Regional Tumult, Constitutions, and the Political Calculus of Imperial Philanthropy in 1880s Jamaica

If nineteenth-century British imperialism was often about holding territory as cheaply as possible with as little manpower as possible, this was doubly true in the postemancipation Caribbean. As the former slave colonies slumped into varying degrees of economic ruin, many in Britain wanted to limit the money and resources devoted to these colonies. Yet not only did the Caribbean colonies continue to draw on imperial resources, but natural disasters and administrative crises often forced more aggressive imperial intervention on behalf of vulnerable or disgruntled subjects. This paper examines the confluence of two such moments in the late 1870s and early 1880s. In 1877, when a crippled Venezuelan schooner sailed into Kingston Harbor, Jamaican governor Anthony Musgrave confiscated the ammunition onboard, worried that the weapons may have been destined for a nearby island like Cuba, which was then embroiled in the Ten Years War. The owner of the ammunition was awarded damages, which Musgrave was obligated to pay. The question over which government had to pay the governor’s debt, Jamaican or imperial, prompted a serious debate about the unpopular 1865 constitution that the imperial government had imposed on Jamaica after the Morant Bay Rebellion. At the height of the ensuing political crisis, a fire, likely started by the disgruntled employee of a merchant, destroyed much of downtown Kingston, the capital of Jamaica. After a series of internal debates during which various administrators made clear that the crisis would not ordinarily warrant a loan, the Colonial Office offered substantial rebuilding loans to Kingston residents in recognition of the delicate political situation. Thus, the paper argues, regional tensions in and around the Caribbean basin not only influenced constitutional politics within Jamaica, they also dictated the degree of humanitarian intervention from the metropole.