Living costs, real incomes and inequality in colonial Jamaica☆

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Abstract

This paper provides the first quantitative assessment of colonial Jamaican real incomes and income inequality. We collect local prices to construct cost of living and purchasing power parity indicators. The latter lowers Jamaica's GDP per capita compared with the rest of the Atlantic economy. We also compute welfare ratios for a range of occupations and build a social table. We find that, being a net food importer, the slave colony had extremely high living costs, which rose steeply during the American War of Independence, and low standards of living, particularly for its enslaved population, but also for the free unskilled population that competed with slave labor. Our results also show that due to its extreme poverty for the many in the middle of great wealth for the few, Jamaica was the most unequal place yet studied in the pre-modern world. Furthermore, all of these characteristics applied to the free population alone.

Section snippets

Britain's richest but most unequal colony? The issues

The wealth of colonial Jamaica around the time of the American Revolution has been a topic of historiographical interest since the pioneering work of Richard Sheridan, which estimated that Jamaican wealth around 1774 was extremely high, even by British standards (Sheridan, 1965). Sheridan's work corroborated the famous thesis put forward by Williams (1944) that the wealth of the British West Indies was fundamental in financing British industrialization during the second half of the eighteenth

Measuring Jamaican living standards

This section assesses Jamaican living standards around 1774, following the methodology pioneered by Allen (2001), now widely used by economic historians (Arroyo et al., 2012, Geloso, 2016, Lindert, 2016, Lindert and Williamson, 2016). As far as we know, this is the first attempt to provide a quantitative estimate of Jamaican living conditions during pre-industrial times, thus making it possible to locate its experience in a comparative perspective.

Jamaican living standards are constructed by

Colonial Jamaica's high cost of living

Section 2 provides estimates of Jamaica's cost of living around 1774: a bare-bones consumption basket for a common laborer's family cost 161.69 Jamaican shillings or 593.4 g of silver. Compared with other locations in the Americas and Europe, living expenses were only higher in seventeenth-century Potosi, where the inflationary effects of the silver economy were felt so strongly, and, for similar reasons, in seventeenth-century Mexico and Spain, the former a major silver exporter and the latter

Was Jamaica the most unequal place on the planet?

How much of Jamaica's aggregate income accrued to a few plantation owners and their white management, or to the top 10%? How much did a slave field hand receive as “in-kind maintenance” compared with his marginal product or with the annual earnings of free common labor in the towns? How much did skilled white collar clerks, bookkeepers, attorneys, clergy, surveyors and surgeons get relative to free common labor in town? What about overall income inequality? Was Jamaica the most unequal place in

Concluding remarks

This essay provides new estimates of incomes, cost of living, living standards and income inequality in colonial Jamaica, and documents that it was markedly different from other British American colonies given its extreme poverty surrounding extreme wealth. Our findings signify a radical departure from the usual characterization of Jamaica as the richest colony in the pre-revolutionary British Empire, a “constant mine,” which provided “prodigious riches” to its inhabitants and to the imperial

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There are more references available in the full text version of this article.
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We are grateful to Bob Allen, Luis Bértola, Frank Lewis, Peter Lindert, Justin Roberts and the participants at the WEHC 2018 session on “Preindustrial inequality: Europe, Asia and the Americas compared” for useful suggestions that improved the paper. We also thank three anonymous referees and editor Ran Abramitzky for providing valuable comments. The data and replication files for this article are available at https://www.openicpsr.org/openicpsr/project/106,347/version/V1/view/.

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