Colony of Jamaica

The Colony of Jamaica was Britain's richest Caribbean possession, a sugar island held from 1655 to 1962. It was taken by accident: an English fleet meant for Hispaniola failed there and grabbed Jamaica from Spain instead in 1655. The settlers found the Spanish ranches thin and turned the island into a machine for sugar, clearing forests for cane fields worked by hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans. By the eighteenth century Jamaica's planters were the wealthiest men in the British Empire, and their absentee mansions in London were built on the labour of people they never saw. The enslaved never accepted it: Maroon communities held the mountains from the first years, and revolt after revolt, ending with the great Baptist War of 1831, forced emancipation through in 1838. Sugar declined, bananas and bauxite followed, and the colony moved through Crown rule toward self-government. In 1962 Jamaica lowered the Union Jack and raised its own black, green and gold flag, the first Caribbean colony to stand alone.