Kingston: A Creole Colonial City (1692–1962)

In colonial towns—settlements founded or developed by Western, imperial powers—two or more ‘cities’ usually exist: ‘the indigenous, ‘‘tradition-orientated’’ settlement, frequently manifesting the characteristics of the ‘‘pre-industrial city’’, and on the other hand, the ‘‘new’’ or ‘‘western’’ city, established as a result of the colonial process’ (King 1976: 5–6). But Caribbean cities gainsay this duality. Caribbean societies have virtually no pre- European inhabitants, and the non-Western elements in their cultures are no more indigenous than the traits of their white elites. Caribbean cities are quintessentially colonial, products of early mercantilism. Their creole (local or American) cultural characteristics were fashioned in the Caribbean by white sugar planters, merchants, and administrators who enslaved the blacks they imported from Africa, and with them bred a hybrid group—the free coloured people (Braithwaite 1971). Caribbean colonial cities are characterized by a morphological unity imposed by Europeans, yet their social and spatial structures have been compartmentalized by these creole social divisions (Clarke 1975a; Goodenough 1976; Welch 2003) Caribbean societies have been moulded by colonialism, the sugar plantation and slavery. These historical factors have also been underpinned by insularity, which facilitated occupation, exploitation, and labour control— and implicated port cities in such seaborne activities as sugar export and slave-labour recruitment. Accordingly, four themes provide the organizational framework for this chapter on Kingston, the principal city of Jamaica, during the colonial period: the economy, population, colour-class-culture stratification, and the spatial aspects of the city’s organization. The themes relate to different scales: the urban economy expresses the global aspects of commercial transactions; population and race-class stratification refer to the juxtaposition of different populations and cultures within colonial society; these socio-economic structures give rise to distinctive spatial configurations within the urban community. By 1800 Kingston was the major city and port of the largest British colony in the Caribbean, and its multiracial population was rigidly stratified into legal estates. Since the early nineteenth century, Jamaica has experienced a sequence of clearly identified historical events—slave emancipation in 1834, equalization of the sugar duties after 1845, a workers’ riot in 1938, and a slow process of constitutional decolonization after 1944, leading up to independence in 1962. This chapter is therefore organized around three major periods in Caribbean history—slavery (1692–1838), emancipation and the postemancipation period (1838–1944), and constitutional decolonization (1944– 62).