A failed settler society: marriage and demographic failure in early Jamaica.

Jamaica in the eighteenth century was the jewel in Britain's imperial crown. According to any number of criteria, Jamaica was the most important colony held by Britain in British North America. Jamaica contributed the most of any colony to the imperial coffers. Its leading inhabitants were the wealthiest citizens i the British Empire and among the wealthiest of the subjects of the British monarchy. Moreover, the only colonials to play any significant role within the British establishment were Jamaicans, William Beckford, Lord Mayor of London in the 1760s, being the most notable example. Jamaica was important not only in economic terms. Even though the population of Jamaica remained substantially below mainland colonies such as Virginia and Massachusetts throughout the eighteenth century, Jamaica attracted sizeably more migrants, the majority bein unwillingly coerced slaves from Africa, than any other colony in the century before the American Revolution.

Yet what was so clear to contemporaries has not been so evident to later historians. To consider Jamaica the most important colony in eighteenth century British America is almost wilfully provocative. In any colonial survey, Virgini and Massachusetts, even New York, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina, attract mor attention than Jamaica. In part, the answer for the relative neglect of Jamaica is understandable: Jamaica's subsequent history and decided marginality in the world after the early nineteenth century reduce the significance of its earlier importance. Yet there are other reasons why Jamaica does not receive the attention it deserves even for the colonial period. In the seventeenth century, Jamaica can be easily accommodated within existing historical syntheses. Struggling settlers in Jamaica just as on the mainland sought to cement an enduring presence in an alternately inviting and hostile environment. They attempted to create a genuine settler society with a distinctive cultural identity that was a mixture of inherited metropolitan assumptions and new colonial experiences.

Nevertheless, during the course of the eighteenth century, Jamaica's experience increasingly diverged from mainland patterns of development. While on the continent increasingly successful European settlement "produced a slow but powerful cultural and social convergence,"(1) white colonists in Jamaica faced considerable problems in transforming their society into a tropical replica of British society. Jamaica was a fully fledged and remarkably successful plantation society by the eighteenth century but the seventeenth century attemp to establish a lasting white settler presence in the island had not been successful. There were a few settlers of long standing in the island and there was, as Edward Brathwaite has argued, a discernible creole identity among nativ born white Jamaicans,(2) but creole settlers were overwhelmed by other presence in the island ensuring that social patterns continued to exhibit marked transitory and impermanent characteristics. Creole settlers were unable to create a consensus about what Jamaican identity should be. Instead, the dominan tone of the place was largely set by expatriate English and Scottish immigrants who had no intention of making Jamaica their home and by the large majority of brutalized African slaves who gave clear evidence in several largescale slave rebellions that they had an entirely different idea from white creoles about what life in Jamaica should be like.(3)

Scholars have not given much attention to what can be seen as the failure of a settler society to develop in Jamaica, alone of the major colonies established in British North America in the seventeenth century.(4) The success of the plantation complex in eighteenth century Jamaica and the social structure that it engendered gives a degree of inevitability to its establishment and characte in Jamaica. Yet alternatives to plantation agriculture were always possible and in the seventeenth century had been actively pursued. Many, perhaps the majority, of early British settlers to Jamaica attempted to make a living in th island outside sugar planting. As on the North American mainland and in Brazil, there were ample opportunities for white settlers living in a plantation econom to make money from activities besides staple agricultural production. In the seventeenth century, for example, buccanneering was a potentially profitable--i risky--alternative to sugar planting. Another option for a man wanting to make his fortune was to operate as a trader in the flourishing mercantile community of Port Royal. In the eighteenth century, there were always opportunities outside staple agriculture for ambitious whites either within the plantation system as overseers, bookkeepers, and managers or as merchants, doctors, tradesmen, or pen-keepers.(5) Moreover, as a large Caribbean island with a sizeable frontier area not effectively settled until the late eighteenth century, Jamaica could have absorbed and profitably used many more white settlers than it in fact did. It was not, therefore, the nature of the plantation complex that determined that white settlement on a sizeable scale would not develop in Jamaica. What in fact prevented the establishment of a flourishing settler society in Jamaica was the inability of white settlers to establish successful demographic patterns that allowed for the natural increase of white population in the island.

Despite a slow and steady increase in white population from 7000 in 1703 to ove 20,000 in 1774 (of whom 17,000 were "settled and resident white settlers"), Jamaica failed to keep pace with population growth in the plantation economies of the American mainland.(6) Whereas white population in the Chesapeake multiplied more than ninefold between 1660 and 1760 and white numbers in the Lower South catapulted from 21,000 to nearly 120,000 in the half-century before 1760, Jamaican whites only just managed to double their numbers.(7) The enormou population growth of Jamaica in the eighteenth century--from less than 4000 in 1661 to nearly 210,000 in 1774--was achieved only through the massive importation of African slaves. From 13.3% of the population in 1661, the proportion of the population that was black had increased to nearly 94% in 1774.(8) As early as the 1670s, blacks formed a majority of the population and the presence of such a large black majority soon came to shape every aspect of society in Jamaica. White Jamaicans came to depend on blacks for their economic well-being but feared being overwhelmed both culturally and physically--by thei numerical predominance and their unassimilabilty. The Jamaican government made occasional attempts to foster white settlement in the island, passing deficienc laws, for example, where planters were fined if requisite numbers of whites abl to serve in a militia were not present on their plantations. Nevertheless, whit population growth continued to lag and the gap between white and black populations increased to what Jamaican officials believed were alarming levels.

In Jamaica, demographic failure prevented the establishment of a settler society. Continuing high mortality among white settlers meant that white number could not be maintained by natural increase alone. This failure was crucially important in shaping the character of the fully-fledged plantation society that emerged in the early eighteenth century--a society characterised by large imbalances between the sexes and especially between races, by the widespread absenteeism of many of the most influential members of society, and by continuing population instability and slowness in developing a recognizably home-grown creole consciousness.(9) Moreover, the transformation of Jamaica int a plantation society in itself accentuated these trends and hindered the development of a settler society and settler institutions.

