A Hospitable Country: Egalitarianism, Sociability, and Racial Exclusion in 18th-Century Jamaica

Every commentator on white society in eighteenth-century Jamaica noted that white Jamaicans were famed for their hospitality. James Knight, writing in the 1740s, declared that “there is not more Hospitality, nor a more generous Freedom shown to Strangers in any Part of the World.” “Even vagrants,” another planter commented are seldom refused protection and food.” At the same time, white Jamaicans were notorious for how they treated enslaved people. No people, Charles Leslie argued, “excels them in a barbarous Treatment of Slaves.” Both sociability and cruelty were key features of white life in Jamaica during the African period of slavery. The two sets of behavior were not unconnected. Jamaicans, like other colonists in British America, developed a particular kind of civil and political society, in which rights for whites were extensive while black people were excluded from participation in social life. Sociability and racism cemented white society together. This paper draws on theories of sociability to test the long-standing thesis put forward about British American plantation societies by Edmund Morgan: that a commitment to racial inequality in plantation societies allowed for sociability and political inclusion for all people who belonged to the polity, making exclusive egalitarianism fashioned around the preservation of slavery and the adoption of an often compulsive culture of hospitality key to Jamaica’s particular social pathology.