Negril, today, is a major resort in Western Jamaica with over 6,000 rooms. In the 1950s, however, Negril was no more accessible than it had been in the 1920s when Mary Gaunt, the Australian journalist [...]

In the 1950s, in the capital of Savanna-la-Mar the wharves of W.G. Norton & Co. and that of Bertram Arnold & Co. bustled with “barrowmen” and “lightermen”. Cargoes of sugar, logwood, coffee, h [...]

The days following the disturbance at Frome saw the emergence of unions with leaders who, as the events of the year 1938 unfolded, would take up the cause of the rights of workers in the cane fields a [...]

As we have seen, for centuries in Jamaica the precariousness of sugar had been a constant. The planters’ old bank was the Colonial Bank, which had established a branch in Savanna-la-Mar in 1912, four [...]

he twentieth century opened with the death of Queen Victoria. Her passing on January 22, 1901 ended the longest reign of a monarch in British history. In all parish capitals of Jamaica, there were chu [...]

In the year 1866, Jamaica became a full Crown Colony and for the next 19 years, the entire legislature would be nominated by the Crown. It did not take long for many of those who had at first been in [...]

In the early years of freedom interest in scientific agriculture spread rapidly throughout the Caribbean. Agricultural societies were established to facilitate the exchange of information on all aspec [...]

The Moravians are an ancient Protestant branch of Christianity having roots in the Greek Orthodox Church and originating in Moravia, which later became part of Czechoslovakia. Sixty years before Marti [...]

Glimpses of what life was like in Westmoreland in the second half of the nineteenth century can be found in the writings of three Englishmen who came to the parish during that period. Two were visitor [...]

The Indian Indentureship Scheme for Jamaica was part of an even wider movement of Indian labour. Workers from the sub-continent went to the islands of Mauritius, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and Fiji, and [...]