Jamaica historical timeline

Origins

The Taíno, who called the island Xaymaca, were its people when Columbus landed in 1494. Spanish rule destroyed them within a century through disease and forced labour. England seized the island in 1655 and turned it into the most profitable sugar colony in the Caribbean, worked by enslaved Africans brought in such numbers that they outnumbered the free population many times over. Those who escaped into the mountainous interior became the Maroons, and they fought the British army to a standstill and a treaty in 1739.

Turning points

Resistance was continuous rather than occasional. Tacky’s Revolt in 1760 shook the colony; the Baptist War of 1831, led by the preacher Sam Sharpe, involved tens of thousands and was suppressed with such violence that it hastened the abolition of slavery, which came in 1834 and was completed in 1838. The Morant Bay rebellion of 1865 ended the island’s own assembly and brought direct rule from London. Independence came on 6 August 1962. The 1970s brought ideological conflict, armed political gangs and economic crisis, and from the late 1940s large-scale emigration to Britain, the United States and Canada built a diaspora comparable in size to the population at home.

Influential people

Nanny of the Maroons, guerrilla leader and national hero. Sam Sharpe and Paul Bogle, who led the two great rebellions. Marcus Garvey, whose Pan-Africanism shaped black political thought across three continents and fed directly into Rastafari. Alexander Bustamante and Norman Manley, cousins who founded the two parties that have alternated in power ever since. Bob Marley, and Louise Bennett, who insisted that Patois was a language worth writing poetry in.

Cultural evolution

Jamaican Patois, an English-lexicon creole with West African grammar, is what most people actually speak. Rastafari emerged in the 1930s and gave the island a religion of its own. Musically the island reinvented itself roughly once a decade — mento, ska, rocksteady, reggae, dub, dancehall — and the sound-system culture that carried it, exported to New York by Jamaican migrants, is where hip hop begins.

Present-day significance

Fewer than three million people exert cultural influence out of all proportion to that number, through music and through sprinting: Jamaica has produced the fastest men and women in history. Tourism and remittances carry much of the economy, and violent crime, concentrated in particular urban areas rather than spread across the island, remains the country’s hardest domestic problem.