Security, Taxation, and the Imperial System in Jamaica, 1721–1782

White Jamaicans paid relatively high rates of taxation to support a powerful and assertive imperial state in schemes of settlement and security. They paid such taxes willingly because they were satisﬁed with what they got from the state. Furthermore, they believed they had a signiﬁcant stake in the processes by which taxes were collected and spent. The power of the colonial state depended on the empire being a loose fraternal alliance. Nevertheless, what worked for imperial and colonial Jamaica did not necessarily work elsewhere. Jamaica provides a case study of how the imperial state worked satisfactorily for imperial rulers and those colonists whom they ruled when both the state and colonial settlers shared common beliefs and when negotiations made it clear that the interests of all parties coincided.

historiographical reassessment of the place of the imperial state in colonial British America. 2 Attitudes toward the state in Jamaica and other colonies were protean and shaped by circumstances and by negotiations between the imperial center and individual polities at specific times, and dependent on these polities' spatial location and social character and value to the imperial project. 3 The benefit of the pre-1763 imperial system was that it accommodated diversity. By contrast, imperial policy after 1763 was more centralized and homogenous, which suited a colony like Jamaica more than others. 4 An examination of how its imperial structure operated from the 1720s to the 1780s reveals that Jamaica in fact depended on an active and interventionist imperial state provided that it could be controlled by an equally engaged colonial state, which benefitted from the centralizing and homogenizing policies adopted in the 1760s. Success depended on British statesmen understanding both the limits of their authority and the need to negotiate with local elites, and on local elites recognizing that some degree of increased taxation was necessary if such negotiation was to be effective. Such was the case in Jamaica after 1763, in stark contrast to North America. The accommodations made in Jamaica between a strong imperial state and an assertive colonial state demonstrate that the problems of taxation, which vexed colonists in British North America and helped facilitate a revolution, did not apply universally throughout the British Empire, where places like Jamaica, Ireland, and Scotland established a strong fiscal-military state devoted to ensuring white security. 5 T H E POLI T ICAL GEO GRAP HY OF EMP I RE Between 1690 and 1763, Britain developed a workable imperial "system" in which component parts of the empire were treated differently according to imperial conceptions of their value to Britain irrespective of local circumstances rather than the same rules applying to each territory. 6 A study of fiscal-military operations in eighteenth-century Jamaica illustrates the relationships between colonists and the imperial state beyond "salutary neglect" before the Seven Years War and followed by a disastrous period of attempted centralization in the lead-up to the American Revolution. 7 Whereas in many British North American colonies the imperial state had a limited presence, there was, as Elizabeth Mancke has argued, "another British America" in Canada, in Florida, and most of all in parts of the West Indies, where "the state had considerable presence, acquiring new territory through conquest and state-funded exploration." 8 The fiscal-military state in Britain and its empire matured over a century of British conflict with other European states, notably France. 9 This time of near-constant warfare required Britain to raise money through taxation or borrowing not just at home but elsewhere in the British Atlantic worldlike Jamaica, which it relatively heavily taxed, conspicuously militarized, and intensively governed. 10 In this respect, Jamaica's tax structure more closely resembled Britain's than that of many British North American colonies. The fiscal-military state in Britain in the second quarter of the eighteenth-century, and its extension into Scotland and Ireland, was of course much larger than its embryonic manifestations in British America, yet there were similar structures and aims, with state power in Jamaica operating primarily through the mobilization of revenue via taxation and the deployment of military power. 11 This tension between imperial ambitions for a more integrated empire and settler insistence on the imperial state recognizing local particularities was important in defining the early eighteenth-century British Empire. 12 The Board of Trade, for example, embraced a consistent policy aimed at consolidating imperial control of colonial affairs and operating colonies within a common plan. The working assumption was that an overarching system under Crown scrutiny would replace the proliferation of jurisdictions and provincial interests that had prevailed in colonial politics since 1607. In times of war, more powerful political actors superseded the Board of Trade's authority over colonial affairs, but in peacetime, the colonists' disregard of trade regulations and determination to make their own lawscoupled with the reluctance in many colonies (though notably not Jamaica) to provide troops in time of war-limited state control. 13 In the thirteen colonies that became the United States of America, the battle between the demand that colonists obey the imperial state's authority and setter colonials' insistence that they be allowed to control their own destiny had been deferred before 1763, in part because most colonies, like New York and Virginia, had been providing for their governmental needs with their own resources. In the end, however, as Justin du Rivage has insisted, disagreements over Britain's imperial design were irreconcilable, and every proposal for reconciliation after 1765 "ultimately foundered on radical colonists' demands for fiscal self-determination, and authoritarian reformers insistence on a reliable source of colonial revenue." 14 As John Murrin has argued, this enduring difference of opinion between British imperial statesmen and American colonists remains the enigma at the core of the American Revolution-though only on the British North American mainland, not elsewhere such as Jamaica. Between the 1720s and the 1760s, the growing power of the British state and its fiscal-military system created an ever more tightly integrated empire in terms of migration, the imperial economy, social, religious, and political cultures, and anglicization. Thus, as Murrin has maintained, the American Revolution was a countercyclical event-a crisis of imperial integration that the British state could not handle. 15 It was different elsewhere. The British fiscal-military state had more purchase in Scotland and Ireland than in colonial British America, where security needs persuaded local stakeholders that a stronger state accompanied by increased taxation was a necessary price to pay for imperial protection. 16 This was true also in Jamaica, where local legislators saw a need for imperial action to increase white population levels and to keep that population secure from external and internal attack-especially the latter-through both the deployment of military force and the use of state powers. Traditional Whig views on curbing executive power by a representative assembly equivalent to the British parliament coexisted with the conviction that state power, when deployed under the advice of local agents, was vital to the prosperity of the island and the wider British Atlantic.
