Jamaica Surveyed: Plantation Maps and Plans of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Abstract

Jamaica Surveyed was first published in Jamaica in 1988 and was not widely available to a worldwide market. This new reprint is now available and brings to the public a representative sample of the enormous collection of plantation maps and plans in the National Library of Jamaica. The complete collection, unique in the Caribbean, provides information on over twenty thousand landholdings in Jamaica and is one of the most extensive collections of plantation maps in the Americas. Jamaica Surveyed explores the diversity of agricultural activities in the island and the changing patterns of land use during the period. The familiar sugar estates are included but so are the coffee and pimento plantations and livestock pens. Plantation villages, gardens, grounds and great houses are featured, as well as post-emancipation settlement patterns. What emerges is a fascinating picture of Jamaica as it was in the first phase of large-scale settlement and as it changed over time in response to economic forces. B. W. Higman combines cartographic and documentary evidence to produce an unusual work of historical scholarship of interest to historians, geographers, cartographers, and all students of Caribbean life and culture.

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