The Taíno trace their origins to Arawak peoples of the Orinoco Delta in eastern Venezuela. Starting around 400 BCE, groups sailed out into the Antilles and moved north island by island, settling Jamaica around 650 CE. By the time Columbus arrived in 1494, the island had more than 200 villages, each led by a cacique.
Columbus first landed in May 1494. The first Spanish settlers came in 1508, when Juan de Esquivel landed at Santa Gloria with 80 citizens and their families and founded Sevilla la Nueva near St. Ann's Bay. No gold was found, and Jamaica became a supply post for Spain's mainland campaigns, living on ranching, cattle and hides. In 1534 the capital moved to Villa de la Vega, today's Spanish Town. By 1655 the Spanish population was only about 2,500.
As the Taíno population collapsed, Spain turned to African labor. The first Black people brought to Jamaica, in 1517, did not come directly from Africa: they had been enslaved in Spain, or were descended from people enslaved there. The first Africans shipped directly from Africa arrived in 1518. By 1611, Jamaica held about 558 enslaved Africans, roughly half the size of the Spanish settler population.
Spain's 1492 expulsion order and the Inquisition forced Jews to flee or convert. Portuguese-Spanish Jews, many of them outwardly converted, began arriving in Jamaica in the early 1530s and settled in Spanish Town, where they could practice in secret without fear of torture.
After the English conquest in 1655, Jews could worship openly and gain citizenship, and Sephardic Jews came from England, Brazil and other South American colonies. Many settled at Port Royal. More came from Curaçao and Germany in the late 1700s and early 1800s, and in 1831 Jamaica's Jews received full political rights.
Cromwell's "Western Design" sent Admiral Penn and General Venables to take Hispaniola. They failed there and turned to Jamaica, which they believed was weakly defended, landing at Passage Fort on May 10, 1655, with about 8,000 men. Spanish settlers and their Maroon allies resisted for five years; with the help of Maroon leader Juan de Bolas, the English drove the last Spanish to Cuba in 1660.
To fill the island, Cromwell offered 20 acres to every male settler, plus 10 acres for each woman and child, and sought settlers from Barbados and the American colonies.
Roughly 1,500 settlers came from Nevis with Governor Luke Stokes and settled near Port Morant, where fever killed many of them, Stokes included.
Building the colony required workers, and the first Irish and Scots came as indentured servants and convicts. The Irish came both from Barbados and directly from Ireland, in the aftermath of Cromwell's reconquest; English plans called for 1,000 Irish boys and 1,000 Irish girls under 14 to be sent and sold as servants. Cromwell also ordered "idle, masterless" vagabonds in Scotland rounded up and shipped to Jamaica. After 1660, about 5,000 more Irish moved over from Barbados, pushed out by its high land prices.
Servants who finished their four-to-seven-year terms could join the militia or acquire land, and within ten years many former servants appeared on lists of planters and settlers.
Governor Edward D'Oyley invited about 250 buccaneers to base themselves at Port Royal as a deterrent against Spanish attack. Their plunder fueled the economy, and Port Royal grew to rival only Boston in size and importance among English American towns, though the lure of quick riches held back planting and settlement.
Sugar had consolidated Barbados land into large estates, squeezing out smaller planters. Thomas Modyford, a longtime Barbados planter, became governor and arrived in 1664 with about 1,000 settlers. Quakers followed in 1665.
England ceded Surinam to the Dutch in the Treaty of Breda (1667). Its English sugar planters, with their capital and planting expertise, left for Jamaica in 1671 and 1675, bringing enslaved Africans with them. About 1,200 settled in St. Elizabeth in 1675, helping drive the growth of Jamaican sugar. That year's census counted 17,272 people on the island.
After the failed 1685 risings against King James II — Monmouth's in England and Argyll's in Scotland — convicted rebels were sentenced to transportation, and a group reached Jamaica in 1687 to be sold as servants.
Scotland's colony at Darien in Panama collapsed, and some survivors made their way to Jamaica. Among them was John Campbell, who settled at Black River in St. Elizabeth in 1700 and later sat on the Privy Council.
By far the largest movement of people to Jamaica. The Royal African Company received its monopoly on the British slave trade in 1672, and by the 1720s Jamaica had overtaken Barbados as the British Caribbean's largest sugar exporter and slave importer. About 1,000,000 Africans were landed, of whom about 200,000 were re-exported. Roughly 16% of those put aboard died on the crossing.
Of those who arrived alive, about 30% came from the Bight of Biafra (Igbo), 29% from the Gold Coast (Akan peoples, called "Coromantee" in Jamaica), 18% from West Central Africa, and 13% from the Bight of Benin.