Writings about empire dated before the start of the Seven Years' War display this attempt to moderate between competing imperial imperatives. In 1746, James Knight pointed out that although the colonial government had given considerable sums for the "Support of the Government of the Island," the cost of settling and protecting the island was much less than the £60,000,000 that Knight believed Jamaica had provided to Britain in the time since settlement in 1655 as "almost clear Proffit." He thought that Britain needed to compensate Jamaicans with substantial metropolitan subsidies, noting that "when the Affairs of the Nation are settled" in the mid-1740s, after war was concluded, "We have great Reason to Expect" that British money would remove the "Difficulties and Obstructions" that had inhibited the expansion of trade. Increased white immigration would then make full settlement of the island possible, which in turn would allow whites "to Strengthen and Secure their possessions." 17 Whether Jamaica was a net profit or loss to the empire has been a longstanding historiographical debate, but recent research has tended to endorse Knight's conclusions. At midcentury Jamaica's total wealth was very largeover £7.6 million. The island produced £634,670 in commodities per annum around 1750 and made an average annual contribution of £579,649 to the British economy. Such large sums-which rapidly increased between 1760 and 1783, when Jamaican wealth stood around £28 million-exceeded the 16 expenses of empire. 18 Klas Rönnbäck has estimated that the value-added contribution of all British activities associated with the plantation complex was 4 percent of GDP in 1721 and 7.5 percent in 1772, before dipping to 6 percent of GDP by 1782. 19 Key to this wealth was the tariff protection offered by enforcement of the Navigation Acts that protected Jamaican planters from competition from better and cheaper French sugar, as well as the security provided by the Royal Navy. 20 White Jamaicans also understood the threats to their security posed by Maroons (communities of ex-runaway slaves) before 1739, by enslaved people throughout the eighteenth century, and by the Spanish and French after midcentury, and would pay large taxes to keep themselves safe, with the proviso that the Jamaican Assembly had authority to spend such money. This system of security, carefully crafted in 1739 and again in 1760, would work until the 1790s, when it unraveled in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution, which put the Caribbean and the institution of slavery at the center of global consciousness. The British imperial government in the 1790s prioritized global geopolitics over the need to continue old practices of negotiating security concerns with settler elites.
This change in imperial decision-making toward policies being made in London and then implemented in the colonies without colonial input also coincided with the calamitous Second Maroon War in 1795-96-a Pyrrhic victory for the imperial state, albeit one achieved at an enormous cost, nearly bankrupting the colony while weakening protection that the Maroons provided against slave revolt, as part of the 1739 agreement whereby they acted as a police force, returning absconded enslaved people to plantations. 21 Military protection was a key part of Jamaica's system of security, but white Jamaicans knew well that demographic problems imperiled their safety (although at least until the end of the American Revolution, some hoped that concerted government action might rework the basic demographics of the island). 22 Meanwhile, the enslaved population had ballooned from 7,768 in 1673 to 96,946 in 1730 and to 150,000 in 1750, whereas the number of whites barely increased from 8,000 to 10,000. By 1782, a white population of no more than 15,000 presided over an enslaved population of 240,000. 23 Max Edling's contention that the first half of the eighteenth century was "an age when the central government gave little in return for the subjects' tax money" held for some parts of British North America, such as Virginia, but certainly not for Jamaica. 24 Most government expenditure in eighteenthcentury Britain, as elsewhere in Europe, focused on the narrow if important matter of making war. But much of this investment was linked to larger imperial projects for securing Britain's geopolitical position in the Atlantic and dominance in Europe. 25 It is thus difficult to distinguish monies spent on colonial matters from money spent on maintaining Britain's naval and military might while Britain also invested, as Steve Pincus and James Robinson argue, directly in imperial development. 26 The colonial state, of course, was not the same as the imperial state. And indeed, the imperial state differed in every imperial possession, both before and after attempts at imperial reform from 1763 onward intended to lessen colonial differences in favor of imperial uniformity.
