From Crown Colony to Adult Suffrage, 1866-1944

• Author: Trevor Munroe/Arnold Bertram
• Profession: Rhodes Scholar and Fulbright Fellow, political scientist, labour activist and politician, is Professor of Government and Politics at the University of the West Indies, Mona/Distinguished commentator on Jamaican Social History and Political Development is a former Legislator in both houses of the Jamaican Parliament and a former Minister of ...
• Pages: 44-71

44 / The Journey to Adult Suffrage

Crown Colony government established the authority of the

Governor to make laws with the consent of a Legislative Council

consisting of official and unofficial members appointed by the Queen.

The total number of unofficial members was not to exceed six. The

Legislative Council then enacted a law providing that

All powers, functions, and duties heretofore … exercised by the

executive committee … are hereby transferred to, and vested in

… the governor.1

This was the constitutional framework in which the new governor,

Sir John Peter Grant, initiated the period of Crown Colony government

in Jamaica. For the next 18 years no elections were held in Jamaica.

The Governor and his Legislative Council had absolute power and were

subject only to the government in Britain. The Municipal Boards were

entirely nominated bodies, composed in the main of the planter/merchant

class, the Anglican clergy and District Medical Officers.

During the period of Crown Colony government, no black man was

nominated to the Legislative Council, or to any official positions in the

administration. The brown politicians fared better. Their leader, Edward

Jordan, had been elevated to the prestigious position of Island Secretary

under Governor Eyre, and was very much a part of the officialdom which

welcomed the new Governor.

From Crown Colony to Adult Suffrage,

1866–1944

Chapter 2

From Crown Colony to Adult Suffrage 1866–1944 / 45

Governor Grant was a very capable administrator, who during

his tenure carried out extensive reforms including modernizing the

infrastructure, creating a more efficient bureaucracy, upgrading social

services such as health and education, and establishing a police force.

Ironically, these successes were used by the Colonial Office to validate

the view that representative government could not reform the colonial

state. Indeed, Joseph Chamberlain, as Secretary of State for the colonies,

elevated this view to the level of policy, as he articulated fears as to the

suitability of representative government in the colonies.

Grant’s term of office coincided with the rise to power of the industrial

capitalists in England, at a time when free trade governed international

economic relations. Britain was then the world’s leading manufacturer,

and enjoyed a position in the world economy very similar to that occupied

by the United States today.

Grant’s reforms reflected the colonial policy of converting the

uncompetitive semi-slave plantation system into modern capitalist units

of production. In this system, there was no room for an independent

peasantry; what was required was a landless proletariat to provide labour

on the estates in return for slave wages. The post-emancipation vision of

black political activism on the basis of ownership of land, initiated by

the Baptists, now disappeared.

Thousands of peasant farmers were forced off land reclaimed by the

Crown. Refusing to work on the plantations for starvation wages, they

fled the countryside and became ‘vagrants’ on the edge of the capital

city. The impact of this exodus from rural Jamaica to the capital city

increased the population of Kingston — which had fallen to about 27,000

in 1861 after the cholera epidemic of 1850–52 — by some 80 per cent to

48,504 persons in 1911.

The political consequences were even more far-reaching. Thousands

of Jamaicans concentrated in squatter communities on the edge of the

city were totally excluded from participating in the political process, as

well as from accessing the services offered by the colonial state. On the

eve of the 1938 rebellion, their numbers had grown exponentially, and

their condition became even more desperate, as Marcus Garvey

described.