Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-tf8b9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-30T20:08:44.004Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Towns, government, legislation and the ‘police’ in Jamaica and the British Atlantic, 1770–1805

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 March 2019

Aaron Graham Open the ORCID record for Aaron Graham [Opens in a new window]
Aaron Graham*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT, UK
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Urban renewal in the British Isles in the long eighteenth century was based on new municipal powers made possible by parliament. Focusing on Jamaica between 1770 and 1805, which passed legislation for the ‘policing’ – in the broader Scottish sense – of its towns, demonstrates that it was a global phenomenon common to the whole British Atlantic. However, the solutions it produced were also specific to local circumstances. Jamaican elites feared invasion, revolt and the dissolution of the slave society. Their police acts reflected these concerns, and demonstrate the alternative pathway that urban modernity took in this part of the British Atlantic.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 47 , Issue 1 , February 2020 , pp. 41 - 62
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

†

I am grateful to Trevor Burnard, Rosemary Sweet and the reviewers at Urban History, and the attendees at the Urban History Conference 2018, for their advice and encouragement in writing this article. The research was supported by a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, with further assistance from a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship.

References

1 Borsay, P., The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town, 1660–1770 (Oxford, 1989)Google Scholar; Corfield, P.J., The Impact of English Towns, 1700–1800 (Oxford, 1982)Google Scholar; Sweet, R., The English Town, 1680–1840: Government, Society and Culture (Harlow, 1999), 40–61Google Scholar, 76–109. For a summary of this historiography, see Clark, P. and Gillespie, R., ‘Introduction’, in Clark, P. and Gillespie, R. (eds.), Two Capitals: London and Dublin, 1500–1840 (Oxford, 2001), 1–6Google Scholar; Borsay, P. and Proudfoot, L.J., ‘The English and Irish urban experience, 1500–1800: change, convergence and divergence’, in Borsay, P. and Proudfoot, L.J. (eds.), Provincial Towns in Early Modern England and Ireland: Change, Convergence and Divergence (Oxford, 2002), 1–27Google Scholar.

2 Webb, S. and Webb, B., English Local Government: Statutory Authorities for Special Purposes, 9 vols. (London, 1922)Google Scholar; J. Innes, ‘Managing the metropolis: London's social problems and their control, c. 1660–1830’, in Clark and Gillespie (eds.), Two Capitals, 53–79; Langford, Paul, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman, 1689–1798 (Oxford, 1991), 182–3Google Scholar, 208, 223–32, 249–50; Sweet, English Town, 61–10.

3 Hoppit, J., ‘Patterns of parliamentary legislation, 1660–1800’, Historical Journal, 39 (1996), 109–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sweet, English Town, 67–73. For other examples of interest groups using legislation, see Handley, S., ‘Local legislative initiatives for economic and social development in Lancashire, 1689–1731’, Parliamentary History, 9 (1990), 14–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Innes, J., ‘The local acts of a national parliament: parliament's role in sanctioning local action in eighteenth-century Britain’, in Innes, J. (ed.), Inferior Politics: Social Problems and Social Policies in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2009), 78–108CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and the essays in Gauci, P., Regulating the British Economy, 1660–1850 (Farnham, 2011)Google Scholar.

4 J. Hill, ‘The shaping of Dublin government in the long eighteenth century’, in Clark and Gillespie (eds.), Two Capitals, 160–2; C. Lennon, ‘The changing face of Dublin, 1550–1750’, in ibid., 45–60; E. Sheridan-Quantz, ‘The multi-centred metropolis: the social topography of eighteenth-century Dublin’, in ibid., 275–87; Cionnaith, F. Ó, Exercise of Authority: Surveyor Thomas Owen and the Paving, Cleansing and Lighting of Georgian Dublin (Dublin, 2016)Google Scholar.

5 Harris, B. and McKean, C. (eds.), The Scottish Town in the Age of the Enlightenment, 1740–1820 (Edinburgh, 2014), 78–134Google Scholar, 151–208.

