Acts of Assembly, passed in the Island of Jamaica; from 1681 to 1737.

£4,500 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

A vital digest of laws governing Jamaica over fifty years: the most important British colony in the Caribbean . This copy is complete with the engraved plan of the harbour at Port Royal. While none of the acts explicitly mention sugar, they are all in service to it, the major crop on this island: roads connecting plantations, establishing wharves and ports, duties (including on rum and estates), settling new parts of the islands and, of course, labour. After the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1494, Jamaica remained a Spanish colony until it was captured by the English in 1655. Thirty years prior, Barbados was claimed for England with the first settlers arriving in 1627. It quickly adopted a plantation economy and enslaved workforce and as such became a model for what followed in Jamaica. In his article on slave codes, Edward Rugemer writes that by “the early seventeenth century, when the English began to plant settlements in the Americas, African slavery had been a fixture in the Iberian Atlantic for more than a generation. The English did not have to invent slavery out of whole cloth but, in a similar manner to their French counterparts at the same time, they had to construct the legal and political structures to govern this labor institution, which for them was quite new” (Rugemer, 432). This volume is an ample demonstration of Rugener’s observation. Indeed, the first English civil government in Jamaica was established in 1661 and promptly adopted - with only a few revi

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