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Abstract
After the first Masonic lodge formed in Jamaica in 1739, Freemasonry rose to a brief period of success in the colony in the 1770s. Kingston saw a proliferation of Masonic lodges, allowing for complex social stratification along class and ethnic lines. Nonetheless, the organization was hampered by high rates of mortality, causing leadership crises and the collapse of most lodges by 1815. Whereas recent scholarship on eighteenth-century white Jamaicans tends to focus on the colonists' cultivation of "Englishness", the rise of Freemasonry illustrates the Euro-Jamaican colonists' desire to form social networks and identities outside of national boundaries.
In July 1796, a Jamaican Freemason named Abraham Alvarenga submitted a complaint to the Provincial Grand Lodge, the governing body of Freemasonry in Jamaica, which was meeting that month in Kingston. Alvarenga was a member of Union Lodge, a largely Jewish lodge in Kingston, and he objected to the results of the recent elections held in that body on the grounds that he considered it "illegal and unconstitutional, the canvassing for votes at any Masonic election". Masons customarily deferred to experience and social standing in their selection of leaders, allowing for smooth and predictable transitions of power. The Grand Lodge unanimously agreed with Alvarenga, rejecting the slate of officers, calling for a new election in Union Lodge, and resolving that thenceforth any candidate who canvassed for votes would be disqualified.1 The scratched elections in Union Lodge in 1796 belie the notion, put forward by some historians, that Masonic lodges represented seedbeds of democratic politics and even revolutionism.2 On the contrary, Masonry aspired to play a stabilizing role in British Atlantic society, particularly in the West Indies. In a world of slavery, violence, migration, warfare, and frequent death, the Masonic lodges imagined themselves as refuges of social unity and continuity; what Masons sometimes called, "a model of Beauty, Order, and Harmony."3
The Freemasons of eighteenth-century Jamaica struggled to establish and maintain their Fraternity on the island in the face of deadly obstacles. Their strenuous efforts led to a brief period of success: in the 1770s, Jamaica was the principal hub of Freemasonry in the New World. More importantly, the travails of early Jamaican Masonry expose the complexities of white West Indians' self-conceptions. Recent scholarship on pre-emancipation Jamaica...