A "Manifest Violation" of the Rights of Englishmen: Rights Talk and the Law of Property in Early Eighteenth-Century Jamaica

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Articles

She thanks S. Max Edelson and Paul D. Halliday for their support and guidance.

In 1706, Jamaica's provost marshal received a writ of escheat from the island's Supreme Court of Judicature. The writ directed him to empanel a jury of "Twelve and Lawful Men of the Neighbourhood" who would determine whether the slaves of James Whitchurch, a Jamaican merchant, should be escheated--returned--to the Crown. Did the "Negro Woman Slave Commonly Called Catalina" and her "Seaven Pickaninny" belong to Whitchurch, or could Queen Anne claim her prerogative right to an escheat because the previous owner of the slaves, Charles Delamaine, had died without an heir? ¹The jury found in the Crown's favor, but a dissatisfied Whitchurch petitioned Queen Anne for relief, asking her to return the slaves and quiet his title. Whitchurch's petition, the first Jamaican escheat case to come before the Queen, sparked a transatlantic legal controversy as colonists, Assembly members, and imperial officials weighed the Crown's prerogative right to escheats against local political grievances and the Board of Trade's desire to encourage West Indian settlement and trade. This seemingly mundane conflict over property law quickly acquired constitutional significance, generating the kind of rights talk so familiar to early American historians: Jamaican colonists claimed the rights of Englishmen, and the Jamaican Assembly asserted an institutional capacity akin to Parliament. In this article, I contextualize colonists' rights talk, rooting their claims to English rights in concerns about the administration of property law during a crucial liminal moment in Jamaican history. As the colony transitioned from a small-scale to a large-scale plantation economy and from a society with slaves to a slave society, property and the law that governed it became the focus of intense political conflict. ²

In uncovering the property law roots of rights talk in colonial Jamaica, I reinforce and extend scholarship that places the varied practices of claiming, distributing, and improving land at the heart of British colonization enterprises.³Also, I build upon recent studies that look beyond constitutional rhetoric to examine the substantive concerns that gave rise to rights claims.⁴Whereas an older historiography used colonists' references to English rights and liberties as evidence for an ideologically liberal or republican worldview, historians...