The extent of demographic failure among white settlers in Jamaica can be measured at the local level thanks to the survival of a surprisingly complete parish register from St. Andrews Parish.(10) St. Andrews was one of the earlies settled parishes in Jamaica and included within its boundaries the fertile plains of Liguanea, well suited both for the production of sugar and also for cattle-raising. The first entries in the register date from 1666, about four or five years after the first patents for land were issued in the parish and a decade after Jamaica had been settled in the aftermath of the spectacularly unsuccessful Western Design. Initially, St. Andrews was a garrison settlement with a regiment of over 1000 men and virtually no women or children. This force dwindled to under 600 men by 1662. Garrison government was soon superseded by civilian settlement in the 1660s but one legacy of that initial period of settlement was a highly imbalanced sex ratio in the fledgling parish. In 1662, of the 827 white inhabitants in Ligueanea, 553 (66.9%) were men.(11) Until 1673 smallholdings predominated with white population peaking at 1,269 whites out of a total population of 2,677. The 1670s are important not only for heralding the end of real growth in white population levels but for signalling the beginning of the transition from a small landholding settler community to a society dominated by large-scale sugar production. From the 1670s, common lands essential for small planter prosperity were gobbled up by large planters and large estates began to assume more prominence, even if such estates were still relatively small and hindered by insufficient slave labor forces. From the 1670s, also, the beginnings of a serious decline in already precarious demographic fortunes for white settlers can be dated, a decline that accelerate from the 1690s. We have no more information regarding white population levels i St. Andrews until 1730, when white population was 515 out of a total population of nearly 7,800, but it is probable that white population remained essentially static until the 1690s. The 1690s heralded serious population decline, brought on in part by epidemics following the earthquake of 1692 in Port Royal and French raids that devastated the eastern part of the island in 1693-94. White population figures in St. Andrews only gradually recovered to the levels reache in the 1670s through considerable immigration into the parish in the first thir of the eighteenth century.(12)

A cursory examination of vital data from St. Andrews reveals the essential dimensions of demographic failure in the late seventeenth century. Crude birth, marriage, and death rates show that natural increase never threatened in St. Andrews except briefly in the 1670s. Deaths consistently outnumbered births at every period except for six years, all between 1670 and 1681, when there was a positive birth/death ratio. Moreover, the ratio of births to deaths worsened considerably over time.

Through a study of marriages entered into in St. Andrews Parish from 1666 until the mid-eighteenth century, some of the consequences of white Jamaicans' inability to reproduce themselves can be measured. In addition, some of the principal differences between the experience of marriage for women and men--differences crucial to the strengthening of white male dominance in the island--can be outlined. Almost nothing, however, has been written on marriage in the early British Caribbean. Richard Dunn, Robert Wells, and Gary Puckrein mention marriage in passing in their explorations of white demographic patterns but little detailed research has been done on either the characteristics or the meaning of marriage in the Caribbean.(13) This lack of attention is hardly surprising. Few colonists commented on marriage and quantitative records are no generally available.

Yet some records on marriage do exist, even if these sources are patchy in coverage and tantalizingly silent about much that most interests historians, especially the quality of marriage in the tropics. It is possible, however, to analyze 244 marriages in St. Andrews, where both a starting date and an end to the marriage are known, from combining information from the parish register and from wills recorded in the Island Record Office. From these records, we can begin to understand the nature of marriage in Jamaica. The overwhelming impression is of an institution that was especially fragile, battered by severe demographic constraints that must have lent a special poignancy to the traditional words that marriage was "until death us do part." For death, and early death, was an everpresent if unwelcome likelihood for white settlers embarking into married life in early Jamaica.(14)

Table One

Births and Deaths in St. Andrews

Year        No. Births   No. Deaths   Births/Deaths   No. Marriages

Pre 1679         521         540           0.96             239
1679-1691        488         880           0.55             298
1692-1704        287         819           0.35             261
1705-1717        212         663           0.32             118
1718-1730        139         507           0.28              80
1731-1744        124         469           0.26              69

Total           1771        3878           0.46            1065

Source: St. Andrews Parish Register, Island Record Office.

Changing socio-economic patterns are reflected in marriage rates although there was a lag between economic change and a decline in the number of marriages in the parish. The number of marriages in St. Andrews was never large but marriage continued to increase until they averaged 5.4 per annum between 1692 and 1704. Between 1718 and 1730, however, the number of marriages plummeted to less than two per annum. The records are less certain after 1730 but it is clear that marriage was becoming uncommon in St. Andrews as the plantation economy started to flourish. More and more of the inhabitants, especially male immigrants, neve married.(15)

But even when the number of marriages was growing, marriage in St. Andrews was precarious institution. The average length of marriage was astonishingly short. The mean length of marriage was just eight years and four months with a median length of marriage a mere six years, four months. Even in the Chesapeake, marriages tended to last longer than they did in Jamaica.(16) If anything, the length of marriage declined over time, with the decades of the 1690s and the 1710s being especially disastrous. While couples marrying in the first years of settlement (between 1666 and 1678) in St. Andrews could expect to live together for eleven years and one month, couples marrying in the 1690s or the 1710s were barely married before parted by death, mean length of marriage being seven year and three months and five years and five months respectively.

Because of the comparatively large number of marriages contracted in the late seventeenth century, this decline from already low levels was fatal to the slim chances that white Jamaicans had to establish a self-sustaining population in St. Andrews. The median length of marriage fell from nine years and six months between 1666 and 1678 to six years and four months between 1679 and 1691 and to a calamitous four years and nine months for the 70 marriages made between 1692 and 1704. By the end of the century, the average Jamaican marriage barely laste long enough to result in even one surviving child. Only a very small minority o marriages lasted long enough to establish a viable family. Nearly 15% of marriages did not last even two years; close to one-third failed to pass five years; just 29% survived for more than 10 years; and a minimal 7.4% of marriage continued for more than 20 years. Some marriages were tragically short. The marriage of John Archer and Anne Hillgrove ended on the same day that it began in 1693 while the marriage between George Somervell and Elizabeth Roger, also i 1693, lasted just nine days. In sum, seven marriages did not even last three months.

Table Two

Number of Marriages in St. Andrews

               N    (1)   (2)            (3)

1666-1678     40   16.4   3.2           11.1
1679-1691     63   25.8   4.8            7.6
1692-1704     70   28.7   5.4            7.5
1705-1718     29   11.9   2.2            8.2
1718-1730     24    9.8   1.8            7.2
1731+         18    7.4   [less than]1   8.9

            244

(1) Percentage of total marriages
(2) Average number of marriages per annum
(3) Average length of marriage in years

Source: St Andrews Parish Register, Island Record Office.

