founded the Village of Sand Lake

Jamaica (JamaicaRN1.2)

James D. Fearon David D. Laitin

Stanford University

This is one of a set of “random narratives” to complement our statistical findings in

regard to civil war onsets. This is a draft completed on July 7, 2006; comments welcome. Our model shows that Jamaica had a two-year period, just after independence was granted, where it was nearly twice as susceptible to a civil war as the average for all country years and nearly three times as susceptible as the regional average. After that short period of being a new state, Jamaica’s probability for a civil war was negligible, far below the world and regional average. Over the course of its independent existence, Jamaica did not have a civil war onset, an outcome by-and-large correctly predicted in our model.

This narrative will first give an historical background to violence and politics in Jamaica, showing that arguments pointing to repertoires of contention would fail in this case. Second, it will address the issue of the transition to independence, when our model gives Jamaica a relatively high chance for a civil war onset.

Finally, the narrative will survey the years 1964-1999 to address a

disjuncture between our model and standard historiographical accounts of Jamaica. From our model’s point of view, civil war was out-of-the-question due to Jamaica’s political stability, full democracy, lack of oil, insufficient mountainous terrain to matter for insurgency, relatively high GDP per capita, and small population size. Yet, from the involved actor’s point of view, the country was often on the brink of generalized violence. The narrative weaves between these two perspectives. What is noteworthy is the high levels of political violence (as Jamaican historiography addresses) combined with the social reality that this violence would not escalate into an anti-regime insurgency (a factor that our research addresses). Of the variables in our model that we think are doing the “work” in holding back escalation, we focus on Jamaica’s small size and stable democracy (two

Random Narratives, Jamaica, p. 2

variables that went into the model directly) as sources of peace. But foreign aid was a key to state strength – and although this aid wasn’t recorded in our data, it helped increase state strength, a factor we say is crucial for staving off civil war. We will also raise the issue of political strategy to stave off rebellion, a factor raised by one analyst that is not part of our model, but seems of some consequence in this case. I. A Violent Preindependence History The systematic examination of non civil war states such as Jamaica provides a continual challenge to those who claim that a country’s historical path yields fundamental insights into contemporary affairs. Heuman’s opening sentence in his study on the tradition of protest is Jamaica (1993, 151) reads: “Jamaica has a long history of resistance…” In the words of Werner Zips (1999, 41) “Jamaica holds a unique record in the collective slave revolts within the context of Caribbean history.” And the Library of Congress country study speaks of a tradition going back to the 17th century that symbolizes “the fervent, sometimes belligerent, love of freedom that is ingrained in the Jamaican people as a result of both their British tutelage and their history of slavery (Library of Congress, chap. 2).

Jamaica’s preindependence past carries with it a history of two rebellious groups, the Maroons and the slaves. The Maroons were runaway slaves, many from the period of Spanish occupation, who resisted British attempts to re-enslave them after the forces sent by Oliver Cromwell in 1655 allowed for a renewed colonization of the island. Resisting foreign rule, the Maroons perfected a system of ambush and hit-and-run attacks on British military forces. In what has been called first Maroon War that started in 1720, guerrilla tactics such as relying on friends, former shipmates, and relatives still living on plantations for information (especially of troop movements and transmitted through talking drums), the British conventional tactics were unable decisively to put this rebellion down. After eighteen years of frustration, Gov. Edward Trelawney in 1738 commissioned Col. John Guthrie either to destroy Maroon leader Kojo’s main settlement or to seek peace. Guthrie chose the latter. In the treaty with the Leeward Maroons (a similar treaty was subsequently signed by the Windward Maroons), separatists were granted the right to plant 1,500 acres of coffee, cocoa, ginger, tobacco and cotton, to breed livestock, to sell their goods in the marketplace, to hunt wherever they pleased, and to self-police. In return, the insurgents agreed to serve in the army of the colony against slave uprisings,


to capture all future runaways for a premium, to allow road access to the British without fear of ambush, to grant two white “diplomats” rights of residence, and to recognize the right of the governor to nominate future Maroon commanders.

The Second Maroon War of 1795-96 was ignited when a new

Governor broke the spirit of the earlier treaty, and humiliated some Maroons by having them flogged by a slave for their law-breaking activities. A conciliation team of Maroons to the Governor was tricked; they were arrested and chained. The Maroons responded by burning their village and retreating into the forests. But since only a single village was fighting (one that traced itself back to Kojo, and was called Trelawney, in honor of the Governor-General who signed the treaty), while other Maroon villages remained neutral, and one village, Accompong (the village founded by Kojo’s brother, Accompong), joined with the British, the rebels surrendered with the British offering the rebels a peace treaty that was less generous than what was received after the First Maroon War. Again the rebels were tricked. The Governor, while amid negotiations with the rebels, had them all deported to Halifax, and the Governor then deported them to Freetown, Sierra Leone, where they rose in the local hierarchy. Thus the Maroons had a long tradition of rebellion and betrayal by the British.