6 Barrie, D.G., Police in the Age of Improvement: Police Development and the Civic Tradition in Scotland, 1775–1865 (Cullompton, 2008), esp. 93–114CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the origins of the term, see Barrie, Police Development, 12, 13, 267.

7 Harris and McKean (eds.), Scottish Town, 428–66; Morton, G., ‘Civil society, municipal government and the state: enshrinement, empower and legitimacy, Scotland 1800–1929’, Urban History, 25 (1998), 348–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Barrie, Police Development, 77–83, and, for more detail, Barrie, D.G., ‘Police in civil society: police, Enlightenment and civic virtue in urban Scotland, c. 1780–1833’, Urban History, 37 (2010), 45–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a similar process in England, see Dodsworth, F.M., ‘“Civic” police and the condition of liberty: the rationality of governance in eighteenth-century England’, Social History, 29 (2004), 199–216CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Harris and McKean (eds.), Scottish Town, 489–504.

9 Hart, E., Building Charleston: Town and Society in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World (London, 2010), 67–97Google Scholar, 157–83; Hart, E., ‘City government and the state in eighteenth-century South Carolina’, Eighteenth Century Studies, 50 (2017), 195–211CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Hart, Building Charleston, 159.

11 Tarr, J.A., ‘The evolution of urban infrastructure in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’, in Hanson, R. (ed.), Perspectives on Urban Infrastructure (Washington, DC, 1984), 4–21Google Scholar; Larson, J. Lauritz, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill, NC, 2001)Google Scholar.

12 Graham, A., ‘Jamaican legislation and the transatlantic constitution, 1664–1839’, Historical Journal, 61 (2018), 327–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and idem, ‘Legislatures, legislation and legislating in the British Atlantic, 1692–1800’, Parliamentary History, 37 (2018), 369–88.

13 Goveia, E.V., Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, 1965), 152–202Google Scholar; Marshall, Bernard, Slavery, Law and Society in the British Windward Islands, 1743–1823: A Comparative Study (Kingston, Jamaica, 2007), 120–42Google Scholar; Graham, ‘Jamaican legislation’, 327–55.

14 Welch, P.L.V., Slave Society in the City: Bridgetown, Barbados 1680–1834 (Kingston, Jamaica, 2004)Google Scholar; Robertson, J., Gone is the Ancient Glory: Spanish Town, Jamaica, 1534–2000 (Kingston, Jamaica, and Miami, 2005)Google Scholar; Greene, J.P., Settler Jamaica in the 1750s: A Social Portrait (Charlottesville, 2016), 110–76Google Scholar; Higman, B.W., Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 1807–1834 (Cambridge, 1976)Google Scholar; idem, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807–1834 (Baltimore and London, 1984), 226–59; Burnard, T.G., ‘“The grand mart of the island”: the economic function of Kingston, Jamaica, in the mid-eighteenth century’, in Monteith, Kathleen and Richards, Glen (eds.), Jamaica in Slavery and Freedom: History, Heritage and Culture (Kingston, Jamaica, 2002), 225–41Google Scholar; Higman, B.W., ‘Jamaica port towns in the early nineteenth century’, in Knight, F.W. and Liss, P.K. (eds.), Atlantic Port Cities: Economy, Culture and Society in the Atlantic World, 1650–1850 (Knoxville, 1991), 117–48Google Scholar.