Nevertheless, some couples beat the odds and enjoyed marriages that by any standards were long-lasting. Three marriages continued for over thirty-five years, with David Crosby and Susannah Thorne surviving long enough to celebrate their fortieth wedding anniversary in 1711. But the marriage of David and Susannah was a rare exception to the norm of distressingly short marriages. Moreover, lengthy marriages became less frequent over time. When Crosby and Thorne married in 1671, they could have reasonably expected that their marriage would last at least ten years: nearly 59% of marriages contracted before 1680 survived at least that long. Their children, however, could be less confident: just 31% of marriages made between 1679 and 1704 and less than 27% of marriages entered into after 1704 lasted more than ten years. Indeed, marriage became mor unstable over time. Of the three children of Crosby and Thorne who survived lon enough to marry, one died within two years and the other two after seven and eight years respectively of matrimony.(17)

The ministers who compiled the St. Andrews Parish Register did not note the causes of death but contemporaries did speculate about the reasons for the extraordinary mortality rates of early Jamaica. The historian and St. Andrews resident James Knight, for example, writing in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, noted that immigrants were especially susceptible to diseas because they did not "Conform to the Nature of the Place . . . but follow their old Courses" and in addition picked up new and dangerous habits on arrival such as "indulg[ing] themselves with the pleasant Fruits of the Country, which by eating to excess, or such as are immature Occasions fluxes and other Distempers and, most disastrously for their health, they "Shorten their Days by too free a use of Spiritous Liquors."(18)

High living certainly contributed to the mortality rate as modem historians hav confirmed. Naval officers' returns show that Jamaica imported as much alcohol per white capita as was consumed per capita in the United States in 1974, in addition to the huge quantities of locally produced rum that must have been par of the staple diet of white Jamaicans.(19) But infectious diseases rather than the manner by which whites lived in the tropics undoubtedly accounted for the majority of deaths in St. Andrews. Malaria was endemic in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Caribbean and was common and deadly wherever stagnant water and warm weather coincided--as they did on the Liguanea plain. Yellow fever, while overall less of a killer than malaria, was even more deadly. The constant human traffic that connected the Caribbean to the wider world and the continual influx of new non-immune migrants to tropical islands ensured that virulent epidemics of yellow fever would flourish in Jamaica. Jamaica was probably spare a major epidemic of yellow fever until the 1690s when a severe epidemic swept first the Lesser and then the Greater Antilles, instigated by the arrival of a French ship at Martinique. The massive mortality that enveloped Jamaica after the Port Royal earthquake of 1692 and, probably more significantly, after Frenc raids (the French being likely carriers of yellow fever) on eastern Jamaica in 1694-95 suggest that no immunity to yellow fever existed in Jamaica as late as the 1690s. Heavier human and microbiotic traffic within the Caribbean after 169 ensured that epidemics of yellow fever would be routine. The extent of mortalit in the 1690s meant that a population of non-immunes was not established in Jamaica at any time during that crucial decade when any hope of maintaining or increasing white population disappeared. As Governor William Beeston complained in 1699, "the sickness is still there after nine to ten years and the Country i so reduced that it is difficult to fill posts. There are so many dead that it i hard to bury them."(20)

The major consequence of high mortality within marriage was fragile family formation. The ease by which Jamaican men were able to circumvent marriage by entering into socially tolerated relationships with slaves and free coloreds only accentuated the tenuous hold family ties exerted in Jamaica.(21) Relativel few Jamaican marriages resulted in children and even fewer could boast survivin children. Some approximation of the number of children produced in Jamaican marriages can be ascertained from reconstituting the families of those 132 married men in this sample who also left wills. The number of children produced by these men and their wives was pitifully small. Even if every child had survived to adulthood and had married and had children themselves, the white population of Jamaica would have been only maintained. The total number of children left by these 132 men was just 277, or an average of 2.1 children each A considerable minority of couples--36%--were childless and less than 50% had more than one child. Large families were decidedly uncommon, although two couples had as many as eleven children, including David and Susannah Crosby. Only 17% of couples had four or more children with less than 5% having six or more offspring. As with several other indicators, the number of children and th proportion of large families declined over time. The percentage of marriages that were childless increased from just under one-third for marriages begun before 1692 to nearly 40% for marriages after 1691. The percentage of large families dropped similarly, with just 12% of the later marriages producing four or more children compared to 22% of the earlier marriages.

Fragile family formation in early Jamaica was enhanced by extremely high child mortality rates. If adults were at risk in the Caribbean environment, then children were even more so. Firm data on the number of children that survived t adulthood are impossible given lack of data concerning outmigration and clear underreporting of childrens' deaths. But the number of children known to surviv either to marriage or to adulthood is astonishingly small. Just 39% of marriage are known to have left surviving children. Just 105 or 38% of the 277 children produced in St. Andrews' marriages survived to adulthood. Only a very small minority of marriages managed to contribute to white population growth: just 16 marriages contained more than two surviving children.

The paucity of children in early Jamaica who survived childhood doomed most families to being at most one- or two-generational. The crucial factor determining family size was length of marriage. The one-third of marriages whic lasted less than four years produced just 10% of the total number of children while the 21% of marriages enduring for over ten years resulted in 51% of all children. Yet even a long marriage with many children did not necessarily lead to generational longevity. David and Susannah Crosby's marriage, for example, seems at first a heartening exception to demographic failure, lasting for forty years and resulting in at least eleven childbirths. But even the Crosbys could not leave an imprint on the future in the form of descendants. Just three of their eleven children and none of their sons survived to marry and produce another generation. Only six grandchildren emerged from these unions of whom just one, John Tyler (1713-1745), the youngest son of their youngest daughter, survived to adulthood before dying--unmarried and presumably without legitimate offspring--at the age of 32. In less than 75 years, the Crosby line had been extinguished from Jamaican soil. Most families vanished much more quickly.

The ending of the Crosby line draws that family's history closer to common experience in early Jamaica. In two important respects, however, their history is markedly different in that neither parent remarried and no child was left an orphan. The opposite was true for most settlers in St. Andrews. Darrett and Anita Rutman have illustrated the pervasiveness of early parental death and the consequences for family formation and societal development in the early Chesapeake.(22) The consequences must have been more extreme in Jamaica because orphanhood and remarriage were more likely. Bearing in mind that the average ga between marriage and the baptism of the first child was one year and eight months, a marriage would need to have lasted at least 17 years before the eldes child was old enough to be able to provide for himself or herself. But just 12. % of total marriages lasted that long and a mere 6.1% of marriages endured for more than 21 years or long enough to see the eldest child reach the age of majority. Most children could expect to be without at least one and probably both parents before they reached adulthood.

Children were more likely to lose a father than a mother. Men were more likely to die first in most marriages, with women dying first in only 38.1% of marriages. Women faced large dangers in childbirth but men may have matched thi danger through their capacity for excess in the brawling taverns of frontier Jamaica. More likely reasons why men were more likely to die before women in a marriage were the age differential between brides and grooms and the differing epidemiological immunities of men and women in the tropics. Against this suggestion is an improvement in men's chances of surviving marriage (or a deterioration in women's chances) over time: 40% of women died first in marriages made after 1691 compared to 35% in marriages made before 1692. One consequence of more men dying first may have been a partial balancing of a very uneven sex ratio as widows outnumbered widowers. That balance may have been advanced in addition by the greater survival rates of widows compared to widowers after the end of marriage, with widows surviving on average four years and nine months longer than widowers.

