Jamaican Blood Money: Black Bodies, Spanish Currency, and the Economics of Colonial State Formation in the 18th Century

Debates about varying conceptions of money raged within the walls and publications of the English government throughout the eighteenth century and overlapped with several strains of Enlightenment thought. In particular, controlling money - not limited to coins, credit, and paper currency - increasingly intertwined with state formation and legitimizing centralized authority. Secondary literature, such as Deborah Valenze’s Social Life of Money in the English Past, describes in detail the harsh results of these debates and policies for those at the bottom of English society, namely the dehumanization of the English poor. Concurrently, proliferating ideas about money also created tensions between the metropole and colonies, such as Jamaica. At first glance, the issues of colonial monetary supply and policies might seem to be a narrow one, confined to the planters, merchants, and other colonial elites who made up one segment of the population. However, this paper asks how did evolving ideas about government authorized currency affect the lives of free and enslaved people of color in eighteenth-century Jamaica?

Drawing on the journals and laws of the Jamaican assembly, financial pamphlets, and contemporary histories of the island, I argue (colonial) state control, surveillance, and punishment of black bodies was, at times, an intended consequence of monetary debates and policies. And, that in their evolving conceptions of money, the Jamaican ruling class juggled compliance with British imperial policies, a dependency on illicit Spanish trade and coins, and specters of external threats from Spain (and France) as well the ever-present internal threat of their large population of “foreign” free and enslaved people of African descent.