Slave rebellions complemented those led by the Maroons (Heuman 1993 152-4). The first slave rebellion was in 1673 by 300 slaves in the parish of St. Ann. They murdered their master and fled, and formed the basis of a new Maroon community. As far back as 1690, more than 500 slaves in Clarendon rebelled, and many of them joined the Maroons. In the 19th century, rebellions were “endemic”, occurring on average once every five years. In 1760 Tacky’s Rebellion erupted when the British were diverted in the 7-years war. This rebellion lasted 6 months, killed 60 whites and over 1,000 slaves. In 1831 (seven years before emancipation) the most serious slave rebellion in Jamaica’s history began, and was called the Christmas Rebellion or the “Baptist War”. Later on in the 19th century, however, with the end of sugar duties for non-British colonies in UK, planters sought to depress wages, making the workers fear again a reintroduction of slavery. There were also grievances on the estates about the tax rates and toll-gates, and these factors were used in justifying the low-level insurrections in several communities in the 1850s. There was then an economic turndown, with scarce food; but the even bigger story was the pressure from the Anti-Slavery Society in Britain, and the attempt by the Crown to restrict practices


in the West Indies. White owners talked openly about revolution. By hearing the whites complain, the slaves surmised that they would not face military resistance if they rebelled, and these factors led up to the Morant Bay rebellion.

The Morant Bay rebellion of 1865 was a short challenge to British authority that was brutally suppressed. The story behind this rebellion goes back to 1862, when George William Gordon, a wealthy businessman and a Member of the House of Assembly (but someone who identified with the poor), left the official Presbyterian and joined the Native Baptist Church. He wrote to Gov. Eyre (and petitioned the Queen) protesting conditions of the blacks in his parish. He was summarily dismissed as Magistrate of St. Thomas. He linked with Paul Bogle, a Minister in his new church, who led a march of 200 into Morant Bay to protest, and when the police tried to arrest him, the peasant marchers attacked the officers. Bogle then sent his men to attack the vestry of Morant Bay in which 18 were killed, and 51 prisoners were freed. The crowd then rioted, burning the courthouse and killing fourteen vestrymen, one of whom was black. Rumors of re-enslavement, and that Jamaica would be joining the US as a slave state, exacerbated the problem. Rumors abounded as well that the Queen would be on the side of the rebels against the white/brown upper classes. The state declared martial law, attacked St. Thomas (and the adjoining parish of Portland), and the militia killed 1,000. Gordon (who was seen as an accomplice) and Bogle were both hanged. Failing to obey an order to disperse, the demonstrators were fired on by the militia, and seven protesters were killed. In all during this rebellion, 439 people were killed, 1,000 houses burned, and 600 people were flogged. The slaves as well as the Maroons had a complete repertoire of rebellion, a factor often forgotten in explanations for peace (Wilson 1980, 139-41). II. No Civil War at Moment of Independence We have proposed a commitment mechanism that explains the vulnerability of new states to rebellions by minorities. If there is no group that was especially privileged under the ancient regime or especially threatened by the consequences of majority rule for an independent state, then it would be quite difficult to activate this mechanism. A reading of West Indian historiography suggests that there was such a group, viz., the Maroons. In fact, their peace treaty with British set them into structural conflict with the slave population. In return for peace, the British received


from the Maroons a commitment to return all future escaped slaves and to help support the colonial order. As Zips points out, “The peace treaties …turn[ed] the tables. Slaves had fought on the side of the colonial militia for payment; now Maroons could themselves serve as mercenaries against slaves who sought freedom.” As mercenaries, the Maroons participated in crushing subsequent slave revolts, and became defenders of the status quo. In Jamaica’s largest slave revolt in 1832, with 20,000 slaves mobilized, the mercenary service of the Maroons turned the scales. Again, the Maroons were crucial in defeating the peasant revolt of 1865 that followed from the Morant Bay incidents.1 In 1842, understanding the problem of unequal rights, the colonial ruler tried to invalidate the special status of the Maroons, to make them subject to the same laws as the Jamaicans, but this failed. As the commitment logic would expect, the Maroons had disdain for the Jamaican nationalists in 1962, and wanted to have special dealings with the Queen rather than the Prime Minister, who was subordinate legally to the Queen in the Commonwealth (Zips, 113ff; 120).