15 W. Bailey, ‘Kingston, 1692–1843: a colonial city’, University of the West Indies, Mona, Ph.D. thesis, 1974, 181–2, 214–17; idem, ‘Social control in the pre-Emancipation society of Kingston, Jamaica’, Boletín de Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe, 24 (1978), 108–9; L.E. Simmonds, ‘“That little shadow of prosperity and freedom”: urban slave society in Jamaica, 1780–1834’, University of West Indies, Mona, Ph.D. thesis, 1997, 72–104. For a representative survey of current work on the ‘black urban Atlantic’, see Cañizares-Esguerra, J., Childs, M.D. and Sidbury, J. (eds.), The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade (Philadelphia, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Burnard, T.G. and Hart, E., ‘Kingston, Jamaica, and Charleston, South Carolina: a new look at comparative urbanization in plantation colonial British America’, Journal of Urban History, 39 (2013), 229;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and see also Burnard, T.G., ‘Towns in plantation societies in eighteenth-century British America’, Early American Studies, 15 (2017), 835–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Burnard, T.G. and Garrigus, J., The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica (Philadelphia, 2016), 50–81Google Scholar. For the continuity of the British Atlantic after 1783, see Marshall, P.J., Remaking the British Atlantic: The United States and the British Empire after American Independence (Oxford, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and the essays in Bannister, J. and Riordan, L. (eds.), The Loyal Atlantic: Remaking the British Atlantic in the Revolutionary Era (Toronto, 2012)Google Scholar.

17 Dunn, Richard S., Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill, 1972), 106–10Google Scholar, 178–81. For urban areas in the American South, see Ernst, J.A. and Merrens, H.R., ‘“Camden's turrets pierce the skies!”: the urban process in the Southern Colonies during the eighteenth century’, William and Mary Quarterly, 30 (1973), 549–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Bailey, ‘Kingston, 1692–1843’, 123–54, 170–8, 180, 204–6; Higman, Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 58–9; Simmonds, ‘“Little shadow”’, 120–8, 135–64, 359–452; Welch, Slave Society, 1–19; Burnard, T.G., ‘Kingston, Jamaica: crucible of modernity’, in Cañizares-Esguerra, J., Childs, M. and Sidbury, J. (eds.), Early Modern Americas: The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade (Philadelphia, 2013), 127Google Scholar.

19 Burnard, T.G., Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650–1820 (Chicago, IL, 2015), 55–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Burnard, T.G., Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and his Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Jamaica, 2004), 146–62Google Scholar, 178–80, 251–5; Paton, Diana, No Bond but the Law: Punishment, Race, and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780–1870 (Durham, NC, and London, 2004), 19–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Craton, M., Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca, NY, 1982), 67–96Google Scholar, 125–38.

20 Wade, R.C., Slavery in the Cities: The South, 1820–1860 (New York, 1964), 4, 143–242Google Scholar; Rousey, D.C., Policing the Southern City: New Orleans, 1805–1889 (Baton Rouge, 1996), 3–8Google Scholar, 12–24. For a comparison with rural conditions, see Hadden, S.E., Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge, MA, 2001)Google Scholar.

21 Nelson, L.P., Architecture and Empire in Jamaica (New Haven, 2016), 10–35Google Scholar, 65–96, 131–217; Robertson, Ancient Glory, 37–52, 81–8, 94–129, 137–50; Bailey, ‘Social control’, 81–94; Mulcahy, M., Hurricanes and Society in the British Greater Caribbean, 1624–1783 (Baltimore, 2006), 118–36Google Scholar.

22 Bailey, ‘Kingston, 1692–1843’, 105–42, 155–78; Greene, Settler Jamaica, 110–76; Higman, ‘Jamaica port towns’; Burnard, ‘“Grand mart of the island”’, 225–41; Burnard, ‘Kingston’, 122–44; Robertson, Ancient Glory, 56–79.

23 Greene, J.P., ‘“Of liberty and the colonies”: a case-study of constitutional conflict in the mid-eighteenth century British American empire’, in Womersley, D. (ed.), Liberty and American Experience in the Eighteenth Century (Indianapolis, 2006), 62–80Google Scholar; Metcalf, G., Royal Government and Political Conflict in Jamaica, 1729–1783 (London, 1965), 121–37Google Scholar, 141–4; Robertson, Ancient Glory, 54–5, 89–102.

