MPhil Diary: Week 2, 5 -11 September

A view from Penfield River, Gordon Town, St Andrew.

Yesterday marked two weeks since I arrived in Jamaica to complete an MPhil in History at the University of the West Indies. The week in global news was dominated by the death of the Queen and the accession of King Charles III, who is also King of Jamaica. This was the last week before my two semester one seminars began, so I wasn’t really deep into research mode – still orienting myself.

The biggest development in my research was a visit to the Jamaica Archives in Spanish Town on Wednesday. I was particularly pleased to find a good quantity of useful records for Kingston, dating back further than Kenneth Ingram knew of in his Sources of Jamaican History (likely transferred from the Institute of Jamaica to the archives since in the 1970s). I consulted 2/6/1b in the local government records, which was a large bound volume of Kingston Vestry Minutes between 1744 and 1749. I found this volume particularly useful as it published the full tax lists for the annual parish and poll taxes, essentially providing lists of the wealthy residents of Kingston and the streets they lived on, as well as some extra information (like rent, number of enslaved people owned, number of cattle owned, and of course the value of tax levied). The Vestry Minutes also recorded a tax list on transient merchants passing through Kingston, another fantastic source.

The Vestry Minutes (the Common Council took over in 1803) exist from 1744 to 1815, with gaps in 1749-50, 1754-63, 1767-68, 1770-81, and 1788-95. There is also, apparently, some earlier material for the years 1739-44 in one of the later volumes. There is also some other material, including the Kingston Parochial Tax Roll from 1774-1805, the Parish Accounts from 1722-89, Vestry Accounts from 1760-92, Kingston Quarter Sessions Proceedings from 1770-98 and 1803-1839, the Toll Book of Slaves Sold 1738-43, and the Register of Free Persons 1761-95.

This was good to find out as my original research proposal involved doing some prosopographical work to really dig into the connections between individuals, particularly economic actors, in Kingston during the eighteenth-century. This looks all the more plausible, even though I am slightly handicapped by the prohibitive fee per photograph at the Jamaica Archives ($500 JMD, about £3). After building lists of individuals, these names could then be cross-referenced with birth, marriage, death records, inventories, court records, manumission records, cadastral maps, and so on. The list is practically endless, and so a line would have to, of course, be drawn.

A quick snap from the entrance of the Jamaica Archives in Spanish Town, St Catherine.

I have been surveying other sources, too, and compiled a list of historic maps of Jamaica (and particularly Kingston) in the eighteenth-century, from online sources. I’ve yet to dig into the manuscript collections of the National Library of Jamaica, or the West Indies and Special Collections here at Mona. I also need to look into the findings of the British Library’s EAP 148: a 2007 survey of endangered archival holdings in Jamaica.

I came to the sudden epiphany that the question I really wanted to answer was: “What did it mean to be a ‘merchant of Kingston’ in the eighteenth-century?” Studying the Atlantic history of places like Liverpool and Lancaster, ‘merchant of Kingston’ was a moniker attached to many people from these places. But what did it really mean? I think a study that examines the nature of the activities of a ‘merchant of Kingston’, particularly focusing on professions such as factors, super cargoes, and agents, who have thus far been neglected by secondary literature, and then set against a backdrop of a social/demographic history of eighteenth-century Kingston, would be truly worthwhile. The idea will continue to be developed as sources emerge.

This coming week sees my first two postgraduate seminars on Monday and Wednesday evenings, and hopefully I can fit a first visit to the National Library of Jamaica in there. I’d also really like to get my hands on some of the microfilm in the West Indies and Special Collections, a collection that is reputed to be extensive indeed.