An independent Jamaica was indeed a threat to the Maroons, who insisted on their inherited rights of sovereignty and tax exemptions. Their long-ago economic advantage (in getting rents from capturing slaves) gone, and suffering from poor roads to market for their agricultural goods, the Maroons in the 20th century were in economic decline. In response to new opportunities, the Maroon communities went into ganja production, and this would put them in direct conflict with a central government that sought international legitimacy. They were right in their fears. In 1988 local residents to protect their sector shot a policeman who had confiscated ganja from a Maroon house in Accompong. In response to incidents of this sort and international pressures, the state began to use airplanes and helicopters to poison the ganja plants, forcing many young Maroons into emigration as the last chance for economic survival. If the Maroons had acted decisively and early, they might have won long term autonomy from control by Kingston. Compare Jamaica to the similar situation in Suriname. In Suriname, in July 1986 (to be sure eleven years after independence), a Bush Negro (the local term for a Maroon) insurgency began, led by former soldier Ronnie Brunswijk. The insurgency went after inland economic targets at first. The

1 . This conflict is reflected in 20th century popular culture. In Bongo Man of Jimmy Cliff, there is a Rastafarian woman who accuses the Maroons of treachery to those on the plantations.


army quickly responded by ravaging villages and killing Brunswijk’s cadres. Bush Negroes by the thousands found refuge in French Guiana. The Surinamese Government in 1989 decided to scale down the conflict, and negotiated a treaty, the Kourou Accord, with Brunswijk.2 But there was no such rebellion in Jamaica.

To be sure, our model provides a probability of only .034 of a civil war onset in each of the first two years of independence, so there is no need to account for its failure. Yet this was Jamaica’s highest point of risk and we have identified those who might have exploited it. They did not do so. A partial answer to this “failure” will be provided in the next section, in the discussion of the role of the UK in the transition and the political strategy of the ruling elites. III. Thirty-five years of Peace with No State Breakdown

From 1964 to 1999, our model predicts a probability of civil war onset in Jamaica that is indistinguishable from zero. And there was no onset.

Lack of a civil war onset does not imply that Jamaica has been a peaceful paradise. In fact, violence has been endemic all through this period in Jamaica’s history. A decade of this violence is astutely analyzed by Lacy (1977). The book goes beyond official statistics, analyzing 1,935 violent incidents resulting in 1,960 casualties (746 killed and 1,214 wounded) that were compiled for the leading Jamaican newspaper, the Daily Gleaner. The data show an increase in violence during the 1960s that challenged the capabilities of the security police charged with maintaining order. The sources of most of the violence were in the lumpenproletariat, a class that comprises about 150,000 Kingstonians living mostly in the western districts, and constitutes youth gangs, political gangs, and (the quasi-religious order that worships the once Ethiopian emperor) the Rastafarians. In the violent confrontations in the streets, the officials from the two competing parties (the PNP and JLP) initially armed these groups. Others developed into local terrorist groups, fighting against the entire political system.

A series of “sparks” that might have – given other conditions – set off a civil war were lit from the eve of independence. The first was in 1958 at a

2 . Background Note: Suriname, U.S. Department of State, http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/1893.htm


convention in Back-O-Wall (in western Kingston). Three hundred Rastas hoisted flags in Victoria Park and declared that they had captured Kingston. They were forcibly evicted by the police. Then came the Henry rebellion of 1959-50, led by Reverend Claudius Henry of the African Reform Church (a Rastafarian group). This religious group was linked with the First Africa Corps, a militant group from New York that got its weapons from bank robberies that were masterminded by a black policeman. The First Africa Corps and the ARC-militants joined forces in a guerrilla training camp in the Red Hills of Jamaica. Overcoming a preemptive police raid in which Claudius was arrested (based on intelligence from New York handed over to British authorities), Claudius’s son took over the movement. His armed group had one violent confrontation with the police, in which two British soldiers were killed.

After independence in 1963, a gang of six Rastafarians attacked a petrol station in Coral Gardens, and then attacked the police that pursued them. Eight people were killed. This was reported in local media as a Rastafarian uprising, and thus it had big political significance.

Political warfare became endemic in 1966-67 with political violence escalating between gangs supporting PNP vs. those supported by JLP. (To raise the tension level, associated trade unions stood behind their own parties, and on their behalf, supported a wave of strikes). In the run-up to the 1967 elections, violence escalated to the point of a State of Emergency. In August 1966 the newspaper of record (The Gleaner) reported that PNP men were unpacking revolvers. Ed Seaga, an MP from the JLP, responded in a radio broadcast saying that this should be dealt with “with a surgeon’s knife”. A series of local shootings in west Kingston neighborhoods followed (by mid-September, there were thirty-nine separate cases, with four dying of gunshot wounds), and in September both JLP and PNP headquarters were attacked. In October, Rudolph Lewis, the lead JLP gunman was shot dead. His alleged attacker was murdered two days later, and on that day there was a bomb attack inside a theatre, and this escalated into other incidents injuring twenty that night elsewhere in west Kingston. At that point, the JLP government declared a state of emergency in Western Kingston, with a curfew, and the army given right to special search and arrest. Police investigations found arms caches in the headquarters of both parties. The state of emergency was lifted in early November, and a series of killings to settle scores followed, leading up to shots being fired into the motorcade of Norman Manley on February 13, 1967, a week before the election. The gang


brawls turned against the security forces of the state in anticipation of the election. After the election, the political violence diminished, but was replaced by general criminal violence, not directed against the other party, but against new targets.