Table Three

Children of Jamaican Marriages

No. of Children           No. of               % of
Per Marriage             Marriages           Marriages

0                           47                 35.6
1                           20                 15.2
2                           22                 16.7
3                           13                  9.8
4-5                         17                 12.9
6-7                          8                  6.1
8-9                          3                  2.3
10+                          2                  1.5

                           132

Source: St. Andrews Parish Register, Island Record Office.

The high likelihood that the overwhelming majority of children left at the end of a marriage would be dependent makes the length of survivorship after marriag of the remaining partner extremely important. Losing one parent was disruptive and distressing for young children; losing both could be disastrous, especially in a society where kin were unlikely to be present to provide alternative sources of parenthood and protection. We have information on the post-marriage history of 145 surviving partners who lived, on average, for 11 years and six months after the death of their spouse. The probability of long life after the death of a partner decreased over time, from 13 years and five months for survivors of marriages made before 1692 to a low of nine years and four months for marriages contracted between 1692 and 1704 and 10 years and seven months fo marriages entered into after 1704. Once again, the 1690s were especially demographically disastrous for St. Andrews residents.

Most significant is the range of survivor rates. With a median length of marriage of six years and four months and an average gap between marriage and the baptism of the first child of one year and eight months, a surviving partne would need to live at least ten to twelve years to ensure that his or her children could fend for themselves when left orphaned. Few did. Nearly 54% of survivors died within ten years, 39% did not last six years, and 19% were hardl out of mourning before they died, within two years of their partner's death. Only 32% survived more than 15 years and just 19% lived longer than twenty years. The chances of a child reaching adulthood with even one parent alive wer small and declining over time. Fewer than 43% of surviving partners of marriage made after 1691 lived more than ten years after the death of their spouse compared to nearly 51% of similar survivors in marriages begun before 1692. Chances of survival were especially bad between 1692 and 1717 with 44% of survivors dying in less than six years and just 38% managing to live for more than ten years after the end of their marriages. The effects for children make for depressing reading. Just 69 of the 150 marriages (46%) where there were children and where both the length of marriage and the length of survivorship are known lasted long enough for a child born within two years of marriage to reach the age of 16 with at least one parent still alive.(23) In only 49 marriages (33%) was a child likely to still have a parent alive at the age of majority at 21.

The consequences of such high rates of orphanhood for Jamaican society must hav been enormous, with repercussions for such matters as the transmission of property, arrangements for management of property and children both on a personal and state level, and on the character of relationships in a fragile an fraught society. At the very least, early death and resultant instability in th relations between parents and children, the relative lack of parental influence over children, and quick inheritance of property and position must have heightened already strong impulses towards anarchic individualism manifest in the early Caribbean.(24)

One consequence that can be measured and one that would have been crucially important to the many Jamaicans whose marriages had been terminated by the earl death of their partner, especially to young widows with dependent children, is the rate of remarriage. Edward Long, writing in 1776, deprecatingly dismissed the travails of widowhood by quoting with approval the acerbic comments of a seventeenth-century governor, Sir Nicholas Lawes, that "the female art of growing rich" was to "marry and bury"--but for many women, faced with raising children by themselves in a society which was unusually discriminatory towards women, the need to remarry was undoubtedly of paramount importance.(25) Men, also, would have wished to remarry, if only to provide a mother for their children.

The data concerning remarriage are fragmentary but wills and the parish registers reveal that at least 37% of surviving partners remarried.(26) That percentage increases to nearly 52% if only those marriages where the survivor lived more than two years after the end of the marriage are analyzed. The incidence of remarriage declined noticeably over time. Before 1692, 52% of surviving partners remarried but this declined almost by half to 27% in marriages after 1691.(27) In part, this drop may be just a function of sources, as the percentage of marriages in which the date of death of the survivor is known declines from 65% before 1705 to 53% for marriages made between 1705 and 1730 and just 28% for marriages made after 1730. Yet the increase over time in survivors who do not appear to have remarried is considerably more than can be explained away by deficiencies in sources. Non-remarrying survivors increased from 40% before 1692, to 64% between 1692 and 1704, and to 75% between 1705 and 1730. If only those surviving more than two years after the end of a marriage are examined, the decline in the percentage remarrying is even more pronounced: from 30% before 1679, to 53% between 1692 and 1704, and to a massive 75% betwee 1705 and 1730. Marriage not only became more unstable over time but the incidence of marriage and the likelihood of remarriage decreased.

Not only did fewer people remarry over time, the period between marriage and remarriage also increased appreciably. Overall, the average time between marriage and remarriage was two years and two months but for marriages made after 1691 the distance between marriages increased to two years and eight months. Most widowed Jamaicans remarried very quickly after their partner's death--nearly 30% remarried within six months of the termination of a marriage, 68% remarried within two years, and just 16% waited more than five years to remarry--but the proportion able or willing to remarry almost immediately, within six months of the end of marriage, dropped from 36% for marriages before 1692 to 22% for later marriages. Meanwhile, the number of Jamaicans who remarried but who were single for more than two years between marriages increased from 32% to nearly 39%. Either opportunities for marriage shrunk or fewer people were willing to enter into marriage as St. Andrews moved more decisively into the plantation economy and as demographic prospects for most settlers declined. As will be explored below, the increasing unattractiveness o marriage for white Jamaicans had more pronounced effects for women, the sex wit most at stake in marriage, than for men.

There are two clearly discernable trends that can be traced in the above analysis of fragmentary demographic data concerning marriage in early Jamaica. First, conditions favorable both for a growing native-born settler population and for the institution of marriage in early Jamaica declined over time, and declined most noticeably just after the firm establishment of a plantation economy in St. Andrews. The growth of the plantation system clearly did not arrest demographic decline and probably encouraged further decline by reducing, though not eliminating, prospects outside large-scale planting for small planters. It is probable, if at the moment unprovable, that demographic failure also helped facilitate the rise of large estates in the 1670s and 1680s. Wealth merchants and planters were very active in the Liguanea land market in these decades with the number of sugar estates increasing from 12 to 33 between 1671 and 1684. Land engrossment seems to have advanced noticeably in this period as well.(28) Yet most of the available arable land had been patented by the early 1670s. From 1664 to 1673, 26,065 acres had been patented and the area was populated to such an extent that the Governor, Thomas Lynch, could state that " ... in all the parishes on the South Side there is not a foot of land to be had for Church, King or public; all is appropriated.(29)

In the absence of firm statistics on land acquisition, it is difficult to be sure how large planters added to their holdings so substantially in the 1670s and 1680s. Clearly, Jamaican officials favored large planters when land was distributed. The gradual diminishing of commons land was also detrimental for small planters and may have accelerated their decline.(30) But high death rates and the lack of immediate kin in Jamaica who could have been bequeathed land were probably just as important in the development of large estates. They allowed more land to come onto the market than may have otherwise been available. It was the large planters and merchants that took advantage of these conditions and solidified their position at the top of Jamaican society.

