Reshma Modi
 
 

Jamaica, as a colony of the British Empire, was a producer of rum, livestock, and most importantly sugar cane. In the seventeenth-century Jamaica's tropical climate, along with the transe-Atlantic slave trade, made Jamaica into the world's largest sugar producer. Throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Jamaica remained the world's largest sugar exporter. Both the United States and Continental Europe depended heavily on the British Colonial, and therefore the Jamaican, export of sugar. Furthermore the Jamaican sugar trade expanded as a result of the Napoleonic Wars. Only during the American revolution did the Jamaican's experience a drop in capital, due to the war time ban on trade with America. Prosperity for the British colony was not to last though, and by March 1815 Jamaica saw the peak of its sugar industry. British domination over the world sugar market lasted until the 1830's, when slavery was abolished, and Cuba over took its neighbor in sugar production.

Establishing Jamaica's place in the British Empire required "greater infusions of capital and population, particularly through the forced migration of Africans" (Shephard 631). As this economical equation came to be reality (were "capital" was sugar, and "population" was slaves) the island was covered by vast sugar plantations, owned by wealthy English gentry. As this dynamic relationship became more successful, three specific results were noticeable. First, as the English population of the island grew, it began to intermarry with the Spanish and French. Inevitably many of the English men also kept black slave women as mistresses. These mixed children more than likely were raised as slaves due to their father's inability and refusal to recognize them. Furthermore, these plantations often attracted the interests of the younger sons of English gentry, who otherwise received little from their father's will. These young men often sought to marry the daughter's of these Jamaican plantation owners.

Despite the eventual success of the sugar plantations in Jamaica there were obstacles; ironically, two of these problems in development, also proved to bring an end to Jamaican success. One was Maroon resistance, which started slave rebellion's in search of free black states (Rogozinski 153). Another was the initial lack of labor. In the end the slave rebellions, and the abolition of slavery that resulted in a labor shortage, caused the Jamaican sugar industry to collapse.
 
 

As the rebellions were reaching their peak, Charlotte Bronte was growing up and writing her first fictional stories. According to Susan Meyer, there is evidence that Bronte had knowledge of the slave rebellions in the West Indies, and the tortures inflicted on the rebellious slaves (Meyer 249). Bronte used these tortures in her fiction, and she also created a black character who lead occasional rebellions against her English masters (Meyer 249). Furthermore, Meyer asserts that this legacy of making colonialism present in her work extends to "each of Bronte's major novels" (Meyer 249).