In 1968 the “Rodney riots” or “October Revolution” undermined the tenuous military stalemate. These riots were incited by the government’s denial of entry to Jamaica of Walter Rodney, a radical lecturer who had a position in the UWI. He was without cause sent “back” to his Guyana homeland. The ensuing violence was the first post-independence political violence that was not associated with one of the two competing parties. The incidents began as student protests, but this was picked up by urban lumpenproletariat in Kingston, whose riots caused immense property damage, and involved much looting. These demonstrations showed the deep antagonism against the government held within the urban ghettoes. But this movement had no legs as the alliance of privileged students and street gangs was short-lived.

Electoral violence continued. As summarized in the Library of Congress study (chap. 2), “almost every general or municipal election since independence has been preceded and followed by gang warfare, street outbreaks, and occasional assassinations.” And the numbers of killed kept rising. The election that brought PNP to power in 1972 was relatively peaceful, but the run-up to the 1976 general election (with Prime Minister Manley employing some of the same tactics of rewarding partisans and blocking political enemies from public goods) set the scene for Jamaica’s second State of Emergency. The by-elections in 1975 were already violent, presaging a return to major violence in 1976 general elections. In the Wilton Gardens section of southwest St. Andrew, an anti-JLP organization called South-west St. Andrew Citizens Association was formed with a socialist orientation and reported that the JLP was training youth for guerrilla warfare. In March 1975 Winston Blake, a shock-trooper for the PNP, was assassinated; the funeral procession passed the JLP stronghold of Tivoli Gardens, and when it passed, a gun battle raged, wounding eight. In early January, 1976, when the new voter enumeration lists were made public, and in the presence of an IMF Conference with many reporters in town, political gangs began assassinations, and by January 6, bombs were set off, and men with rifles set off fires. Meanwhile, PNP supporters were attacking the US Embassy (as there were rumors that the CIA was supporting Seaga, against


Manley’s alleged pro-Cuba policies). Several people were shot, one fatally, and two police were murdered in the general gang violence.

Shortly thereafter, PNP’s office in St. Mary was destroyed by arson, and this led Manley to form a party defense group (much to the worry of the government Security Forces) that could secure some 2,000 PNP sites and fifty-three constituency headquarters. The JLP saw this as an upgrading of the “Garrison Gang” of intimidators, and the Jamaica Manufacturer’s Association called this the “institutionalization of private armies” in Jamaica. And violence continued through February, including attacks on the police. Party headquarters again became hosts for arms cashes.

Between January 1 and June 19, 1976, 151 citizens and 19 police officers were killed in violent conflict. Manley intimated that this was CIA inspired. Wilson surmises that in this period the JPL, with or without CIA help, indeed sought to “disrupt the social order”. He cites the case of Herb Rose, once a PNP member and then a JLP organizer, who at this time resigned from the party accusing it of seeking the violent accession to power. In these conditions, Manley declared a State of Emergency. With this decree, JLP executive members were detained, and this dampened the JLP electoral effort. The JLP further alleged that on election day, December 15, 1976, thousands of JPL supporters were apprehended, and vehicles carrying JPL officials were seized for the day. Violence persisted despite the State of Emergency, up to the election, and a near assassination of Bob Marley at a government-promoted reggae concert added to the violent mix (Wilson 1980, 300-337). And without a State of Emergency in the run-up to the next general election of 1980, some 800 people were killed (Gray 2003, 77).

Violence was set off not only by elections but by economic conditions

as well. Roadblocks and bonfires were set up during protests over a twenty percent jump in fuel prices in 1985 in which four demonstrators died in confrontation with the police at roadblocks; a fifth was killed in a farm thirty-five miles west of the capital (Treaster, 1985, A8).

And the violence goes beyond gangs reacting to economic hardships or serving the needs of those involved in electoral competition. As explained in the Library of Congress volume (1987, chap. 2), “there had been occasional subversive incidents on the island in the 1980s and several armed groups had been linked to such activities. The Seaga government tied several subversive and criminal activities in Jamaica to Cuban-trained extremists. In


a speech to Parliament in 1984, for example, Winston Spaulding, then minister of national security and justice, blamed the violence against policemen on the Hot Steppers Gang. The minister described gang members as ‘specially trained and highly motivated persons who constitute a special threat to Jamaica's security,’ and he linked the group to drug trafficking and Cuba, which, he alleged, provided guerrilla training for gang members.”

The standard explanation for the near epidemic in violence is popular frustration. As Gray (2003, 73) practically assumes, the crisis of violence in Jamaica is due to “the failure of economic policies, near-weekly accounts of human rights abuses, and recurrent disclosures of the corruption of power, the political bosses have retained their predominance, and the political apparatus that supports them has remained largely unchanged…” Or in the words of the Library of Congress (1987, chap. 2) study, “The nation's political violence derives from the socioeconomic structure of Jamaican politics, that is, social stratification along racial and economic class lines. Increasing political, social, and economic polarization in Jamaica has contributed to both political and criminal violence.”3