Demographic failure facilitated the rise of plantation society in St. Andrews. The successful establishment of planter society in the parish did nothing to improve life chances for ordinary white settlers; in fact, already disastrous demographic conditions only worsened after the demise of extensive smallholding There may be no connection at all except coincidence between the rise of a plantation society and the demographic nadir of the white population of St. Andrews but the temporal relationship between the two events seems significant. The worst period to embark upon marriage was in the last decade of the seventeenth century and the first century of the eighteenth century when white Jamaica was on the brink of total demographic collapse. The average length of marriage in the 1690s was only seven years and three months with virtually no marriages lasting over ten years. Moreover, survivors of marriages entered into between 1692 and 1704 lasted just nine years and four months (down more than five years from marriages made before 1692) after the death of their partner with less than 48% remarrying.

The consolidation of the plantation regime had deleterious consequences not onl for small planters but also for another group already disadvantaged in Jamaican society: white women.(31) There were distinct differences between male and female experiences of marriage, differences that increased over time to the detriment of women's position in St. Andrews society. The most important difference was the changing ages of bride and groom at marriage.(32) Both men and women, at least if they were native born, married early in the seventeenth century. For marriages made before 1705, the average age of marriage for men wa 21 and for women was just 19. But while the average age for women remained constant over time at 19 with a substantial majority--80%--marrying before they were 21 and nearly 58% marrying under the age of eighteen, men were increasingl older at first marriage, with the average age advancing to nearly 26 for marriages contracted after 1704. By the early eighteenth century, there were sizeable gaps between the age of bride and groom. The size of the sample is small--there are only 27 cases where the ages of both bride and groom are known--but the gap grows from an already appreciable four years and five months before 1700 to five years and seven months after 1699 and to an enormous eight years and four months after 1720, although admittedly this latter figure includes a clearly abnormal example of a man aged 43 marrying as his first wife a woman of 22. In eleven cases the gap in age between husband and wife was more than seven years. These large age differentials reinforced the already strongly patriarchal character of white plantation society. With continuing massive importation of slaves to work in both the plantation and the house, white men did not need white women's labor nor, with abundant opportunity for socially accepted liaisons with black and mulatto women, did they necessarily depend on their wives for sexual gratification.(33) White women, therefore, increasingly became merely decorative in Jamaican society, an ornamental function enhanced b the fact that they married fully mature men while only in their teens. Studies of marriage in other societies suggest that considerable gaps in age between husband and wife tend to increase the extent of male domination over women and reduce the chances for the development of companionate marriages.(34)

Changing age differentials between husbands and wives also had significant consequences for female survival rates. As could be expected given generally shorter marriages after 1691 and greater gaps in age between husband and wife, female rates of survivorship increased as the plantation economy consolidated. Women tended to live longer after the death of their husband than in the seventeenth century and, more importantly, they were more likely to spend a longer period of that survivorship as widows. Before 1692, men survived on average three years and one month less than did women on the death on their partner but this differential increased to three years and nine months after 1691 and to nine years and seven months for the 17 marriages made after 1717.

Differences in rates of survivorship by gender are suggestive but much more significant are changes in gender-related rates and timing of remarriage. I believe that the sum of changes in remarriage point to a deterioration in women's prospects for remarrying in a society where women would have had far more need and desire to remarry than men. Conceivably, some women may have welcomed the independence that widowhood and the ability to act as a feme sole may have brought but the systematic favoring of men over women in inheritance bequests and the disadvantages of operating as a female businesswoman in a male-dominated society combined with the high likelihood that a widow would hav small children to care for with relatively few kin to support her probably led most women to favor remarriage to widowhood. Conversely, men would have felt less pressure or need to remarry, especially in a society where it was possible to cohabit openly with slaves and freed blacks or mulattoes.(35) Thus, although the percentage of male survivors remarrying dropped precipitously from 50% before 1692 to less than 16% after 1691, it is more than likely that a large percentage of those men not remarrying chose rather than were forced to remain single. Certainly, those men who did remarry managed to remarry with remarkable ease, the average gap over the whole period between marriages for men being one year and eight months, dropping to one year and five months after 1692.

Female patterns of remarriage were substantially different from male patterns. Over time, fewer women were able to remarry but the drop in remarriage rates is smaller than for men, from 52% before 1692 to 35% after 1691. Women were more likely to remarry both more quickly and more slowly than were men. Whereas 26% of men remarried within six months of the completion of their previous marriage 33% of women remarried within six months. Similarly, only 18% of men waited mor than two years to remarry compared to a sizeable 38% of women. What this suggests is that women usually had a more pressing necessity, given the likelihood that they had small resources, limited independent opportunities, an dependent children, to remarry than men, explaining the higher percentage of rapidly remarrying women over men, but that only a limited percentage of women were seen as attractive choices by potential husbands.

Two pieces of evidence support this contention. First, there is a marked difference in remarriage rates between women handsomely provided for in wills and those left with parsimonious inheritances. Women with substantial inheritances found it easy to remarry and did so: of twenty well-provided-for widows, eighteen remarried, eleven within a year of the end of their previous marriage. Others, left conditional estates or less than dower, found it much harder both to remarry and to remarry quickly.(36) Second, the longer a woman was married, the harder it was for her to remarry. For women widowed after ten years of marriage, presumably after the bloom of adolescence and early womanhoo had long been muted, and surviving for more than two years after the death of her husband, the rate of remarriage was under 48% compared to nearly 59% for women previously married between four and ten years and 71% for women married less than four years. Length of previous marriage made little appreciable difference in the rates of male remarriage, with the percentage of men who survived for more than two years remarrying dropping only slightly, from 60% fo short marriages to 54% for long previous marriages. More tellingly, women married for more than ten years who did remarry spent much longer as widows tha did younger widows, taking on average two years and nine months to remarry compared to one year and ten months for women married less than four years. Men found no such problem remarrying if they had been married for more than ten years. On the contrary, those that did remarry did so remarkably easily, averaging just seven months between marriages.

