there were some special processes which demands workers with professional skills. Hence, the workforce of the field was divided into four field gangs, constituted according to age and physical ability. For instance, digging cane holes with crude hoes in often hard and rocky soil was too difficult for ordinary slaves to do. Therefore, a gang of professional workers were assigned for such work specially. At the usual time, slaves worked from five o'clock in the morning to seven o'clock at night, or eleven and one-half hours, excluding meal breaks. There was a half-hour midmorning break for breakfast in the field and a two-hour break at noon for dinner. During the harvest season, slaves were much busier than usual because they had to cut stalks,extract cane juice, and processed the cane as soon as possible. In the mean time, they also had to replant for future crops. As a result, work day extended to about twenty hours during the four to five month harvest season, or a minimum of eighty hours a week, excluding meal break.
The hard work and cruel treatment from planters made slaves rebel to challenge the slavery. The slave rebellion of 1831 made whites think about the abolishment of slavery. Many antislavery societies appeared in Europe and West Indies in eighteenth and nineteenth century and they used reason to challenge the moral and legal basis of slavery. At last, the slavery of Jamaica was abolished in 1834. ex-slaves gained freedom, however, they were controlled under apprenticeship which was considered by whites to help ex-slaves transform from slaves to competent citizens. Under apprenticeship, ex-slaves must bear hard work for forty and one-half hours of the work week as slaves, except being recognized as employee who could freely negotiate the work conditions and wages. In the rest time, they could do what they want. In addition, British brought a lot of East Indians and Chinese indentured servants to make up the shortage of slaves.
In conclusion, when British occupy Jamaica. the main labor were indentured servants from Europe, including a great number of Irish. Nevertheless, the set up of sugar plantation made African slaves quickly became the main labor and Jamaica had been a slave-dependent island for about two hundred years. After abolishment of slavery in 1834, ex-slaves worked as "apprentices" at a short time and then became free workers while a lot of East Indian and Chines indentured servants migrated to the island.
Sources
1. Thomas Cleveland Holt, The Problem of freedom: race, labor, and politics in Jamaica and Britain, p.55-62
2. Rob Mullally, A short History of the Irish Jamaica, Part 1 of 3,
3. The Sugar Revolutions and Slavery, US. Library of Congress
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