On 22 June 1832, the House of Commons ordered a copy of a Jamaica House of Assembly committee report investigating the causes of the recent rebellion and the damage it caused, together with sworn examinations, confessions and other attached documents. The report’s own explanations blamed abolitionist discussion and religious teaching, reflecting the Assembly’s defense of slaveholding rule. Read against that framing, the file is evidence both of the uprising and of the colonial elite’s effort to define its meaning for Britain.
A register for Spring Garden Estate in Saint George, Jamaica, documents named people, ages and changes in the enslaved population. Such registers make plantation slavery visible through archival...
Armed rebellion spread through Jamaica's western parishes after enslaved workers began refusing plantation labor. Baptist deacon Sam Sharpe had organized a mass strike to demand freedom and wages; the...
On 10 April 1832, the British House of Commons ordered copies of further communications from Lord Belmore, Jamaica’s governor, about the recent rebellion. This parliamentary record follows the 1831...
A House of Commons return dated 18 April 1832 requested the names of teachers, preachers and people connected with missionary establishments in Jamaica who had been arrested, along with the charges...
Sam Sharpe was executed in Montego Bay after the rebellion was suppressed. He had organized a strike intended to press for freedom and paid work, and became one of Jamaica's central symbols of...
👉 The Commons orders Jamaica’s Assembly report on the rebellion
Current
22 June 1832
On 22 June 1832, the House of Commons ordered a copy of a Jamaica House of Assembly committee report investigating the causes of the recent rebellion and the damage it caused, together with sworn...
The Slavery Abolition Act received royal assent, setting a legal timetable for emancipation across most British colonies. The act did not bring immediate full freedom for most Jamaican adults: it...
The Act took effect in Jamaica. Children under six and people born after the appointed date were free, but most adults were reclassified as apprentices and required to keep working under former...
On 20 September 1837, commissioners George Gordon and John Daughtrey opened public proceedings at Brown’s Town, St Ann. Governor Lionel Smith had commissioned an inquiry into the administration of the...
At the commission hearing in Brown’s Town on 21 September 1837, apprentice Edward Lawrence described Henry James’s severe flogging at Penshurst and what he witnessed afterward. Lawrence said James was...
On 5 October 1837, the Gordon and Daughtrey inquiry moved its proceedings to St Ann’s Bay and inspected the parish House of Correction. The commissioners examined the institution and its records as...