The overall conclusion must be that male and female experience of marriage was different and for women that difference was hardly beneficial and became even less advantageous over time as male and female marriage patterns increasingly diverged. By the early eighteenth century, when the plantation system was fully fledged, women had been relegated to irrelevance, neither economically importan nor, increasingly, socially powerful. The death of settler society in Jamaica also signalled an accentuation of the already difficult situation that white women faced in a society where the institution of marriage was beset with intractable problems. Not the least of these problems was the tacit social acceptance of the growing tendency for men openly to take concubines rather tha enter into marriage.(37)

If this interpretation of the marriage patterns and demography of white settler in St. Andrews is correct, several implications for the history of colonial America might follow. First, if settlement and demographic patterns in Jamaica are included within overall colonial patterns of development, then the disastrous demographic experience of the seventeenth-century Chesapeake might b more common than exceptional. Second, the prevalence of death in the white settler population in Jamaica shaped not only white experience but also influenced white attitudes to blacks, who also died in droves on the island and to whose welfare whites were conspicuously indifferent. Third, the continuing inability of whites to establish a naturally self-reproducing population intensified developmental differences between the Caribbean and the mainland colonies.

If the Caribbean is included in analyses of colonial American demography, disease, death, fragile family formation and the importance of continuing immigration become more central concerns. What usually impresses historians of the colonial mainland, especially for the eighteenth-century, is dramatic population growth due to natural increase. After a native-born population had been established, population grew rapidly, between 200 and 300% every half-century.(38) Such a remarkable expansion of the American people tends to obscure earlier demographic difficulties. Thus, the persistent high mortality, fragile family life, and dominant immigrant presence that marked Chesapeake society in the seventeenth-century can be seen as abnormal--a temporary blip in an otherwise successful process of peopling America.(39) Yet in at least one significant British American colony, Jamaica, such demographic conditions persisted for the first century of settlement. The rise of a native-born majority and the beginnings of reproductive population growth that marked a major demographic transition in the Chesapeake never occurred in Jamaica. This demographic regime was experienced by a not inconsiderable number of colonial British Americans. Although the total number of whites in Jamaica remained low throughout the colonial period, immigration to Jamaica by whites continued to b impressive, even after 1700. One study notes that Jamaica was far and away the leading destination for white indentured servants between 1720 and 1740.(40) Evidence on free immigration to Jamaica is very limited but it seems clear that given continuing high mortality, a considerable infusion of fresh immigrants into the island each year was required just to maintain white numbers. British emigration to the Caribbean as a percentage of total British emigration to America declined in the eighteenth century but at 20% of the whole, or around 64,400, a large percentage of which would have gone to Jamaica, still remained substantial.(41) For most of that number, ample opportunity in the booming suga economy was also often accompanied by early death, just as had been true for th majority of British emigrants to British America in the seventeenth-century.(42

The majority of immigrants to Jamaica--African slaves--also were likely to suffer early death and found it difficult to form families. The causes of death for blacks were different than those for whites, with blacks much less susceptible to fevers than whites and more susceptible to pulmonary diseases, but the results were similar: an inability to sustain natural population growth Black death rates and family instability were aggravated by the harsh condition under which slaves worked. This ensured that the demographic experience of slaves in the British West Indies "must be located toward the harsh extreme of the scale of modem world population history," especially before the late eighteenth century when external pressure for amelioration was strong.(43) Give the monetary value of slave property and the obvious benefits that a naturally increasing slave force gave to a slaveowner, the indifference of Jamaican slaveowners towards their slaves' private affairs and their legendary brutality towards their labour force has always seemed puzzling and self-defeating.(44) Possibly, such indifference only reflected slaveowners' recognition that any efforts they might make towards improving slave conditions would have minimal effect: even when Jamaican planters embarked upon the path of amelioration, improvements in slave demography were very limited.(45) But the capriciousness of life for whites in early Jamaica must have also influenced white attitudes t blacks. Staggeringly high mortality among whites and chronic family instability must have made it relatively easy to accept similar conditions within slave society. The harshness of life in the tropics encouraged planters to be harsh towards their slaves.

For the initial period of its settlement by the British, the experience of whit settlers in the British Caribbean, including Jamaica, was not particularly different from that of the minority of emigrants from Britain to the New World in the seventeenth century who removed themselves to the mainland English colonies.(46) Indeed, settlement in the English Caribbean exemplified more full than mainland settlement the principal features of early colonization in the first British Empire. While mainland settlers were still solidifying their position in the teeth of a hostile environment and considerable Amerindian opposition, mid-seventeenth century white Barbadians and Jamaicans had made great progress in organizing an unfamiliar landscape so as to satisfy their basic material needs, had developed an economic system that was an integral and hugely successful part of the emerging post-restoration transatlantic trading network, had situated themselves at the top of a multiracial, nakedly exploitative, and rampantly individualistic heterogeneous society, and were wel on their way to creating a society with a genuine cultural identity as the one cultural province of Britain that was able to claim that it had achieved the successful replication of British social and cultural imperatives.(47)

Yet by the mid-eighteenth century, the differences between Caribbean and mainland experience were stark and increasing. While colonists on the mainland were increasingly able to fashion societies that ever more closely approximated metropolitan models, where the common tendency towards increased anglicization within a population that was extensively creole fuelled "a powerful process of social and cultural convergence,"(48) colonists in the Caribbean, or at least i Jamaica, lived in societies that did not become gradually more recognizably British but which increasingly diverged from Anglophone social, cultural, and economic forms. Despite Edward Long's valiant efforts to portray Jamaica as a settled and civilized improvement on England, and despite the evident commitmen of wealthy resident planters both to their tropical home and to the process of anglicizing that home as much as Jamaica's climate would permit,(49) the peculiarities of Jamaican social structure made it impossible for Jamaica to be anything but a very bizarre imitation of British society.

The Jamaica of white colonists in the eighteenth century no more approximated contemporary British society than the society of the Raj in India resembled England of the Home Counties and for the same reasons: the dominant elite was too small in number and too shallowly-rooted in the local soil to make anything more than a temporary impression on the numerically overwhelming majority. As i India, the presence of the British in Jamaica was immensely important and, at least for the British, astonishingly lucrative over an impressively long period Social and political institutions, cultural assumptions, and, not least, the dynamics of the plantation system are all part of the legacy of British colonization in Jamaica. Without those legacies, few of the present-day inhabitants of Jamaica, descendants of Africans taken against their will to the island, could call Jamaica their home. But, unlike mainland North America, the descendants of the people who first brought African slaves to Jamaica have little place in contemporary Jamaican society. The world of whites in Jamaica i now part of the past, with modern whites either anachronistic survivors from a past era or curious anomalies in a society finally controlled by the black majority. The marginality of whites in post-colonial Jamaica is a natural resul of the failure of white colonists in early Jamaica to fully establish a settler society in the tropics. Such a society would have only been possible if white Jamaicans had been able to overcome the effects of a disastrous demographic regime. They overcame the effects of high mortality and low fertility among blacks through massive and continued importation of fresh slaves to replenish their labour forces. But the problem of demographic failure among white settler could not be solved so easily. The consequences for the development of the plantation society and for the character of early Jamaican society were profound.