And economic grievances, when quantified, suggest great frustration. Inequality is a sad fact of Jamaican life. In 1960 61 percent of the national income went to the top 20 percent of the population, and the balance worsened in the period after independence. Similarly with land, as 64 percent of the land was owned by 10 percent of the population as of 1961. Income was higher and public services (especially health care) far better in the urban areas than in rural Jamaica. These inequalities widened as a result of the neo-conservative economic policies adopted in the 1980s (Library of Congress, chap. 2, “Equality”). More specific charges have been leveled. First is the fact of “blocked migration”. In 1962 the British passed the Commonwealth Immigration Act that made it extremely difficult for Jamaican workers to migrate there. Changes in the American immigration law in 1965 provided Jamaican workers with an alternative escape hatch. However, this migration to the US was more of a brain drain of skilled labour, but not an opportunity for the working class migrants that UK had taken. Because of these restrictions on the movement of labor, by the mid 1960s, the Jamaican unemployed could

3 . In a fine book on violence in Jamaica, Lacey (1977) assumes a grievance story in the structure of the book. Part 1 is called “The causes of frustration”; Part 2 is called “The manifestations of frustration”; and Part 3 is called “The containment of frustration.”


not be accommodated by openings abroad. As emigration fell, the percentage of youth in the population increased, and the percentage living in Kingston, largely youth that had in past generations emigrated, increased similarly. Another way to look at this is from 1957 to 1960, the potential labor force fell from 650,000 to 607,000, but then went to 750,000 in 1968 and 822,000 by 1972. This computes to an annual figure of 40,000 school leavers attempting to join the labor force in the 1960s. Unemployment was about 12.7% in 1960 and 30-31% in 1969 (Lacy, 1977, chap. 1; Wilson 1980, 2-5). These unemployed youths unable to find jobs in Jamaica and restricted from international migration, became a form of a lumpen-proletariat. They lived in an environment of urban poverty, and in that environment, they developed a culture, in the analysis of Wilson (1980, 183) that “completely rejects the legitimacy of the social order…within the sub-culture of violence there is an irreverence for life. Life is not perceived as something of value…Their relationship to the larger society is a predator relationship…They connote terror in the minds of the affluent elite…[as they] are as elusive as political guerrillas…it would not be an exaggeration to say that there exist a state of war between the police and the lumpen purveyors of violence. The enshrined custom of this sub-culture is not to cooperate with the police. One does not volunteer information of any kind to the representatives of the ‘unrecognized state.’”

Parallel to blocked migration was the blocked trade in ganja. There was profit for small peasants in the international marijuana trade (ganja), but this created a sector that was anti-police, and necessarily connected with organized crime. It turned hungry peasants seeking to eke out a living as enemies of the security apparatus of the state (Lacy, 1977, 25).

Despite the frustrations in the population, as our model correctly ignores,4 there was little mobilization for insurgent action against the state. As Gray reports in a somewhat astonished tone, attempts to confront economic failure, for example in the Disaffected People’s National Party (former Workers Party of Jamaica activists) and the New Beginning Movement, made up of defectors from the JLP – have stirred little public enthusiasm. The popular response to crisis in Jamaica has been indifference. 4 . We found in other narratives the fact of blocked migration to be potentially significant in inducing civil war onset. We have interpreted this factor to be not a reflection of grievance, but one of labor supply for insurgencies.


Elsewhere he reports that amidst state terror, “a motley collection of politically inspired gangsters, heroic bandits, and left-wing gunmen made armed confrontation and derring-do their deadly vocation…they robbed banks, challenged the security forces with hit-and-run tactics, and mocked the rule of the two parties. Yet for all their disruptiveness such groups were a minority among the poor and their cultural extremism and ultraviolence provided widespread revulsion” (Gray, pp. 73, 90). This of course leads to the question of why our model turned out to be right while many observers looking at Jamaica from close up were surprised to see that the country, like similar states in the impoverished third world, did not fall into warlord-ruled anarchy.

Our theory points to a set of related factors that cauterized frustration and thereby prevented civil war. These have to do with the high degree of control over society that the Jamaican state was able to exert. On one side of the coin, the task for Jamaica’s rulers was not as great as it is for many rulers of postcolonial states. The Jamaican population is low, with an average over the independence period of 2.5 million, which puts it in the bottom twentieth percentile of the observations in our dataset. The median population of country/years in which there was a civil war onset is 12 million. There is a clue in the Jamaican case on how size matters to lower the probability of civil war. From the late colonial period, Jamaican politics has pitted the JPL against the PNP, in what has amounted to as a bitter struggle for power and patronage. The founder of the JPL was William Alexander Bustamante, a moneylender in the capital city of Kingston who had formed the Jamaica Trade Workers and Tradesmen Union (JTWTU) and captured the imagination of the black masses with his messianic personality. His opponent was Norman W. Manley, whose PNP was largely supported by the mixed-race middle class and the liberal sector of the business community. Riots in 1938 spurred the PNP to unionize labor, with its Trade Union Congress (TUC) in opposition to the JTWTU. The PNP declared itself socialist in 1940, subsequently joining the Socialist International and making alliances with the social democratic parties of Western Europe. But Manley was hardly a doctrinaire socialist, but more in line with the politics of the British Labour Party. But ideological similarity did not reduce the fierceness of the party competition in Jamaica.

