In 1803, John Browne Cutting, an author from the US city of Boston, argued that ‘climate and moral causes combining with political institutions, and the peculiar state of society in the West Indies, have created a cast of character that may be distinguished, and is sufficiently marked in the native white Creoles of Jamaica’. Presenting his thoughts as part of a brief history of the island, Cutting expanded on some of the causes of the distinctive local characteristics that he attributed to white men:

In so doing, Cutting echoed the analysis of many of his contemporaries, arguing that the ‘freedom’, ‘dignity’ and ‘consciousness of equality’ that white men on the island enjoyed were contingent on slaveholding and that slavery, the act of riveting the un freedom of others, lent Jamaican white society a distinctively local, or creole, character.

Cutting was broadly right about Jamaican slaveholders. Slavery defined social relations in Jamaica. An elaborate system of social and economic exclusion operated to the advantage of all white men, whose institutionalized privileges were manifested in a variety of ways. White men monopolized the ownership of land and slaves. Although sugar planters held the majority of settled land and claimed ownership of about half of all enslaved people in Jamaica, slaveholding and land-ownership was extremely widespread among white men. Planters were the most powerful group in society, but the ubiquity of mastery among white men helped to alleviate tensions between them and, in spite of differences of wealth and status, they formed a largely unified and privileged minority. This culture of white male solidarity also owed much to the fact that whites were a small and vulnerable minority, outnumbered by enslaved black people. Furthermore, by acquiring slaves, newly arrived white migrants could hope to better their material condition and earn an elevated place in public life.