The End of Alexander Swettenham’s Imperial Career: British Sovereignty, the United States Navy, and the 1907 Jamaican Earthquake

In mid-afternoon on January 14, 1907, an earthquake ripped through the island of Jamaica and shattered its capital city, Kingston. Amidst the chaos and confusion, another drama played out, as the colony’s governor, Sir Alexander Swettenham, rejected the medical aid and military manpower provided by the United States Navy. Swettenham’s rejection of the aid—a decision he made once it became clear that the Americans intended to take up policing functions around the city—sparked a diplomatic squabble between the United States and Great Britain. This paper focuses on debates among colonial officials, including Swettenham, about whether he had the right to assert British sovereignty over Jamaica. Bureaucrats in London agreed that he had the legal right to turn the Americans away, and they also shared his suspicions about the purpose of the American mission. Nevertheless, they questioned the wisdom of his actions at a moment when Britain’s posture towards the United States was changing. At the turn of the twentieth century, the US was rising in international prominence, especially in the Caribbean. At the same time, Britain had begun acquiescing to US demands in the Western hemisphere and, thanks to increasing European threats, had pulled the majority of British ships and manpower from North and South America, in effect entrusting the Caribbean colonies to the protection of the US navy. In an increasingly tense international climate, Britain could no longer afford to antagonize its only quasi-ally. Using newspapers, dispatches between the Colonial Office and Swettenham, and internal Colonial Office memoranda, this paper argues that, in the early-twentieth-century British Caribbean, Britain’s political sovereignty was often subordinate to other considerations: the metropole’s relative waning global dominance imposed limits on how much protection it could offer remote and less central colonies.