Despite the bitter struggles between these parties, reflected in ugly street violence at virtually every electoral competition, both Bustamante and Manley were light-skinned, affluent, aristocratic, and distant cousins. In the


1940s, Manley (unsuccessfully) argued Bustamante’s brief in court, defending him against British charges that linked him to the labor riots of 1938, and then looked after his union organization during his imprisonment. The close network ties of the ruling class, in which all potential rulers were socially connected, hardly blocked internal struggles, but held all parties back from self-destructive civil war. To take an example, in the wake of a State of Emergency that severely limited his party’s ability to campaign, Ed Seaga’s JPL lost decisively. Yet Seaga was gracious is defeat. He told the country, “I think the PNP scored a very clear and decisive victory” (Wilson 1980, 337). This suggests that while the elite incited its mass base to fight each other tooth and claw, the ruling elites had an implicit contract (a possible contract given tight social networks and small size) to set limits to how high up the SES scale they would allow violent conflict to rise. Jamaica’s small size made for a relatively unified ruling class with a clear sense of its vulnerability if competition became too intense.

Perhaps more important than its small size, Jamaica’s population is

largely urban, which facilitates riots and popular protests, but not sustained insurgency. Furthermore, despite inequality in landholding, the countryside does not have a landless peasant class seeking to ally with urban intellectuals who promise massive redistribution of land. Planters in Jamaica failed in their attempt to convert slaves into tenant farmers. Instead they hired rural labor both from ex-slaves and by recruiting workers from India, China, and Sierra Leone. Ex-slaves not working for wages settled in small inland communities doing subsistence and cash-crop farming (Library of Congress, 1987, chap. 2). To be sure, in the late 1930s and 1940s there was some land grabbing, but there has been in the independence era a large wage-earning peasantry that is unionized, well-versed in industrial sabotage (e.g. through the burning of sugar cane), but not hungry enough to squat on the lands of latifundi (Lacy, pp. 24-25). Thus, a small population, largely urban, with no landless peasantry to mobilize in rural areas, makes the task of control by the state a relatively easy one.

Finally, in regard to the capacity to control, Jamaica’s relative wealth plays a role. Jamaica had the second largest GDP of the Commonwealth Caribbean, behind only Trinidad and Tobago, an oil exporter and thus having the kind of wealth that brings problems for social control, at least in


our model. This wealth allowed for a sustained patronage system in which nearly all potential defectors could easily be bought off.5

On the other side of the coin, Jamaica came into independence with a relatively strong state apparatus. As far back as 1662, realizing that tropical diseases would for the long term keep the settler population low, Jamaica’s second governor, Lord Windsor gave nonslave Africans the rights of Englishmen and in so doing, he “laid the foundations of a governing system that was to last for two centuries: a crown- appointed governor acting with the advice of a nominated council in the legislature. The legislature consisted of the governor and an elected but highly unrepresentative House of Assembly” (Library of Congress, chapter 2). Precisely 300 years later, on the eve of independence, a government minister responded to a query of a reporter from The New York Times (“Jamaicans Proud of Independence” December 18, 1962, p. 4) about how people feel about being independent. “We’ve been preparing for independence for so long,” he answered, “that the change in barely discernible.” With this institutional framework, Jamaica has never faced political instability as we code it (that is, change in degree of democracy).6 This stable framework deters potential insurgents who are incentivized to mobilize when the state appears to be weak.

This well-institutionalized state supported a well-trained security apparatus. The Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) and the Jamaica Defense Force (JDF) were the core regular units for security, backed by auxiliary units (e.g. the Island Special Constabulary Force, ISCF), and private security organizations. The JCF had about 2,300 personnel in 1960 and 3,100 in 1968. Auxiliaries added another 3,000 (Lacy chap. 6). Jamaica, with its well-trained personnel, provided the largest Caribbean contingent (250

5 . Given the low scores for mountainous terrain (only 2.8% of landmass with a world average at 22%), it would be consistent with our theory to claim that this too made control easier. But the facts on the ground belie this inference. Kips (1999, 78ff) reports, e.g. that the Maroons relied on the Blue Mountains in the east (with peaks reaching nearly 2,300 meters) and Cockpit County in the west which is pitted karst with deep hollows and limestone hillocks. Both regions were covered with dense evergreen rainforest, and with high humidity there were deep sinkholes that make marching through the terrain (especially with heavy arms) treacherous. 6 . In the model of Robinson, Acemoglu and Johnson, we should not have expected good institutions built where European settlers could not survive; yet in Jamaica, or so it is claimed in the standard historiography, good institutions were successfully implanted without a significant settler population. See Robinson, James A., Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson. "Reversal of Fortune: Geography and Institutions in the Making of the Modern World Income Distribution." Working Paper, 2002. On the ratio of settlers to slaves, see Orlando Patterson (1967) The Sociology of Slavery: An Analysis of the Origins, Development and Structure of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica (London: McGibbon & Kee), who suggests that the reason that Jamaica had such a high rate of rebellion is the very low ratio (1:13 in the 19th c.) of whites/slaves.


