Kingston Parish historical timeline

Kingston’s history begins with a disaster and runs through slavery to independence.

Before

The Taino inhabited Jamaica for centuries before Christopher Columbus arrived in 1494; Spanish settlement from 1509 effectively destroyed them within a few generations through disease and forced labour.

Port Royal

England took Jamaica in 1655, and the town at the harbour mouth became the base for privateers — Henry Morgan among them — raiding Spanish shipping and settlements. By the 1680s it was among the wealthiest towns in the Americas and was called the wickedest city on earth by people who had seen a few. On 7 June 1692 an earthquake and the liquefaction that followed dropped two-thirds of it into the harbour in minutes, killing thousands. The survivors moved across the water and founded Kingston.

Sugar and slavery

Jamaica became Britain’s most valuable colony on the labour of enslaved Africans, with Kingston as the main port and slave market of the western Caribbean. Resistance was constant: the Maroons held the mountains and won treaties, and revolts culminated in the 1831 Christmas Rebellion, which hastened abolition in 1834.

After emancipation

The capital moved here from Spanish Town in 1872. An earthquake and fire destroyed much of the city again in 1907.

Rebuilding after 1907

The January 1907 earthquake and the fire that followed killed around a thousand people and levelled much of downtown. The rebuilding brought reinforced concrete and a height limit of sixty feet, which is why the old commercial district looks low and squat compared with the towers that later went up in New Kingston on the higher ground.

Independence

Self-government from the 1940s, independence in 1962, and a turbulent, sometimes violent political history in the decades since.