Before 1763, the British American colonies operated essentially as a fraternal alliance, structured by parliamentary sovereignty and shared judicial, military, and administrative institutions. Mutual trust and affection between people with a common British heritage and a shared constitutional inheritance cemented this alliance. 27 Colonies faced varying needs, however, and received different treatment. Virginia and New York got little in return for low levels of taxation, as did many of the smaller islands in the British West Indies. There, colonial self-autonomy was largely realized. By contrast, Jamaica, Antigua, and Massachusetts, which had greater strategic and economic value, enjoyed higher levels of imperial spending, becoming much larger "colonial states" that collaborated with the imperial government for common aims. In these colonies, local needs necessitated much more careful negotiation between the imperial state and its needs and the local elites' desire to restrict those needs to local interests.
From the 1720s to the 1780s, the imperial system operated in Jamaica as a complementary interaction between an imperial fiscal-military state, focused on defense and warfare undertaken by imperial troops and funded by high taxes paid on sugar and rum, and the colonial fiscal-military state controlled primarily by the Jamaican Assembly. The latter subsidized a series of imperial garrisons, raised funds to pay for superintendents in Maroon territories, invested in economic development through public works, and underwrote schemes to attract white settlers. Between 1721, when they began financing plans to settle Jamaica's undeveloped interior, and 1782, when the demands of the American Revolutionary War changed the nature of colonial government, white Jamaicans reaped substantial benefits from the hefty taxes they paid to both the imperial and colonial states. 28 With the exception of Tacky's Revolt in 1760, when a rebellion among the enslaved raised significant security concerns for white Jamaicans, the arrangements between the imperial and colonial states kept the island safe. Westmoreland in 1766); one in Hanover, which took place after the Fiftieth Regiment was sent to British North America in July 1776, did not come to fruition, but its planning suggests that it could have been as extensive as Tacky's. 29 The imperial state's ability to prevent or quell slave rebellions justified the cost of maintaining an elaborate security apparatus in the minds of Jamaica's white elites.
T H E COLONIAL JAMAICAN STAT E In Jamaica, the colonial and the imperial states were in constant interplay. White Jamaicans' relationship with the imperial state was shaped by the unavoidable fact that they lived in the middle of a Caribbean Sea surrounded by hostile European powers and in the midst of a harshly treated and numerically dominant enslaved population. 30 As Richard S. Dunn has argued, the British West Indies and British North America took separate pathways after the Glorious Revolution. For the latter, 1688 suggested the uselessness and danger of administrative centralization. The remarkable dynamism of those colonies in the early eighteenth century validated for powerful elites the wisdom of a set of arrangements with the Crown that made them semiautonomous entities. 31 By the 1760s, many Americans who declared for revolution were committed to a concept of negative liberty, meaning "freedom from a number of political and social evils, including arbitrary government power," and a tendency to see "government as malevolent." 32 As James Knight noted in the 1740s, American colonies were meant to pay their way, raising money and supporting "Themselves by Their own Prudence and labour to the Condition and Circumstances They are now in without any 29. James Robertson, " Tackey  Assistance from the Crown." Such self-sufficiency, he argued, may have been appropriate for some colonies, but not for Jamaica. 33 In the British West Indies, planters were frightened by how their control over their islands' politics had been severely challenged before the Glorious Revolution. They knew that their power could only be preserved through assistance from an interventionist imperial state; they needed both to defend their economy from slave revolts and to protect their trade from foreign competition. Each of these ambitions "crystalliz[ed] their economic dependency." 34 From the 1720s onward, colonists accepted that they needed to pay their fair share of taxes to ensure their safety. 35 They were willing to do so because they believed that they controlled the disbursement of funds collected for the government. 36 Jamaican taxation increased in both absolute terms and relative to wealth and population during the eighteenth century. 37 Revenues and spending increased most rapidly during periods of warfare, with major spikes during the First Maroon War in the late 1730s, again in 1760-61 in the aftermath of Tacky's Revolt, and then again during the American and French revolutionary wars. Government spending outstripped growth in population and wealth. The burden of taxation rose from 1-3 percent of national income to 6-8 percent, peaking in moments of crisis such as 1761 and 1782. The main taxes were on estates not having the required numbers of white employees (the deficiency tax); on individuals (poll tax); and on land. In the 1780s, direct taxes accounted for 31.8 percent of government revenue. Indirect taxes-duties on cattle, horses, and rum, taxes on imports and exports, stamp duties, and customs-accounted for 27.7 percent of revenues. The permanent revenue of £8,000 Jamaica currency under the Revenue Act of 1728 was 12.5 percent, and arrears of taxes from previous years stood at 28.2 percent. 38 The collection costs were low. Edward Long calculated that it took less than £1,785 to collect revenues of more than £40,000. The average amount of taxation paid per free person varied considerably depending on circumstances but ranged from between £2 and £4 in times of peace. Jamaicans spent around 60 or 70 percent of this money on defending the island from slave insurrections and foreign invasions. These expenditures confirmed the central concerns of the ruling elite and helped to subsidize a growing imperial military and naval presence. 39 Table 1 shows high levels of taxation in Jamaica by colonial standards, even if they were miniscule in imperial terms. Britain paid by far the most taxes in the empire, with revenues of over £10 million in 1774 compared with just under £1 million in Ireland and only £125,207 in the six most important colonies of British America. 40 Jamaica's white population paid comparatively high taxes: the island's cost of living was very high, debt levels were probably much higher than anywhere else in the British Atlantic world, and the expenses of running estates were large. Nevertheless, these levels of taxation would have been bearable for most white Jamaicans, even in years like 1782 when per capita taxes levied by the imperial state rose above £8. 