24 Bridenbaugh, C., Cities in the Wilderness: The First Century of Urban Life in America, 1625–1742 (New York, 1955), 6–8Google Scholar, 144–6, 304–5; Bridenbaugh, C., Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America, 1743–1776 (New York, 1955), 6–11Google Scholar, 217–24; Roney, J.C., Governed by a Spirit of Opposition: The Origins of American Political Practice in Colonial Philadelphia (Baltimore, 2014), 38–58Google Scholar; Hart, ‘City government’, 195–211. For Britain, see Sweet, English Town, 27–40; Hill, ‘Dublin government’, 149–65.

25 Brathwaite, K., The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820 (Oxford, 1971), 19–22Google Scholar; Petley, C., Slaveholders in Jamaica: Colonial Society and Culture during the Era of Abolition (London, 2009), 55Google Scholar, 60–1. For the exception that proves the rule, an urban borough deliberately created by planters in order to isolate and contain the power of urban elites, see Musselwhite, P., ‘“This infant borough”: the corporate political identity of eighteenth-century Norfolk’, Early American Studies, 15 (2017), 801–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Robertson, Ancient Glory, 65–79, 81–119, 123–9, 142–50; Welch, Slave Society, 108–19.

27 For the efficiency of the assembly, see Graham, ‘Jamaican legislation’, 327–55.

28 The Laws of Jamaica, 7 vols. (St Jago de la Vega, Jamaica, 1802–24), vol. II, 83–7; Jamaica Archives, Spanish Town, Jamaica (JA), 2/6/5, fol. 66r.

29 Acts of Assembly Passed in the Island of Jamaica, from 1770 to 1783, Inclusive (Kingston, Jamaica, 1786), 213–15.

30 Though see Robertson, Ancient Glory, 81–7, 95–118.

31 Bailey, ‘Kingston, 1692–1843’, 181–5; Simmonds, ‘“Little shadow”’, 62. For the wider context, see O'Shaughnessy, A., An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Philadelphia, 2000), 167–81Google Scholar, 199; Carrington, S.H.H., ‘The American Revolution and the British West Indies economy’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 17 (1987), 823–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire, 70–100, 151–2; Burnard, Planters, Merchants and Slaves, 87–97; Brathwaite, Creole Society, 135–50, 266–305; Lambert, D., White Creole Culture, Politics and Identity during the Age of Abolition (Cambridge, 2005), 73–104Google Scholar; Petley, Slaveholders in Jamaica, 53–60, 62–3.

33 See in particular Green, C., ‘Hierarchies of whiteness in the geographies of empire: Thomas Thistlewood and the Barrets of Jamaica’, Nieuwe West-Indische Gids / New West Indian Guide, 80 (2008), 5–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the experience of soldiers and sailors in West Indian societies, see Buckley, R.N., The British Army in the West Indies: Society and the Military in the Revolutionary Age (Gainesville, 1998), 173Google Scholar, 190, 327–33; Rogers, N., The Press Gang: Naval Impressment and its Opponents in Georgian Britain (London, 2007), 88–103Google Scholar; Magra, C.P., ‘Anti-impressment riots and the origins of the American Revolution’, International Review of Social History, 58 (2013), 131–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Petley, Slaveholders in Jamaica, 64–5.

34 Petley, Slaveholders in Jamaica, 64. For other limitations to white solidarity, see Heuman, G.J., Between Black and White: Race, Politics, and the Free Coloreds in Jamaica, 1792–1865 (Westport, 1981), 4–10Google Scholar, 23–8; Brathwaite, Creole society, 168–74; Robertson, J., ‘A 1748 “Petition of Negro Slaves” and the local politics of slavery in Jamaica’, William and Mary Quarterly, 67 (2010), 319–42Google Scholar; Livesay, D., Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733–1833 (Chapel Hill, 2018), 20–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 For context, see Bailey, ‘Kingston, 1692–1843’, 178–82.

