The UC Santa Barbara Undergraduate Journal of History

The 18th century Caribbean has long been understood by academia and popular imagination as a diverse arena for competing, cooperating, and overlapping ethnic, religious, imperial, and indigenous groups. One interaction that requires more thorough analysis is between Africans–enslaved and free–and (predominantly) Sephardic Jewish merchants. Two diasporic peoples, Africans and Jews navigated the transatlantic slave trade and, during critical moments of imperial crisis, shared in resistance to oppressive political forces. British Jamaica was a particularly volatile island that saw African and Jewish attempts at liberation intimately intersect. The 1729-to-1740 First Maroon War allowed African Maroons to secure autonomous communities in the Blue Mountain region; meanwhile, Jewish merchants leveraged their access to the Crown, particularly from 1737 to 1739, to petition against local governmental taxation that was disproportionately levied on them for alleged assistance in the African rebellion. Later, in 1799, Franco-Jewish merchant Isaac Sasportas devised a slave revolt in Jamaica to follow the Haitian revolutionary model; Lockean visions of egalitarianism drove Jewish demands for British colonial equality, with the First French Republic’s abolitionist stance affording an opportunity to expand minority rights across the Atlantic world. Ultimately, through primary source investigations and analysis of current scholarship on 18th century Jamaica, my research illuminates how African-Jewish intersectionality offers a more comprehensive understanding of the 18th century Caribbean’s experience for diasporic communities who served as regional economic drivers.