41 In short, Jamaica's white residents enjoyed a blended colonial and imperial state system that offered them real benefits, although they did occasionally grumble about high taxes. For example, Thomas Thistlewood, a resident small planter, complained in 1772 that "such enormous taxes" that he had paid that year were "never known in Jamaica before." His tax bill had risen from £3.26 in 1766 to £8.30 in 1772, but then rose again to £9.41 in 1778, and to an unprecedented £24.98 in 1781 in the wake of a devastating hurricane that destroyed his house and wrecked most of the wider parish he lived in. He reserved his chief complaints, though, for residents who 38 paid less tax than they should have. He submitted proposals to the local parish vestry that would have produced, in his opinion, fairer taxation of large estates. 42 Thistlewood's grievance was not over taxation by a colonial state, or even imperial taxation, but with his fellow planters who shirked their duties to the "public" of the island by withholding the resources that this blended state system needed to function. He had witnessed Tacky's Revolt in 1760 and had met the Maroons who helped to protect white planters in return for the subsidies formalized in the treaties of 1739, so he knew what would happen if the relationship between the imperial and colonial states broke down. 43 On a broader level, Jamaican planters recognized that control of the colonial state and its powers of taxation enabled them to dictate how the imperial state operated. A political compromise in 1729 gave the governor a permanent revenue in return for confirmation that the laws  and statutes-and liberties-of England applied to Jamaica. Though planters complained continually about this grant, which was unique in British America, they recognized that it also gave them massive financial leverage over how government money was to be spent, as well as the ability to exert wide authority over both the colony's internal polity and the imperial state itself. 44 This financial leverage explains why white Jamaicans saw no contradiction between their fervent defense of colonial prerogatives and their reliance on imperial protection. They shared many similar ideological biases with North Americans, especially with slaveholders in plantation societies,  but they did not share the common cause that united North Americans after 1763-the hatred of imperial taxation without representation-because they saw firsthand the benefits that this taxation offered. By contrast, North Americans considered this violation of colonial rights as an example of tyranny, likely to lead to further attacks on colonists' liberty. 45 SET T LEMENT AND SECURI T Y Relatively high taxation rates worked well to keep Jamaica secure from internal and external invasion, but less well during this period to increase white settlement. Even though white Jamaicans were happy with government expenditure attempting to attract white settlers,, the dearth of Europeans was compounded by a malign disease environment where yellow fever and malaria were rampant killers, and a population in which white demographic decline already exceeded enslaved plantation workers' death rates.. 46 A collaboration between the colonial state and the imperial government, both of whom shared the concerns of local planters for economic development and strategic security, confronted the problem of a cohort of white men too small to staff large sugar estates, which had hamstrung the expansion of plantation agriculture into Jamaica's unsettled areas outside the southeast coast and parts of central Jamaica. As Governor Robert Hunter commented to the assembly in 1731, "Nothing can prevent the growth of the evils you labour under, but the speedy peopling of the unsettled part of the country." 47 Initial efforts focused on reforming a series of Deficiency Acts passed from the late seventeenth century onward, which fined estate owners when the ratio of whites to blacks slipped below set levels, with the funds they raised often diverted toward subsidizing military needs such as fighting Maroons in the First Maroon War (1731-39). 48 In practice, these acts rarely succeeded in their demographic aims. Meanwhile, the cost of providing white overseers frequently exceeded the fines, so the Deficiency Acts were generally viewed simply as one more cost of doing business on sugar estates. Planters adjusted their management practices to employ "privileged blacks" as drivers. These drivers supplemented the limited number of paid white overseers and bookkeepers working as supervisors of the enslaved work force. 49 As early as 1715, the Board of Trade had argued "that if all Mulattoes and Indians were declared free, it would be another help toward the peopling of the island." 50 However, as Daniel Livesay has demonstrated, establishing the place of free people of color within Jamaica's intricate class and racial structures was a delicate question for white Jamaicans. On the one hand, incorporating them within free society helped expand Jamaica's settler base, since it would be easier and cheaper for wealthy, anglicized, mixed-race Jamaicans to transition to being thought of as white than it would be to bring over "boys and girls, of seven years upwards . . . at the public expense." On the other hand, advancing mixed-race people to be legally considered as white people diluted a fundamental understanding within white Jamaican society-namely, that the advantages of "belonging" needed to be confined solely to them. Progress depended on finding measures that soothed white colonial fears while serving imperial interests. 51 The response of governors and the assembly to the problem of limited white settlement was to use state power to open up more of the lands still vested in the Crown for European immigration, noting that "nothing can conduce more to the security, wealth and defense of this island than the giving proper encouragement to white people to come over and settle the uncultivated lands thereof." Their plans included offering white settlers three hundred acres of land upon establishing residence; constructing barracks for the military; raising white and black troops; and imposing levies on planters to provide enslaved labor to construct roads, as well as 49. William and Edmund Burke noted that plantation owners "find it more easy to pay the penalty . . fortifications that would become military posts. Possibly, these forts were modeled on Roman coloniae: they would settle loyal whites in strategic points and thus redress the demographic imbalances on the island. The posts would also help with conflicts against the Maroons by interrupting their movements across the island. 52 Fiscal, military, and civil power would simultaneously support military action against the Maroons, correct the demographic imbalance between whites and blacks, and establish new economic resources that could be tapped through taxation. None of these plans succeeded, however, because it was difficult to attract settlers to remote areas where high mortality rates prevented population growth. Governor Charles Knowles, a vociferous critic of the efforts, estimated in 1754 (although his figures seem inflated) that in the late 1740s and early 1750s the colony had spent as much as £30,000-all raised through taxationtrying to bring seven hundred English families to Jamaica. 53 By the early 1760s, after the shock of Tacky's Revolt, Jamaica had given up on settlement plans.
