The Sir Charles Price Rat and Colonial Failure as Told by Enslaved Laborers

Sir Charles Price was owner of Worthy Park plantation in Jamaica from 1730 to 1772, where he served as Speaker of the Assembly for nine years between 1745 and 1763. When the rat named after him was first recorded in natural histories by Edward Long and Patrick Browne, its origins were not yet established, and colonial naturalists simply linked the rat’s emergence with Price’s highly public presence on the island. However, by the early nineteenth century, West Indian literary writers began recording oral histories kept by enslaved laborers. In their telling, Price imported the novel rat species to Jamaica as a failed form of experimental pest control, where its importation was meant to eliminate other cane-rats. In an embarrassing twist, the rat joined in with the island’s vermin to feast on the sugar cane, eating away at the planters’ most valuable cash crop while spreading putrefying disease. To this day, the rat is a symbol of colonial and environmental arrogance. If enslaved laborers had not kept the history, according to these colonial writers, the rat’s story and moral lesson would have “descended into oblivion.”

Tracing these origins of the Sir Charles Price rat, I argue for the value of literary works, printed images, and folk tales in filling in the gaps of the early British Caribbean colonial record. Unlike traditional sources of West Indian history like government records and natural histories which present the colonies under propagandistic terms, literature and the oral record better document moments of anxiety and failure in eighteenth-century Jamaica. At a time when the island was considered the crown jewel of Britain's colonies, the Charles Price rat’s botched introduction demonstrates how planters’ desire to maximize returns on the crop could result in toxic harm to the island’s environment, the plantation’s laborers, and ultimately to the colonists themselves. In short, histories taken from enslaved laborers and recorded in literary sources document how Jamaica’s rise was one of fits and starts, where successes were just as frequently met with fiascoes.

Using the poster format, I will present short, rarely discussed sources, like dinner graces and songs from enslaved laborers, for discussion with my audience. Because these sources require both linguistic and generic analysis, I believe the poster format will allow me to unpack the many nuances embedded in two- and three-line textual sources. In addition, the poster format would allow me to present images of rodents in the eighteenth century to better contextualize how the Sir Charles Price rat aligns with and departs from European knowledge about domestic rats like the Norwegian or black rat.