Eighteenth‐Century J amaica's Ambivalent Cosmopolitanism

Eighteenth‐century J amaica's brutal society appears inimical to the values that the E nlightenment promoted, yet E nlightenment‐era scientific inquiry, printing and some self‐critical debates took place in the island's towns. Sugar‐profits could fund books and instruments. J amaica's eighteenth‐century towns sustained a social life that allowed wider aspects of E nlightenment‐era cosmopolitanism to take root. In these transient societies ‘ordinaries’ and coffee‐houses stocked the latest newspapers, while the new Freemasons’ lodges integrated the colony's white males. The urban networks of assembly rooms, journal subscriptions and scientific memberships in K ingston and S panish T own were inclusive – for those whites who could afford them – while some basic research did draw on enslaved plant collectors’ expertise. Data from W est I ndian botanists and historians informed E uropean scholars’ theorizing, but for slave‐holding Jamaicans the humanitarian ideas developed in mid‐eighteenth‐century Europe proved a tendentious import. In the 1780s the first M ethodist missionaries, the next metropolitan intellectual wave to reach the island, piggy‐backed onto existing urban intellectual networks before reaching out to a wider J amaica. By the century's end a fearful colonial elite found the Enlightenment's free exchange of ideas suspicious rather than supportive.