Between 1737 and 1746, James Knight—a merchant, planter, and sometime Crown
official and legislator in Jamaica—wrote a massive two-volume history of the island. The first
volume provided a narrative of the colony’s development up to the mid-1740s, while the second offered a broad survey of most aspects of Jamaican life as it had developed by the third
and fourth decades of the eighteenth century. Completed not long before his death in the winter
of 1746–47 and held in the British Library, this work is now published for the first time. Well
researched and intelligently critical, Knight’s work is not only the most comprehensive
account of Jamaica’s ninety years as an English colony ever written; it is also one of the
best representations of the provincial mentality as it had emerged in colonial British America
between the founding of Virginia and 1750. Expertly edited and introduced by renowned scholar
Jack Greene, this volume represents a colonial Caribbean history unique in its contemporary
perspective, detail, and scope.
