By the 18th century, Jamaica had become one of Britain’s richest colonies through the export of sugar and rum. British trade laws tightly controlled this commerce. Originally, colonial sugar could only be sold to Britain. Although some restrictions were relaxed in 1751, heavy regulations and high prices in British markets meant that most Jamaican sugar still flowed almost entirely into Britain. In practice, the colony remained economically dependent on the empire and its merchants (WN I.x.).
Smith argues that plantation economies shaped both the land and society of Caribbean colonies such as Jamaica and Barbados. Many wealthy plantation owners lived in Britain rather than the colonies themselves, so profits from sugar were often sent back overseas instead of being reinvested locally. This limited the development of local infrastructure and trade. Smith also believed Jamaica’s economy was unstable because planters constantly borrowed money to expand plantations into new land, relying on speculation and debt rather than steady commerce (WN V.iii). This wealth depended on the labour of hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans transported across the Atlantic through the slave trade.
Enslaved and indigenous people repeatedly and consistently resisted colonial rule. The most famous uprising before the American Revolution was Tacky’s Revolt in 1760, led largely by Coromantee people of West African origin in Jamaica. Although the rebellion was violently suppressed by 1761, it exposed the fragility of plantation society and became an important symbol of continued resistance throughout the Caribbean.
Smith was friendly with many of the Glasgow merchants involved in trade with Britain’s North American and Caribbean colonies. He was deeply sceptical of the model of colonial settlement in the British West Indies. In addition to the injustice of slavery as an institution, Smith thought that it was only the very high profits secured from the sugar trade – profits falsely inflated by the trade regulations – that allowed the plantation owners to continue the uneconomic practice of slavery (WN III.ii).
Slavery, Smith argued, was uneconomic because hired free labourers and tenant farmers possessed an incentive to work hard and produce more, since they would themselves share in the fruits of their labour. Enslaved workers, driven to work by brutal overseers and earning no wages, did not benefit from this “liberal reward of labour.” It was only the protected monopoly of the sugar trade, and the love of dominance of the slave overseers, that led slavery to continue.
Image: “View of Port Royal, Jamaica,” Richard Paton, courtesy Royal Museums Greenwich