Jamaica's past is detailed here.

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Jamaica's past is detailed here.

Map of Jamaica in its older form

Pre-Columbian Jamaica

Taíno people

Jamaica under Spanish rule

Colonization by the Spanish

Jamaica under English jurisdiction

The invading of Jamaica

The Jamaica earthquake of 1692

First Battle of the Maroons

Tacky's Conflict

The Second Battle of Maroon

The Baptists' War

The uprising at Morant Bay

Rastafari movement

Independent Jamaica

Freedom and independence for Jamaica

Jamaican political strife

flag Jamaica portal

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The Redware people, whose name is commonly associated with redware pottery, were the first known
inhabitants of the island of Jamaica in the Caribbean around 600 AD or 650 AD.

[1]

[2]

[3] Around the year 800 AD, a second wave of Arawak tribes, which included the Tainos, began
inhabiting the area prior to the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1494.

[1] The original people who settled in Jamaica gave the island the name "Xaymaca," which translates to
"country of wood and water."

[4] The Arawak people were enslaved by the Spanish, and the diseases that the Spanish brought with
them further devastated the Arawak people.

[5] The first historians think that by the year 1602, the Arawak-speaking Taino tribes had died out
completely. Nevertheless, a number of the Taino were able to flee into the interior's forested
mountains, where they intermarried with African slaves who had fled their owners and lived on their
own, free from the Spanish and then the English. [6] [7] [8]

In addition, hundreds of individuals from West Africa were brought to the island by the Spanish. On the
other hand, the majority of Jamaica's African population is the result of the English slave trade.
In the year 1655, the English successfully invaded Jamaica and won the war against the Spanish.
Maroons are people who were formerly enslaved Africans who took advantage of the political unrest on
the island to flee to the interior mountains, where they established autonomous settlements and
became known as Maroons. [9] In the meantime, the English constructed the village of Port Royal on the
coast. It was a base of operations where piracy flourished due to the large number of European rebels
who had been expelled from their countries to serve sentences on the seas. Captain Henry Morgan was
a Welsh plantation owner and privateer who earned a reputation for being one of the wealthiest pirates
in the Caribbean by plundering villages and shipping bases at Port Royal. Morgan was born in Wales.

The production of sugar cane overtook piracy as the primary means of financial support for British
Jamaica in the 18th century. Because of the high need for labor in the sugar business, the British
colonizers imported tens of thousands of enslaved black Africans to the island. By the year 1850, the
number of black and mulatto Jamaicans outnumbered the white population of Jamaica by a factor of
twenty to one. Tacky's Revolt, which took place in 1760, was one of over a dozen significant rebellions
that enslaved Jamaicans staged throughout the 18th century. In addition, there were frequent conflicts
between the British and the mountain settlements of the Jamaican Maroons, which culminated in the
First Maroon War in the 1730s and the Second Maroon War in 1795–1796. Both of these wars took
place in Jamaica.