Poor Whites in a Slave Society: The Monmouth Rebels and the West Indies Monoculture

Mark S. Quintanilla

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were a time of rapid change in the British West Indies as that region, beginning with Barbados and continuing to Jamaica and the Leeward Islands, settled into sugar monoculture. Because sugar monoculture was predicated on the ability of a few elite whites who controlled the ownership of viable lands, labor supplies, and trade, socioeconomic opportunities for poor whites were limited. This paper will use the Monmouth Rebels, a group of English political prisoners deported to the British West Indies in 1685 after their unsuccessful effort to overthrow James II, as a point of reference to glean information on the level of social opportunity that existed in these colonies. Because the rebels were distributed between Britain's principal West Indian colonies (Barbados, Jamaica, and the Leeward Islands), they provide a unique opportunity to examine social mobility during a very crucial time in the development of monoculture throughout the region.

[WP #96016]