36 Acts of Assembly Passed in the Island of Jamaica, from 1681 to 1737 Inclusive (London, 1738), 255–7.

37 Journals of the House of Assembly of Jamaica, 14 vols. (Kingston, Jamaica, 1808–26), vol. 5, 125, 133.

38 Paton, No Bond, 19–31.

39 Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness, 63–78, 215–31, 374–91; Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt, 108–22, 297–305. For Britain, see Paley, R., ‘“An imperfect, inadequate and wretched system”? Policing London before Peel’, Criminal Justice History, 10 (1989), 95–130Google Scholar; Reynolds, E.A., Before the Bobbies: The Night Watch and Police Reform in Metropolitan London, 1720–1830 (Basingstoke, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Barrie, Police Development, 1–49, 92–114, 146–63.

40 JA, 2/6/6, 11 Jan. 1781.

41 Acts of Assembly…1770 to 1783, 280–90; JA, 2/6/6, 11 Oct. 1781, 7 Jan. 1782.

42 JA, 2/6/6, 10 Jan. 1782, 17 Jan. 1782, 14 Jul. 1783; The Laws of Jamaica, vol. 2, 349–52.

43 The Laws of Jamaica, vol. 2, 92–6, 379–90.

44 Journals, vol. 3, 444.

45 Karras, A.L., Sojourners in the Sun: Scottish Migrants in Jamaica and the Chesapeake, 1740–1800 (Ithaca, NY, 1992), 46–80Google Scholar, 118–69; Hamilton, D., Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World, 1750–1820 (Manchester, 2005), 55–107Google Scholar; Barrie, Police Development, 61–74.

46 Coleman, J.M., ‘Joseph Galloway and the British occupation of Philadelphia’, Pennsylvania History, 30 (1963), 272–300Google Scholar; Hulsebosch, D.J., Constituting Empire: New York and the Transformation of Constitutionalism in the Atlantic World, 1664–1830 (Chapel Hill, 2005), 161–3Google Scholar; Chopra, R., Unnatural Rebellion: Loyalists in New York City during the Revolution (Charlottesville, 2011), 148–52Google Scholar; Johnson, D.F., ‘The failure of restored British rule in Revolutionary Charleston, South Carolina’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 42 (2014), 22–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 Stevens, J.A. (ed.), Colonial Records of the New York Chamber of Commerce, 1768–1784 (New York, NY, 1867), 343Google Scholar.

48 Craton, Testing the Chains, 180–210, 224–38; Geggus, D., ‘Jamaica and the Saint Domingue slave revolt, 1791–1793’, The Americas, 38 (1981), 219–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

49 Simmonds, ‘“Little shadow”’, 62–5; Bailey, ‘Kingston, 1692–1843’, 206–9, 214–17; de Cauna, J., ‘La diaspora des colons de Saint-Domingue et le monde créole: le cas de la Jamaïque’, Outre-Mers: Revue d'histoire, 304 (1994), 333–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50 Craton, Testing the Chains, 211–23; Geggus, D., ‘The enigma of Jamaica in the 1790s: new light on the causes of slave rebellions’, William and Mary Quarterly, 44 (1987), 274–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51 JA, 2/6/7, fols. 81v, 112v.

52 The Laws of Jamaica, vol. 3, 46–58. See also Simmonds, ‘“Little shadow”’, 98–9.

53 Higman, ‘Jamaica port towns’; Hunt, N., ‘Expanding the frontiers of western Jamaica through minor Atlantic ports in the eighteenth century’, Canadian Journal of History, 45 (2010), 485–502CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54 Journals, vol. 9, 306.

