"Negros Ingleses" in Colombia: An Entangled History of Caribbean Slavery

Thousands of captives sold in the Caribbean port city of Cartagena de Indias in the 1700s arrived from British Jamaica through asientos (contracts) granted to British slave traders, who held considerable influence in the city. From 1714 to 1757, Jamaica was the chief supplier of bondspersons in the legal slave trade to New Granada through Cartagena. How many of them had spent extended time in that island, rather than being shipped through it, remains unclear, but certainly some of them were: as early as 1677, English administrators resolved to rid themselves of “refractory, dangerous, and bad negroes” for a profit by selling them to Spanish slave traders. Spanish colonial documents frequently refer to “Jamaican creoles” or “blacks from the plantations (plantajes) of Jamaica” as particularly rebellious. For example, Jamaicans formed the maroon community Tabacal in the Caribbean province of Cartagena de Indias (1688) and were central to the enslaved rebellions in Tadó (1728) in the Pacific gold mining region of Chocó. This paper examines the movement of enslaved creoles and Africans between Jamaica and colonial Colombia in shaping both places and the political culture of the African diaspora.