troops) to the American-led force in Grenada from late October 1983 to June 1985. The government of Edward Seaga, in fear of a revolution like Grenada’s, sent his troops to participate in regional military exercises, under the watchful eye of the Americans. In addition, Jamaica cooperated with the United States and the Regional Security System (RSS) – where member states collaborated on regional security matters. Saega also had Jamaican forces hold joint military and narcotics interdiction exercises in the context of the RSS (Library of Congress, 1987, chap. 2, section on “National Security”).

The national security apparatus is strengthened by active support from the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada. At the dawn of independence, the UK retained troops in substantive posts in the JDF and there was a large British Joint Services Training Team in Jamaica throughout first decade of independence. In 1965, Brigadier Crook and twenty-one of the British officers who had colonial command positions changed their formal role defined in the colonial period and became the British Joint Services Training Team. (This helps explain why there was no attempted insurgency in 1962 – the imperialists, from the point of view of the provision of order, did not leave). Meanwhile there were regular “exchange training schemes” that brought Jamaican troops to the UK and UK forces to Jamaica, including the 1st Battalion of Lancashire Fusiliers and the York and Lancaster Regiment who conducted jungle training. British aid also supported a Police Training Team (by sponsoring officers to go to UK for further training), and a command and co-ordination structure for the Jamaican security forces. In a parallel fashion, once Prime Minister Bustamante made clear that Jamaica would have nothing to do with Cuba, the US Military Assistance Program gave $1.1 million between 1964 and 1967 for the JDF, and in 1966 began a technical assistance program to the JCF through the AID Public Safety Program. In June 1963 Jamaica and US signed a defense pact. Canada also played a prominent role in promoting security assistance (Lacy 1977, chap. 8).

The JCF and the JDF were regularly involved in joint police-military operations with a domestic security slant. However, the police aspect of security is far less supportive of the “strong state” view than is that of the constabulary. Although the police have received positive reviews for professionalism, they have become implicated in partisan politics. Most of the police were partisans of the PNP, and when the JLP ruled through the first decade of independence, there was trouble. After a JLP march in 1965


that resulted in violence, the police charged Saega (then a government minister) and eight other party members with riot and assault, charges that were thrown out in court due to unreliable witnesses (who were probably threatened by JLP party hacks). The police were so scared of party-induced violence in Western Kingston (in electoral districts that were quite volatile, yet decisive for electoral outcomes) they were reluctant to make arrests to stem pre-election violence in fear that both sets of gangs could turn on them. Relations between police and government got so bad that the police went on strike (in a “sick out”), and the government ordered the JDF to man the police stations (Lacy, chap. 7).

The partisanship of the police helps explain high levels of urban violence. Americas Watch reported an average of 217 police killings a year from 1979 to 1986, representing about fifty percent of Jamaica’s total killings. A Jamaica Council of Human Rights report computed 289 persons killed by the police in 1984. This is exacerbated by the continued fear of the police to investigate electoral violence (Library of Congress, chap. 2, “The Police”). However, urban violence pits gang against gang, but not a guerrilla group against the state. Overall, then, a powerful security apparatus supported by generous international assistance complements a highly institutionalized political structure to lower the expected returns to insurgency.

A compelling political interpretation of the cauterization of potential insurgency takes a different tack from ours. Rather than pointing to the conditions that disfavor insurgency, Obika Gray (2003) emphasizes the brilliant strategy by party elites through their dramaturgical use of the cultural trope of “badness-honor.”

The key to the strategy is “granting cultural recognition to Afro-Jamaicans, promoting the social power of the militant urban poor, and placing tight control over efforts to convert cultural social power into citizenship-driven political power.” In the early 1960s the two opposing political parties co-opted young criminals in Western Kingston to become “notable” political enforcers and shared the state’s largesse with them. Gray sardonically reports that “accustomed to urban gangster politics, seasoned in the parasitic and menacing ways of the criminal underworld, these worthies were key targets for politicians’ solicitations.” Thus, he argues, the state brought in criminal gang power to help sustain a middle-class centrist democratic regime.


Both the Harvard educated Seaga and the LSE graduate Michael

Manley (son and heir to Norman) adopted the cultural symbols of the gangster poor, and this resonated in the ghettos. In a brilliant strategic move, according to Gray, the brown- and white-skinned party bosses co-opted the politically subversive practice of ‘badness-honor’ – a “dramaturgy in which claimants to respect employ … norm-disrupting histrionics – ‘badness,’ … to affirm their right to an honor…denied.” The implication of relying on this cultural trope was that for “politicians, urban dance halls, makeshift recording studios, petty commodity marketplaces…were … legitimate venues for recruiting supporters…” Jamaica’s leaders used this dramaturgy to win support in the ghettos, but also to forestall without compromise any challenge to their rule. The leaders gave ghetto voices cultural power in their expressions, but no political or economic power to complement it. Violence was consequently not directed vertically, but horizontally within the ghetto.