55 Ibid., vol. 10, 44, 46; JA, 2/6/7, fol. 68v.

56 Journals, vol. 10, 494; The Laws of Jamaica, vol. 4, 105–20.

57 The Laws of Jamaica, vol. 4, 213–29, vol. 5, 48–61.

58 JA, 2/6/7, fols. 5r, 42v, 63v.

59 JA, 2/6/7, fol. 76r. The scavenger was charged with the cleaning and repair of the streets.

60 The Laws of Jamaica, vol. 3, 144–60.

61 Journals, vol. 10, 507, 517.

62 JA, 2/6/8, fols. 79, 99–100, 114–15, 144, 156, 158–9, and 1 Feb. 1808, 11 Jul. 1808, 18 Jul. 1808.

63 The Laws of Jamaica, vol. 4, 151, 153, 154, 159.

64 JA, 1B/5/14/2, fols. 136r–137r. For Colquhoun, see Barrie, Police Development, 74–7.

65 JA, 2/19/3, 4 Jul. 1801.

66 Barrie, Police Development, 24, 37–8, 61–6, 110–12.

67 The Laws of Jamaica, vol. 3, 111–14, 231–6, vol. 4, 105–7, 153.

68 Ibid., vol. 2, 386, vol. 3, 108, 114, 234, vol. 4, 106.

69 The Laws of Jamaica, vol. 3, 231–6. Measures for a watch were also missing from the police act for St Ann in 1805: The Laws of Jamaica, vol. 5, 48–61.

70 The Laws of Jamaica, vol. 4, 17–22; JA, 2/6/6, 12 Nov. 1781, 24 Nov. 1781, 28 Nov. 1785; JA, 2/6/7, fols. 118v–119r, 126v, 127v.

71 Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness, 55–63, 206–13, 364–72; Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt, 98–105; The Laws of Jamaica, vol. 2, 382–6, vol. 3, 102–8, 110–14, vol. 4, 112–15, 213–18, vol. 5, 48–54.

72 The Laws of Jamaica, vol. 3, 108.

73 Ibid., vol. 2, 379–81, vol. 3, 100–2, 126–7, vol. 4, 111, 220. See also Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness, 110–15.

74 The Laws of Jamaica, vol. 2, 387–8, vol. 3, 49–50, 114–15, 124–5, vol. 4, 107–9, 119, vol. 5, 55–6.

75 Ibid., vol. 2, 388, vol. 3, 50, 56–7, 116–17, 125, 236–8, vol. 4, 110–19, 223–5, vol. 5, 57–9. For urban hawking and peddling, see Mintz, S.W., ‘The origins of the Jamaican internal marketing system’, Yale University Publications in Anthropology, 57 (1960), 1–26Google Scholar; L.E. Simmonds, ‘The Afro-Jamaican and the internal marketing system: Kingston, 1780–1834’, in Monteith and Richards (eds.), Jamaica in slavery, 274–90.

76 The Laws of Jamaica, vol. 2, 388–9, vol. 3, 52–3, 57, 109–10, 125–6, 238, vol. 4, 108, 111, 221–3; JA, 2/6/7, fol. 63v.

77 Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness, 12–22, 26–9, 152–70, 192–5, 313–25; Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt, 28–36, 235–45, 277–80.

78 For a contemporary summary of the powers and development of such corporations, see Lunan, J., The Jamaica Magistrate's and Vestryman's Assistant (St Jago de la Vega, Jamaica, 1828), 15–16Google Scholar, 67–9, 127–8.

79 The Laws of Jamaica, vol. 2, 84–5, 94, 455–6.

80 Ibid., vol. 3, 17–19.

81 Ibid., vol. 4, 226–7.

82 Ibid., vol. 4, 144–60.

83 Ibid., vol. 3, 169–82.

84 Ibid., vol. 3, 81–100, 127–8, vol. 4, 28–39; Graham, A., ‘Technology, slavery and the Falmouth Water Company of Jamaica, 1799–1805’, Slavery and Abolition, 39 (2018), 315–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

85 Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt, 100, 102, 104; Carp, B., ‘Fire of liberty: firefighters, urban voluntary culture, and the Revolutionary movement’, William and Mary Quarterly, 58 (2001), 781–818CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Quotation on 817. For the ‘unacknowledged republic’, see Goldie, M., ‘The unacknowledged republic: officeholding in early modern England’, in Harris, T. (ed.), The Politics of the Excluded, c. 1500–1850 (Basingstoke and New York, 2001), 153–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

