MAPS OF HISTORY · HISTORY OF · Jamaica

ONE LAND · 4 ATLASES

Jamaica, on the map of history

What was Jamaica before it was Jamaica? Below, every era of this land in the Maps of History collection — who ruled it, what it was called, and when control changed — each line linked to the dated map that shows it. Modern borders stand in as an honest approximation; every atlas says so on the map itself.

Jamaica · The Age of Revolutions, 1775–1848

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British Jamaica · The American Civil War, 1861–1865

British Jamaica had been free since abolition in 1834–38 — the great precedent both American sides argued over (planters called it ruin; abolitionists called it proof). In October 1865, the Morant Bay rebellion — freedpeople protesting land and justice, put down by Governor Eyre with some 400 executions — split British opinion in a furious public controversy. The empire that lectured Washington on slavery faced its own reckoning over what freedom without land or votes was worth: the exact question Reconstruction was failing to answer.

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Jamaica · The Great War, 1914–1918

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Jamaica · The Cold War, 1945–1991

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