Other forms of collaboration between the colonial and imperial fiscalmilitary states, however, had borne fruit and provided some of the same benefits. These collaborations focused on the Maroons, who had established themselves in autonomous fiefdoms in the rugged countryside of the Jamaican interior by the late seventeenth century. 54 They first became a threat to white rule in the 1720s, preventing the spread of the large plantation system to northern regions of the island, as Governor Nicholas Lawes mentioned in an address to the assembly in 1722. Between 1723 and 1738, the assembly authorized at least twenty-four acts to raise parties to suppress the Maroons, compared with six between 1699 and 1719. Jamaican officials failed repeatedly in their efforts, although they occasionally killed a few individuals in raiding expeditions. The Maroon settlements provided a refuge for runaway slaves and also challenged white Jamaicans' precarious dominance over a growing slave population. 55 Tensions led to warfare following the Anglo-Spanish War of 1727-29, when colonists thought foreign invaders might combine with Maroons and possibly to provoke a slave rebellion. 56 Dealing with Maroons was expensive, with Edward Long calculating that raiding parties had cost £240,000 over ten years, accounting for the bulk of tax increases for those years. Meanwhile, Governor John Ayscough estimated that between 1729 and 1734, the assembly had expended £105,000 to pay for expeditions against the Maroons. 57 Planters also used the colonial state to secure manpower to assist the effort. For example, in October 1734, the assembly passed an act putting martial law into force and levying black and white labor to support military deployments, while in 1730, the imperial government made its own contribution by stripping the garrison at Gibraltar of eight companies (or about six hundred) men for service in Jamaica against the Maroons. 58 The assembly and the colonial state reluctantly subsidized this expanded Jamaican garrison through a raft of new taxes that raised total revenues from £31,000 in 1728 to £40,000 in 1731. 59 The economic burden was thus large, and the political burden even larger.
These expenditures did not defeat the Maroons in battle, but they did alter the balance of forces sufficiently to enable Jamaica's powerful mideighteenth-century governor, Edward Trelawney, to negotiate a peace with them in 1739 that held for nearly sixty years until the Second Maroon War of 1795-96. The Jamaican state was the major beneficiary of this settlement, even more than individual white colonists, which channeled the Maroons into a new imperial role as policemen and military auxiliaries, funded by colonial taxes. 60 One contemporary, probably Chief Justice Thomas Fearon, praised Trelawney's "mild Government" of the Maroons for transforming white Jamaicans' greatest internal foe into a considerable supporter of the plantation regime. Maroons, he claimed, "opened the Highways, [and] prevented or suppressed all Insurrections of the Negroe and other Slaves." In addition, they "never failed to bring back all runaway Slaves to the Service of their respective Masters" and "kept the Peace, and found Ease and Prosperity under the Protection of the Laws." The result, he believed, was a dramatic increase in "new Settlements . . . in all the extreme Parts of the Country," which, he argued, contributed "very greatly towards the Security of the Island" and provided "a most immediate Safeguard against the Depredations of foreign or Domestick Foes." 61 The treaty of 1739 enabled planters to open the rich sugar lands of the northern extremities of the island to plantation agriculture and profit. For example, the parish of Saint James in northwest Jamaica, which had been marginal in 1734 due to the Maroon threat, was Jamaica's wealthiest and most productive parish by 1768, with the largest enslaved population (21,749) and the second highest number of cattle (15,137). These totals marked the island's highest increases by parish since 1739 in both categories (847 percent and 1,277 percent, respectively). 62 Indeed, almost 60 percent of the sugar produced in Jamaica in 1768 came from seven parishes on the eastern and western peripheries of the island, all of which had opened up after the Maroon treaties concluded in 1739, and they poured increasing revenues into British coffers via sugar duties. 63 The expansion of the sugar frontier in Jamaica happened therefore not by settling white people but through the same mixture of fiscal and military state power that had been deployed earlier.