86 Leibman, L.A. and May, S., ‘Making Jews: race, gender and identity in Barbados in the age of emancipation’, American Jewish History, 99 (2015), 1–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hurwitz, S. and Hurwitz, E., ‘The New World sets an example for the Old: the Jews of Jamaica and political rights, 1661–1831’, American Jewish Historical Quarterly, 55 (1965), 37–56Google Scholar; Snyder, H., ‘Rules, rights and redemption: the negotiation of Jewish status in British Atlantic port towns, 1740–1831’, Jewish History, 20 (2006), 147–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Newton, M.J., The Children of Africa in the Colonies: Free People of Color in Barbados in the Age of Emancipation (Baton Rouge, 2008), 59–86Google Scholar; Heuman, Black and White, 4–15, 23–45; Livesay, Children of Uncertain Fortune, 66–401.

87 Petley, Slaveholders in Jamaica, 62–4; Brathwaite, Creole Society, 19–22; Delle, J.A., The Colonial Caribbean: Landscapes of Power in the Plantation System (Cambridge, 2014), 115–28Google Scholar.

88 The Laws of Jamaica, vol. 3, 447–8. This was the same franchise as the house of assembly: Brathwaite, Creole Society, 44–9; Petley, Slaveholders in Jamaica, 62–4. The franchise in Scottish police acts generally varied between £5 and £10: Barrie, Police Development, 132–8.

89 Brathwaite, Creole Society, 20–2; Petley, Slaveholders in Jamaica, 55.

90 Sweet, English Town, 30–3, 56–9, 109, 141–61; Eastwood, D., Governing Rural England: Tradition and Transformation in Local Government, 1780–1840 (Oxford, 1994), 125–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 175–87; Sheppard, F.H.W., Local Government in St Marylebone, 1688–1835: A Study of the Vestry and the Turnpike Trust (London, 1958), 215–98Google Scholar.

91 See below n. 96.

92 Welch, Slave Society, 44–6, 162–5; Levy, C., ‘Barbados: the last years of slavery, 1823–1833’, Journal of Negro History, 44 (1959), 337–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hall, R. (ed.), Acts Passed in the Island of Barbados, from 1643 to 1762 Inclusive (London, 1764), 436–42Google Scholar; Moore, S. (ed.), The Public Acts in Force; Passed by the Legislature of Barbados, from May 11th 1762 to April 8th 1800, Inclusive (London, 1801), 22–62Google Scholar, 66–80, 127–47, 208–12.

93 NHall, .A.T., ‘Law and society in Barbados at the turn of the 19th century’, Journal of Caribbean History, 5 (1972), 43–5Google Scholar.

94 G. Smith (ed.), The Laws of Grenada, from the Year 1763, to the Year 1805, with Tables of All the Statutes Passed in that Period (1808), No. LI.

95 Recent work has even extended this to British India: see Eacott, J., ‘Urbanity and the endurance of global empire: Charleston and Calcutta before and after the American Revolution’, in Ward, J.P. (ed.), European Empires in the American South: Colonial and Environmental Encounters (Jackson, MI, 2017), 218–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

96 S. Wilmot, ‘From bondage to political office: blacks and vestry politics in two Jamaican parishes, Kingston and St David, 1831–1865’, in Monteith and Richards (eds.), Jamaica in Slavery, 307–23; Wilmot, S., ‘Black voters and Jewish politicians: electoral politics in three Jamaican parishes, Kingston, Portland and St Mary, in the post-slavery period’, Journal of Caribbean History, 49 (2015), 30–52Google Scholar; Heuman, Black and White, 57–63, 77–8, 93, 99, 103, 120; Holt, T.C., The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938 (Baltimore, 1991), 98–103Google Scholar, 216–23.

97 Burnard, ‘Towns in plantation societies’, 858.