Department of History Christchurch New Zealand

ENDNOTES

1. Jack R Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill, 1988), 170-71.

2. Edward Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica 1770-1820 (Oxford, 1971), 105-50.

3. For the character of expatriate life in Jamaica, see Alan Karras, Sojourners in the Sun: Scottish Migrants in Jamaica and the Chesapeake, 1740-1800 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1993). For slave resistance in Jamaica see, inter alia, Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca, N.Y., 1982).

4. White settlers in Barbados faced some of the same problems as did those in Jamaica but were much more successful in establishing a lasting presence on the island. Jack P. Greene, "Changing Identity in the British Caribbean: Barbados a a Case Study," in Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden (ed.), Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (Princeton, 1987), 213-66.

5. For various accounts of alternatives to planting in seventeenth and eighteenth century Jamaica see Nuala Zahadieh," 'A Frugal, Prudent, and Hopeful Trade': Privateering in Jamaica, 1655-1689," Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 18 (1990): 152; idem, "The Merchants of Port Royal, Jamaica, and the Spanish Contraband Trade, 1655-1692," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., 43 (1986): 570-93; Verene Shepherd, "Livestock and Sugar: Aspects of Jamaica's Agricultural Development from the Late Seventeenth to the Early Nineteenth Century, Historical Journal 34 (1991): 627-43 and Richard B. Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves: A Medical and Demographic History of Slaves in th British West Indies, 1680-1834 (Cambridge, 1985).

6. Population figures from Edward Long, History of Jamaica . . ., 3 vols. (London, 1774; rpt. 1970), I: 377.

7. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness, 178-79.

8. Robert V. Wells, The Population of the British Colonies in America before 1776 (Princeton, 1975), 195-96.

9. Eighteenth-century Jamaica, despite its importance within the first British Empire, has been relatively neglected historiographically. The indispensable source is Long, History of Jamaica. An equally indispensable source is Richard B. Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies, 1623-1775 (Baltimore, 1974), although this work is mainly economic in focus. Also important is Michael Craton and James Walvin, A Jamaican Plantation: The History of Worthy Park (London, 1970), 71-94. Still valuable is Frank W. Pitman The Development of the British West Indies, 1700-1763 (New Haven, 1917). Two interesting essays on planter ideology are Greene, "Changing Identity in the British Caribbean: Barbados as a Case Study," in Canny and Pagden (ed.), Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800, 213-66 and Michael Craton, "Reluctant Creoles: The Planters' World in the British West Indies," in Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan (eds.), Strangers Within the Realm: Cultural Margin of the First British Empire (Chapel Hill, 1991), 314-59.

10. St. Andrews Parish Register, Island Record Office, Spanish Town, Jamaica.

11. Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica, 1, 1663-1709, 20.

12. W. A. Claypole, "Land Settlement and Agricultural Development on the Liguanea Plains, 1655-1700, (M.Phil. Thesis, University of the West Indies, 1973), 170-75; idem, "The Merchants of Port Royal, 1655-1700," (Ph.D. Diss., University of the West Indies, 1974), 235-39. The character of St. Andrews changed after 1700. From being at the center of plantation developments in the seventeenth century, it became less central in the eighteenth century. By 1739, it produced just 4.4% of the colony's sugar and paid only 6.6% of the colony's poll tax. By 1768, sugar production had slipped to 3.8% of the island's total sugar production and St. Andrews share of the poll tax was down to 5.3%. Add. Mss. 12434 ff. 14-15; 12435 ff. 31-32, British Museum.

13. Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1972), 76-77,107-110, 332; idem, "The Barbados Census of 1680: Profile of the Richest Colony in English America," William and Mary Quarterly 3d Ser., 26 (1969): 3-30; Gary Puckrein, Little England: Plantation Society and Anglo-Barbadian Politics, 1627-1700 (New York, 1985), 181-94; Wells, Population of the British Colonies, 200-03, 278-88; Patricia A. Molen, "Population and Social Patterns in Barbados in the Early Eighteenth Century," William and Mary Quarterly 3d Ser., 38 (1971): 287-300.

14. This study makes few claims either for the reliability or for the accuracy of the data used to analyze early marriage patterns except to note that the sources that remain, deficient as they are, can provide broad outlines that are presumably moderately accurate. Certainly, the sources are weak in two importan respects. It is probable that a number of children's births, especially for short-lived children, are not recorded in baptismal records (which are themselves clearly biased in terms of selection) and it is evident that many deaths of children are not recorded. Moreover, the parish register only provide information concerning stayers in the parish and it is impossible to track down the people who left the parish for other parts. Indeed, it is impossible even t make guesses about the overall numbers of people who were only transient in the parish. These difficulties with sources are magnified over time: the parish register and wills appear to be more complete prior to 1700 than after that dat and decline appreciably in quality after 1730.

15. This assertion is difficult to prove but is an impression drawn from a survey of wills left by St. Andrews residents where, after the turn of the eighteenth century, an increasing number of men seem to die without wives. Wills, Island Record Office. See also Edward Long's impassioned plea for marriage and diatribe against "goatish embraces" between white men and black or colored slave mistresses. Long, History of Jamaica, 2: 281, 328.

16. Darrett B. and Anita H. Rutman, "'Now-Wives and Sons-in-Law': Parental Deat in a Seventeenth-Century Virginia County," in Thad W. Tate and David L, Ammerma (eds.), The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill, 1979), 158-62.

17. Ironically, the remarriage in 1698 of David and Susannah Crosby's son-in-la William Williams to Sarah Sleigh after the death of their eldest daughter Mary in 1697 was very long-lasting, continuing for thirty-five years until William Williams' death in June 1733.

18. James Knight, "Proposals for Increasing the Number of White Inhabitants in Jamaica," [n.d.], Add. Mss., 22,676, ff. 141, British Museum and idem, A Histor of Jamaica, Add. Mss., 12,418, ff. 27, British Museum.