T H E SLAVE REBELLIONS OF 1760-1761
The overall relationship of imperial and colonial governance and taxation in Jamaica had, therefore, been established well before 1760, but it was sealed in April and May that year, when a series of violent revolts by rebellious slaves in Kingston and in northern and southwestern Jamaica rocked the island. A combination of the skilled leadership of Jamaican Governor Henry Moore, who received a baronetcy for his efforts, the effective deployment of British troops, sailors, and soldiers resident on the island because of the Seven Years' War, and the military strength of Maroons managed to quash the rebellion. But the revolt revealed the danger settlers faced in a society with a majority enslaved African population laboring under extremely oppressive conditions. It also highlighted the failure of efforts to redress the demographic imbalance. 64 Funds for white immigration and settlement had totaled about £12,045 between 1745 and 1754, about 4 percent of the £297,494 allocated for disbursement by the assembly in this decade, compared with the £180,668 allocated for defense and policing. Funds for white settlement now dried up entirely. 65 By contrast, colonial expenditure on the imperial military soared. Local parishes spent between £35,000 and £45,000 sterling per annum on building inland barracks, with the sums reaching over £70,000 sterling in 1774. 66 The vestrymen of St. Dorothy, a small, mostly inland parish, complained in 1767 that all its parish taxes barely met the cost of quartering a company of troops. In 1773, the cost of maintaining an expanded imperial garrison in Jamaica stood at £18,000, or nearly two-thirds of what the total government revenues had been in 1750. 67 The planters received protection, while the British government could not only secure a vital economic and strategic asset but also, as in Ireland, move part of the unpopular standing army out of Britain. 68 This decision to increase considerably imperial military expenditure reflected how the slave rebellions of 1760-61 had tested the security arrangements of the 1750s and found them wanting. Vincent Brown created a website on the revolt with a day-by-day guide to events, which shows that the Maroons wavered before supporting the troops and militia whom Governor Moore ordered to attack the rebels in Westmoreland. The Maroons perhaps wanted to assess the rebels' chances of success before committing to honoring the terms of the 1739 treaty that enjoined them to help capture escaped slaves. On May 29, 1760, according to Edward Long, the rebels had a major success over white troops at an inland wooded area called Rebel's Barricade, where a party of militia was "struck with terror . . . thrown into confusion and routed." The survival of the island stood in the balance, but possibly because Jamaica was well garrisoned and had lots of troops in the area, the Maroons decided to support Moore's assault. 69 On June 2, a detachment of the Forty-Ninth Regiment and militia (horse and foot) from three parishes, along with two detachments of Maroons, attacked the rebels, killing a great number of them and thus averting the crisis. This combination of troops, militia, and Maroons, operating within a well-garrisoned state and forming a mutually supportive military system, became the preferred option for Jamaican defense after 1761. The imperial garrisons helped to maintain the loyalty of the Maroons; the formidable military skills of the Maroons helped the garrisons to husband their resources by taking on the business of internal security; and both served to strengthen the colonial militia. 70 White Jamaicans and Britons thus increasingly supported a strong imperial and colonial state because they knew that an imperial state operating powerfully in white Jamaican interests served them both best. Both gained a deepening appreciation of the need for the imperial government to have enough revenue, and white Jamaicans stood ready to appropriate even larger amounts of money between 1760 and 1775 to support military and policing measures intended to strengthen internal security than they had between 1739 and 1760. Jamaicans accepted heavier taxation not only because it was spent on popular measures and could be paid for by growing prosperity but also because the system of raising revenue worked within the ambit of local politics, which suited the interests of the planters and merchants who paid most of the costs of defense. 71 Jamaican planters supported an increased tax burden in large part because they could oversee the expenditures and because most of the additional revenues went to internal security demands that the planters supported. 72 And because officials were prepared to work out these various compromises on a bilateral and relatively ad hoc basis, this relationship with the imperial state could work within the same imperial system that structured Britain's connections to other colonies such as Barbados, Virginia, and New York. 73 Jamaica's relations with the Crown had suffered various moments of strain before 1760, and would continue to do so thereafter, but the risk of political contagion was low because neither the island nor the mother country saw the relationship as a definitive model for other colonies. As part of a process of political negotiation, both sides could afford to grandstand, to engage in political and financial brinksmanship, and to make extravagant demands, since this political agitation was relatively contained and isolated from other colonial negotiations. 74

T H E CHALLENGE OF T H E 1780s
This system whereby white Jamaican planters shouldered relatively large taxes in return for imperial protection survived into the 1770s. The wealth that the white elites made from plantation agriculture and trade with Spanish America and Africa allowed them to pay the considerable costs of maintaining detachments of regular soldiers, a militia increasingly composed of free blacks, and Maroon establishments throughout the island. Unlike planters in British North America, white Jamaicans willingly armed black men as soldiers. As long as black troops were kept under the close control of colonial officers, Jamaican elites condoned the intensive use of free blacks and even enslaved men in the service of imperial strategic aims designed to overcome West Indian demographic realities. Epidemic disease, especially yellow fever, caused enormous losses of European soldiers and sailors during the siege of Cartagena in 1741-42, the siege of Havana in 1762, the disastrous San Juan expedition to Nicaragua in 1780, and the threatened French invasion of Jamaica in 1782. It was thought better to use black soldiers as cannon fodder in dangerous Caribbean warfare than to risk supposedly more valuable white regulars. 