A 1703 law required planters to keep one white man for every ten enslaved people for the first twenty, and one for every twenty after that. The ratio was never met — by 1763 it stood at 30 to 1 — and planters paid the fines instead. Britain abolished the trade in 1807; the last legal arrivals came in early 1808.
After the 1707 Union opened England's colonies to Scots, large numbers came as overseers, bookkeepers, doctors and merchants. A further group arrived as prisoners after the failed Jacobite rising and the Battle of Culloden (1745–46). By 1754, Scots held land in nearly every parish, and in 1774 historian Edward Long estimated that nearly a third of the island's white inhabitants were Scots or their descendants.
When Britain lost the American Revolution, those who had supported the Crown fled Savannah, Charleston and New York. One major estimate puts the arrivals in Jamaica at about 3,000 white Loyalists and about 8,000 enslaved Africans — more than half of all enslaved people taken out of the new United States. Free Black Loyalists came too.
Among them was George Liele, who escaped to Jamaica with his family after being threatened with re-enslavement, and began Baptist preaching there in 1783. This was the start of the Black Baptist movement that later fueled the 1831 Christmas Rebellion.
Under a 1786 treaty with Spain, Britain withdrew its settlers from the Mosquito Coast of Central America. Most went to Belize; some settlers and the people they enslaved came to Jamaica.
The Haitian Revolution drove French planters, free people of color, and the enslaved people they took with them to Jamaica, especially when British troops evacuated the colony in 1798 and when the French were defeated in 1803.
French planters helped expand coffee growing in the Blue Mountains and Port Royal Mountains. Jamaican authorities feared the arrivals would spread the revolution and placed restrictions on them.
The Emancipation Act of 1834 freed enslaved people into a four-year "apprenticeship." Planters feared a labor shortage, and feared freed people would settle the mountainous interior, so the government paid bounties of up to £15 per head to bring in European workers and settle three planned townships: Altamont in Portland, Middlesex near Guys Hill in St. Ann, and Seaford in Westmoreland.
The first 64 Germans, recruited in Bremen for planter Solomon Myers, arrived at Kingston on the Anna on May 24, 1834. About 506 more followed on the Olberes in December. The government's agent, William Lemonius, recruited a caravan of about 800, mostly from Westphalia; the first 532 landed at Rio Bueno on December 10, 1834, and 249 of them were sent to found Seaford Town.
The Irish came too: in December 1835 the James Ray sailed from Belfast with 121 men and their families from Ballymoney, County Antrim, bound for St. Ann, and brought 185 more the following year. In January 1840 the New Phoenix brought 136 more from County Kildare to estates in Clarendon and St. Ann. Many immigrants found the promised terms broken. Full emancipation came on August 1, 1838.
After full emancipation in 1838, and after the bounty scheme failed to supply enough European labor, planters turned to India. On May 10, 1845, the Blundell docked at Old Harbour with 261 indentured workers: 200 men, 28 young women and 33 children. They were sent in small groups to estates in Portland, St. Thomas, St. Mary, Clarendon and Westmoreland, at pay lower than what formerly enslaved workers received.
Arrivals grew quickly: 1,852 in 1846 and 2,439 in 1847. In all, about 37,000 came, the last group landing in 1914. Most planned to return home, but only 38% did. Planters and the government cut return costs by offering land or cash instead of passage, so most stayed and became the island's largest ethnic minority.
Planters also looked to China. On July 30, 1854, the Epsom arrived from Hong Kong with 224 workers. That November, the Vampire brought 197 more who had been working on the Panama Railroad; fearing yellow fever, Panamanian authorities sent them to Jamaica in exchange for Jamaican laborers.
About 200 more came in 1864 from British Guiana, Trinidad and Panama. The last 19th-century group, 694 laborers, arrived from Hong Kong on the Prinz Alexander in July 1884. Broken promises on food, shelter and medical care led to protests and desertions, and by 1891 only 481 Chinese remained on the island. Many who stayed became shopkeepers.
Christians from Mount Lebanon, then part of Ottoman-ruled Greater Syria, fled persecution and sought the protection of the British flag. Unlike the Indian and Chinese arrivals, they came by choice, not under indenture. Most started as door-to-door peddlers, then opened dry-goods shops in downtown Kingston. Families such as Ziadie, Hanna, Mahfood, Issa and Ammar became fixtures of Jamaican retail.
This much larger wave was made up mainly of businessmen, many brought over by relatives already running shops. In 1921 alone, the Georgistan landed 621. The Chinese population grew from 481 in 1891 to 6,886 by the 1943 census, with the biggest increases in the 1920s and 1930s. By then, Chinese grocers anchored communities across all fourteen parishes. A third, smaller wave followed in the 1980s.
For the movements of Jamaicans out of the island — to Panama, Cuba, Britain and North America — see The Diaspora.