19. R.N. Bean, "Food Imports into the British West Indies," in V. Rubin and A. Tuden (eds.), Comparative Perspectives on Slavery in New World Plantation Societies (New York, 1976), 588.

20. William Beeston to Board of Trade, 23 October, 1699, C.O. 137/5, Public Record Office, Kew. For a useful survey of the causes and effect of disease in the early Caribbean, see John R. McNeill, "The Ecological Basis of Warfare in the Caribbean, 1700-1804," in Maarten Ultee (ed.), Adapting to Conditions: War and Society in the Eighteenth Century (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1986), 26-42.

21. The following analysis clearly underestimates the number of children produced by the white inhabitants of St. Andrews as it ignores the products of unions outside marriage. The majority of these unions would have been between whites and slaves and the resulting children, most of whom would have remained slaves, would not have been noted in the Parish Register. It is difficult to quantify the number of children born as a result of white-slave unions but Barr Higman's analysis of slave returns between 1829 and 1832 suggest that in 10.7% of slave births one parent was white. Barry Higman, Slave Population and Econom in Jamaica, 1807-1834 (Cambridge, 1976), 140. Free colored children were occasionally noted in the Parish Register when baptized. Their numbers increase considerably after 1700, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of total baptisms: there were 19 baptisms of negroes and mulattoes prior to 1700 out of total of 1254 baptisms (1.5%) while there were 78 free negroes or mulattoes baptized between 1700 and 1750 out of a total of 729 baptisms (10.7%).

22. Rutmans, "'Now-Wives and Sons-in-Law'," 153-82.

23. This includes those marriages where the length of survivorship is unknown but where the marriage lasted for more than 16 years.

24. For an exploration of the effects of early death in the Chesapeake, see Tar and Ammerman, Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century, 126-82 and Daniel Blake Smith, "Mortality and Family in the Colonial Chesapeake," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 8 (1978): 403-27. For the Caribbean, see, Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 332-34. For the extreme individualism of the early Caribbean, see Greene, "Changing Identity in the British Caribbean: Barbados as a Case Study," in Canny and Pagden (eds.), Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 224-26; idem, Pursuits of Happiness, 45-47.

25. Long, History of Jamaica, II, 286. See also Trevor Burnard, "Inheritance an Independence: Women's Status in Early Colonial Jamaica," William and Mary Quarterly 3d. Ser., 48 (1991): 113.

26. In all but one case information concerning remarriage, including the date o remarriage, has been obtained from the St Andrews Parish Register.

27. If marriages made after 1730 are excluded because information on remarriage is especially patchy in this period, then the percentage of marriages resulting in remarriage between 1692 and 1730 increases to 31%.

28. Claypole, "Land Distribution and Agricultural Settlement," 140-52.

29. Thomas Lynch to the Earl of Sandwich, 14 October, 1671, Calendar of State Papers, 1669-1671, no. 640, 265; Claypole, "Land Settlement and Agricultural Development," 59-79.

30. Claypole, "Land Settlement and Agricultural Distribution," 81.

31. For studies arguing for reduced opportunity for white women in Jamaica compared to the American mainland see Burnard, "Inheritance and Independence," 93-114 and idem, "Family Continuity and Female Independence in Jamaica, 1665-1734," Continuity and Change 7 (1992): 181-98.

32. It should be noted that data on ages of marriage are particularly incomplet and unrepresentative in that most of those whose ages at first marriage are known were native born rather than immigrants and female rather than male. Just 23.6% of mate ages at first marriage are known compared to 45.5% of female ages For both men and women, these percentages increase over time, to 34% of men and 65% of women contracting marriages after 1692.

33. Barbara Bush, "White 'Ladies', Coloured 'Favourites' and Black 'Wenches'; Some Considerations on Sex, Race and Class Factors in Social Relations in White Creole Society in the British Caribbean," Slavery and Abolition 2 (1981): 245-62.

34. J. Hajnal, "European Marriage Patterns in Perspective," in D.V. Glass and D.E.C. Eversley (eds.), Population in History: Essays in Historical Demography (London, 1965), 101-43.

35. Thomas Thistlewood, for example, does not seem to have felt any need to tak a white wife despite living in Jamaica from 1750 to 1786 and seems to have suffered no social ostracism as a result of his many dalliances with his slaves and his over twenty year association with one slave in particular, Phibbah, wit whom he eventually lived in a nearly monogamous relationship. Douglas Hall, In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750-86 (London, 1989), 59-61 148, 215, 313-14.

36. Burnard, "Inheritance and Independence," 113.

37. From mid-century onwards, an increasing number of testators in St. Andrews wills refer to and leave bequests to slave women who were more than likely to b their mistresses. Whereas there were no manumissions of female slaves by male testators until 1737, from 1737 until 1775 11 of 97 male testators either freed or left property to female slaves or freedwomen. Wills, Island Record Office.

38. See Greene, Pursuits of Happiness, 177-80.

39. For a summary of the impressive literature on seventeenth-century Chesapeak demography, see the literature cited in the introduction to Lois Green Cart, Philip D. Morgan, and Jean B. Russo (eds.), Colonial Chesapeake Society (Chapel Hill, 1988).

40. David W. Galenson, "British Servants and the Colonial Indenture System in the Eighteenth Century," Journal of Southern History XLIV (1978): 44-45.

41. Ida Altman and James Horn (ed.), "To Make America": European Emigration in the Early Modern Period (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1991), 5.

42. By my estimation, using calculations of European emigration to the Americas made by Altman and Horn, 55.4% of British migrants to the colonies between 1607 and 1780 went to areas characterised by demographic disaster. It should be noted, moreover, that migrants from southern and western England--the metropolitan heart of empire--went in disproportionately large numbers to these areas. Thus, the experience of the typical English migrant to the British American colonies was more likely to be shaped by demographic failure and famil disarray than by demographic success. Altman and Horn, "To Make America," 3-5.

43. B. W. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean 1807-1834 (Baltimore, 1984), 397.

44. Charles Leslie, A New and Exact Account of Jamaica (Edinburgh, 1740), 321-26.

45. Higman, Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 129; Michael Craton, "Jamaican Slave Mortality: Fresh Light from Worthy Park, Longville, and the Tharp Estates," Journal of Caribbean History 3 (1971), 17-18.

46. This point is argued most strongly in Greene, Pursuits of Happiness, 154-69

47. This paragraph is an adaptation of the characteristics that distinguished early modern British American societies outlined in Jack P. Greene and J.R. Pol (eds.), Colonial British America (Baltimore, 1984), 13. For a good description of Barbados at the height of its success, see Dunn, "The Barbados Census of 1680."

48. See Greene, Pursuits of Happiness, 170-206.

49. ibid, 160-64.