75 The early 1780s, after France and Spain entered the Revolutionary War in North America, brought some of the worst years that Jamaican planters had ever faced. The slave trade, which was crucial to maintaining and increasing the number of coerced laborers in a relentlessly oppressive plantation system, fell to its lowest levels; 1780 marked the nadir with just 3,763 enslaved Africans arriving on the island, a fraction of the 15,000 annual arrivals of the early 1770s. Prices for slaves-when any could be obtainedincreased dramatically. Such inflation caused difficulties for white enslavers and resulted in starvation and destitution for enslaved people. The hurricane of October 1780 magnified this privation, especially among the enslaved. Meanwhile, the British defeat at Yorktown in October 1781 led to preparations in Saint-Domingue for a full-fledged assault on Jamaica. These preparations led public expenditures to increase by 445 percent over the modest expenditures of 1774, which were 241 percent higher even than 1760, the last year of major crisis on the island. 76 Between May 1779 and June 1783, the Jamaican Assembly spent at least £60,000-equivalent to the entire prewar annual budget-on repairing the forts and fortifications commanding the approaches to Kingston Harbour, which was the equivalent of about 269,245 days of work by enslaved labor. 77 The colonial state also cut deeper into the fabric of Jamaican economy and society: it passed an order in June 1780 that all the parishes in the central and eastern districts of the island "allot one Negro out of each and every hundred Negroes in their respective parishes to work on the forts and fortifications, furnished with hoes, bills and baskets." This order allowed for a corvée that would have raised some two thousand people and temporarily expropriated from enslavers perhaps hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of enslaved property. 78 Not since the First Maroon War of the 1730s had the colonial state intervened so directly in the property of its constituents.
Jamaica, however, survived the crisis months between October 1780 and April 1782 surprisingly well. Admiral George Rodney's victory over a strong French fleet at the Battle of the Saintes in April 1782 saved the island from invasion from neighboring Saint-Domingue. Relief at their escape from invasion sent white Jamaicans into deliriums of excitement: The island authorized a magnificent statue of Rodney, resplendent in a Roman toga, and located it in a prominent position in the colonial capital of Saint Jago de la Vega, where it still stands today. The assembly paid at least 2,000 guineas to the sculptor and spent almost as much transporting the statue to the island and building an appropriate setting for it, all paid for by taxes. 79 In addition, Kingston merchants raised £1,500 to put on a dinner and "grand entertainment" for Rodney when he visited the island. The money that Jamaicans had authorized for military expenses, including the 1774 purchase of a property near Kingston-the Admiral's Pen, where the senior Royal Navy officer in the western Caribbean could live and entertain when he was in station-was being put to good use. Along with a series of gifts to major figures, these initiatives yoked together and reinforced the connection between the colonial and imperial states. The Jamaican state could associate itself with the victories of imperial Britain and affirm the combined interests of the two. The unprecedented decision by Parliament to grant £40,000 to Jamaica in 1781 as an act of imperial charity in the wake of the devastating hurricane of 1780, and as "testimony of the tender regard of government, for the faithful subjects of the King, in all parts of his majesty's dominions and of the good will borne them by the people of this country," again showed how the imperial and colonial states could work together even during a moment of grave imperial crisis occasioned by the American War for Independence. 80 The Jamaican state itself handled the business of distributing the grant-albeit contentiously, by favoring planters over poorer whites and excluding free people of color entirely-further strengthening the sense of shared interests and complementary spheres of activity already established in fiscal and military matters since the 1720s. 81 The travails of the 1780s highlighted the delicately blended colonial and imperial state that had existed since 1760, in which white Jamaicans willingly paid high taxes for a functioning security settlement. The deployments of regular troops on the island, encouragement of the Royal Navy, and reliance on well-compensated and well-supervised Maroon communities stood up well under immense pressure. 82 Jamaica benefitted in 1782 from having a skilled governor, Archibald Campbell, who, like Henry Moore during Tacky's Revolt, proved adept at keeping Jamaican residents calm, ensuring that restless and starving slaves did not rebel, and managing a complicated military situation. 83 Yet it was intention-the carefully worked out relationship between settlers, the imperial state, and semiautonomous Maroon communities-rather than luck that preserved Jamaica in a time of great peril. And prosperity soon returned to the island economy. Following Saint-Domingue's great slave rebellion of 1791, by 1793, the Jamaican plantation system boomed as never before (or after): the public debt, which had reached £114,608 in 1782, dropped to £11,657. 84

CONCLUSION
The island-wide survey Edward Long included in his impressive threevolume History of Jamaica indicates that white Jamaicans accepted and welcomed a strong imperial state. Long was a fervent Whig, but not of the radical antigovernment kind found in Massachusetts, and his work offers an impressive-if opinionated-guide to elite understandings of the relationship between colonists and the imperial state. 85 He was contemptuous of the "hirelings, fools and sycophants" whom Britain sent out to become governors, but mainly complained that they were men of undistinguished background out for the main chance. He did not share the disdain felt by radical British North American Whigs for strong government. 86 He was, instead, a proud Patriot who believed that Jamaica had progressed wonderfully in the 120 years since English settlement in 1655, and he believed that the island had the potential, if various obstacles were overcome, to continue an ongoing upward trajectory.
