people and slaves per household. Nevertheless, Kingston accounted for 7 percent of Jamaica’s population in 1774. By this time it was the third largest town in British America, with around 14,200 people, more than twice the size of contemporary Cap Français, which had only 6,143 people in 1775.35 More important, just under one-third of white Jamaicans dwelt in Kingston, and 40 percent of free people of color lived there. In contrast, 25 percent of Saint-Domingue’s whites lived in the three largest cities, and less than 10 percent of the free people of color were urban residents.36 Kingston’s population increased rapidly after the American Revolution. By 1788, its 26,478 people meant that it had 12 percent of Jamaica’s population, including 6,539 whites and 3,280 free people of color. Most slaves lived in the countryside, but with 16,659 slaves, Kingston accounted for 7 percent of Jamaica’s enslaved population. Kingston had more slaves and free people of color combined than in all the urban centers of British North America.37
It was a heterogeneous place. The cacophony of voices and jumble of complexions in Kingston struck observers forcefully. Curtis Brett, a Dubliner from a middling commercial background, who arrived in Kingston from London in 1748, wrote vividly about the heterogeneous character of the town’s population, noting upon arrival, “Instead of the Morning London Cries, of Old Clothes, Sweep, &c. my Ears were saluted with Maha-a, Maha-a, the Cries of Goats, kept in Most Houses for their Milk. And presently I heard called the Names of Pompey, Scipio, Caesar &c. and again those of Yabba, Juba, Quasheba (Negro Boys and Girls, Slaves in the Family) which first raised an Idea of being in old Rome; & then again of my being transported suddenly to Africa.” He thought “the Inhabitants very open, courteous, lively & very ready to serve and assist a stranger. But how different did everything appear to me…. People of almost all colours! White, black, yellow, in abundance. Many pale white, and great Variety in the Shades of Black and Yellow. Very few, not one in a Thousand, of a ruddy Complexion.”38
Kingston’s great merchants were very wealthy, with the largest leaving estates of more than £100,000 or 230,000 livres. They made their fortunes in several ways. Kingston’s principal business was the importation of African slaves into the Americas, the largest and most complex international business of the eighteenth century.39 Between 1700 and 1758 the city was the sole port of entry for Africans shipped into Jamaica and the major port for such shipments between 1758 and 1807. During this time nearly 830,000 slaves were imported into Jamaica. The total value of this trade amounted to nearly £25 million. Perhaps £200,000 per annum passed through the hands of Kingston merchants. Henry Bright, a Bristol factor resident in Kingston, called the trade to Africa the “chief motive of people venturing their fortunes abroad.”40
Many of those African captives did not stay in Jamaica but instead were reexported from Kingston as part of the Asiento, or legal slave trade with Spanish America. Richard Sheridan estimates that between 1702 and 1808, 193,597 Africans landing in Jamaica, or 24.4 percent of all captives landed on the island, were immediately shipped onward to Spanish America. The peak years of exportation were between 1710 and 1740, when 42 percent of slaves were reexported. Saint-Domingue had no such reexport sector, and its local merchant class was consequently far less wealthy.
A well-informed account of Britain’s American colonies in the mid-1740s thought that Jamaica was the most substantial financial contributor to the British Empire, with its trade to Spanish America worth £900,000 sterling per annum in 1745, making its total trade worth £1.5 million, compared to New England’s £1 million.41 James Abercromby, a Scottish imperial thinker who had lived in the colonies, argued in a similar vein in 1752. He ranked twenty-three colonies in British America in terms of their worth to the empire. Jamaica ranked thirteenth in fighting men but second in value of produce and first in value of the British goods it imported.42
As this data suggests, the wealth of Kingston’s merchants continued after the Asiento ended in 1740. The most recent estimate of intercolonial slave departures from Jamaica (mainly from Kingston) suggests that between 1741 and 1790, 62,600 Africans were exported from Jamaica to foreign markets with a further 11,075 leaving in the same period for other British colonies. It was the most active such entrepôt in British America. Cuba was a popular destination, as was Cartagena, with the southern regions of Saint-Domingue also attracting considerable illegal smuggling. By the 1760s, Kingston merchants had begun to expand their trade in slaves and other goods to other places, such as the Bahamas and Honduras, as well as to familiar Spanish American and North American destinations. The American Revolution was a blow to such trade, but it quickly picked up again in the 1780s.43
Kingston merchants also made substantial sums from money lending. Planters approached them for credit to acquire slaves, livestock, land, and mill equipment as well as to fund conspicuous consumption and to pay out family inheritances. The biggest moneylenders provided large sums to their clients. Fifteen Jamaican colonists (eight of whom were Kingston merchants) left inventories showing they lent out more than £60,000 or 138,000 livres to creditors. To keep this in perspective, only one man in British North America—Charles Carroll of Annapolis—lent money on the Jamaican scale, with £57,400 out on loan in 1776.44
Located on the Atlantic coast, the “French Cape” was, like Kingston, a major location for the arrival of Africans in the New World, and a significant site for the transculturation that created a creole society in Saint-Domingue. Although it did not dominate colonial commerce like Kingston did, Cap Français received roughly half of Saint-Domingue’s incoming African slave ships; Port-au-Prince, the colony’s second slave port, received only 30 percent. While eighteenth-century Jamaica received slave ships coming from fifty-eight sites on the African coast, according to surviving records Saint-Domingue received human cargoes from seventy-six African ports. Even more than Kingston, therefore, Cap Français was a place where different African peoples became Americans.45
Unlike Kingston, however, Saint-Domingue did not reexport its African captives. Rather, the French colony received slaves from other empires, often illegally. Saint-Domingue, as one expert describes it, was continually in the grip of a terrible labor shortage. Planters blamed imperial restrictions on foreign trade, though the real culprit was the relentless work regime on many plantations, and the ongoing expansion of those plantations. David Geggus estimates that in one region of Saint-Domingue’s southern peninsula, between 10 and 15 percent of slaves there had been purchased from British traders, probably sailing out of Kingston.46
By the end of the colonial period, the ten thousand enslaved people living in Cap Français made up 67 percent of the city’s population. Port-au-Prince and Les Cayes had similar compositions. Thus slaves, who made up 90 percent of the overall colonial population, were underrepresented in the cities.47 But their labor and actions determined cities’ character. David Geggus has summarized what little we know about the 4 or 5 percent of slaves in Saint-Domingue who lived in towns, villages, or hamlets.48 Their characteristics resembled, in exaggerated form, those of the slave population as a whole. They were mainly male, African, and overwhelmingly adult: 65 percent of slaves in Cap Français were adult males, and only 13 percent were children, compared to 41 and 23 percent on sugar estates in the northern province. Nearly two-thirds of urban slaves were not locally born, the great majority being born in Africa. A few were described as “foreign creoles,” and they tended to be slaves transported for being troublesome in other places like Martinique, Guadeloupe, or the Mississippi. They continued to be troublesome in their new homes, being disproportionately represented in fugitive slave advertisements.49
The lives of urban slaves, while hard, were probably better than the lives of rural slaves. Colonists certainly believed they were better fed and healthier, and had more personal property. Indeed, their clothes, which seemed to some whites like gaudy finery, gave them away as relatively privileged, at least compared to slaves on distant plantations, who often went about nearly naked or dressed in rags.50 As in Kingston, they had more opportunities than rural slaves to establish independent lives where they hired themselves out and, after paying a portion of their wages to their owners, lived separately. Colonists