Those improvements could only occur under the influence of a strong and assertive imperial state, attuned to colonial interests and respectful of gaining elite Jamaicans' consent before embarking on schemes to improve settlement and security. 87 When Long reviewed the history of the Jamaican state, he did not criticize the assembly for exceeding its powers in attempting to plant internal settlements, but rather the effort's ineffectiveness. White settlement, he thought, was practical if properly done, even though it might require the colonial state (with the help of the British governor) to harm the rights of individuals in serving the common good, through appropriation of property. "I am not without hopes that the legislature of Jamaica will in time be roused into a serious attention to the further improvement of their country," he stated, "by a few easy measures which require only judgment in setting them on foot and unabated perseverance in conducting them to a happy effect." 88 Long therefore celebrated a powerful and assertive state that in responding to local circumstances was genuinely participatory, at least for that narrow section of the population who belonged to the political nation. 89 This well-placed Jamaican's attitude differed from prevailing opinion in island colonies such as Barbados, where the imbalance between white and black was less skewed, where a powerful colonial state was less necessary, and where the imperial government had less to offer, and therefore less right to expect the planters to give anything in return. 90 Long's Jamaican perspective also differed from many colonies in British North America, although not those in Florida or Canada, where many people "cast a suspicious eye on even their own colonial governments . . . [as] remote and unrepresentative." 91 But it was certainly in line with evolving British ideas of an empire predicated on a strong state that would ensure security and promote economic development. It was also congruent with the experience of Britons in Bengal and Ireland, the two other most strategically and economically important imperial territories from the 1763 Treaty of Paris. These regions were alike in having serious defense concerns, and in depending for their future prosperity on expensive economic development plans that required substantial governmental underwriting. In all three, ruling elites accepted a degree of imperial intervention from London and relatively high taxation rates to ensure British rule over restive indigenous populations. 92 As imperial structures altered after 1763 to accommodate the new reality of power in the colonies, and as statesmen tried to impose some kind of uniformity on a complex and heterogeneous collection of imperial possessions, this tradition of colonial state-building in Jamaica, Ireland, and Bengal therefore fit comfortably with new (or old) metropolitan expectations and models. It did so even as key groups within British North America moved increasingly out of step with Britain, building on their own divergent understandings of the Glorious Revolution legacy that distrusted rather than welcomed a strong state.
In the historiography of the British Empire in the eighteenth century, the assumptions held by the generation that "lost" America still dominate perceptions about how empire worked, both before the American Revolution and in places that did not join the rebellious thirteen colonies. Looking at how the imperial and colonial states interacted in Jamaica offers a different perspective on these matters. Furthermore, examining the operations of the imperial state from a broader perspective answers important questions about its relationship with colonists throughout British America in the eighteenth century. 93 The integrity of the British Empire, which had been strong in the first half of the eighteenth century and had reached a peak with the fruits of victory in the aftermath of the Seven Years' War, shattered in the second half of the century. 94 By the late eighteenth century, all European powers-and probably Britain most of all-struggled to transform what Lauren Benton has called the porous "fabric" of imperial sovereignty, almost string-like in its composition, as Patrick Griffin has noted, into something cohesive. 95 Such uniformity as had emerged by the 1760s proved to be a major policy error. The power of the eighteenth-century British imperial state and its manifestation in colonial legislation and spending depended on the empire being a loose fraternal alliance. It worked before 1763 because allowances had been made for local circumstances in ways that the imperial reformers of the 1760s-flushed with victory after the end of the Seven Years' War, obsessed with cutting costs, and determined to impose a common order on a diverse set of possessions-could not comprehend.
Jamaica provides an eighteenth-century case study of how the imperial state worked for imperial rulers and those colonists who shared common beliefs and, more importantly, agreed on how to implement government actions only after careful negotiations in which the interests of both parties coincided. 96 Though an extreme example, by virtue of its exposed strategic position, the demographic imbalance between whites and blacks, and its economic importance, Jamaica differed in degree rather than kind from other colonies and territories in the British Atlantic. Eighteenth-century statesmen as different as Charles Townshend, Benjamin Franklin, and Edmund Burke understood these imperial realities. 97 Less sophisticated thinkers like Lord North and George Grenville, however, were seduced by plans that forced the empire into one colonial model and thought that the same solutions were applicable to the problems throughout the empire. 98 The American War for Independence resulted from a failure to understand this fundamental reality about the need to treat colonies within an imperial framework according to their local circumstances. It is therefore not surprising when we look at how white Jamaicans viewed the imperial and colonial states that residents of this island chose not to join their northern cousins in rebellion.