Thus stability in Jamaica according to this interpretation is based on a “fusion of warlordism, political gangsterism, and democratic politics [that] tapped powerful cultural sentiments in the society and the marriage had broad appeal. Jamaican statecraft embraced repertoires that ensnared clashing groups.” To be sure, there were excesses. For those who did not comply, state terror was unleashed against the mobilized, rebellious black urban poor who were not co-opted under the protection of a political party. Even amidst state terror, however, Gray reports (noted earlier) that those who challenged the system were a minority among the poor and had almost no political following. Thus the strategic use of “badness-honor” worked. Jamaica avoided the descent into anarchy that was the fate of other poor patrimonial states due to this form of cultural co-optation (Gray, 2003, 72-94).

Gray’s interpretation helps account for the “failure” of the Maroons to

take advantage of Jamaica’s moment of weakness in 1962 as a new state. In line with the political leaders’ identification with ghetto culture, all Jamaican governments have treated the Maroon communities with respect as their badness gave them honor. The Maroons enjoy a virtual dual nationality. This respect is ritually portrayed. Nanny, Kojo’s wife and a cultural icon, is called in Jamaican political discourse “Queen Sovereign Mother Nanny.” She was declared a national heroine and appears on the $500 bill. A monument to Kojo was erected by the Jamaica national trust. The Maroons


were co-opted dramaturgically by the state as a mechanism to reduce its commitment problem.

Gray’s is a compelling interpretation, and shows that effective political strategy must complement conditions that disfavor civil war, even when the probability of an effective civil war is, by our model’s predictions, quite low.

IV. Conclusion When a model predicts a low probability for civil war and no civil war takes place, the model probably had it “right”. This is indeed the case with Jamaica, in both the negative and positive sense. On the negative ledger, the narrative points out that a long history of rebellion and defiance of authority is not a good predictor of civil war; nor are economic grievances, based on the data showing continued and even growing inequality.7

On the positive ledger, we have noted the importance of a strong state, neither anocratic nor unstable, with foreign aid provided to the state, in a highly urbanized small country as conditions that would highly disfavor the growth of insurgencies. While the standard histories of Jamaica focus on the conditions that favored urban violence, our discussion has highlighted the conditions that disfavor the escalation of violence into civil war onset. Our interpretation of the key variables in our model as reflecting a strong state capable to containing insurgencies is largely confirmed in our interpretation of post colonial Jamaica. But we have also noted that government strategies to co-opt the discontented, giving them both honor and patronage, played a role in sustaining peace in Jamaica, and this is a factor that our model ignored.

7 . It could be argued that here is a case where our model would have profited from including ELF, due to Jamaica’s extremely low score on ethnic fractionalization (.05). This figure is based on a coding rule that shows 95 percent of the population is of African descent. However, if Jamaica is coded as having 75 percent of the population as of African descent, 15 percent with Afro-European descent, 4 percent Afro-Asian descent, 2 percent East Indian, and 1 percent Europeans (and 3 percent others), Jamaica would have been coded as highly fractionalized with an index of .41. And given a single large group of 75 percent and a second group greater than 10 percent, some models would have seen Jamaica as especially vulnerable to ethnic violence.


References: Gray, Obika (2003) “Predation Politics and the Political Impasse in Jamaica” Small Axe 13: 72-94 Heuman, Gad (1993) “From Slave Rebellions to Morant Bay: the tradition of protest in Jamaica” in Wolfgang Binder Slavery in the Americas (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann) Lacy, Terry (1977) Violence and Politics in Jamaica: 1960-70 (Totowa, N.J.: Frank Cass) Library of Congress (1987) Caribbean Islands: A Country Study (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, Federal Research Division) chapter 2. Patterson, Orlando (1967) The Sociology of Slavery: An Analysis of the Origins, Development and Structure of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica (London: McGibbon & Kee) Treaster, Joseph (1985) “Brief Spell of Unrest Slows Jamaica Tourist Business” The New York Times January 25, A8 Wilson, Basil Winthorpe (1980) “Surplus Labour and Political Violence in Jamaica: The Dialectics of Political Corruption, 1966-1976” Ph.D. Thesis, Political Science, Graduate Faculty, City University of New York Zips, Werner (1999) Black Rebels: African-Caribbean Freedom Fighters in Jamaica (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers).


start year of war/conflict

Pr(onset) for JAMAICA

1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000

0

.01

.02

.03

.04

cname year pr gdp~l pop mtn~t Oil ins~b anocl JAMAICA 1962 .0336846 1.81 1669 2.8 0 0 0 JAMAICA 1963 .0336846 1.81 1692 2.8 0 0 0 JAMAICA 1964 .0060858 1.809 1716 2.8 0 0 0 JAMAICA 1965 .0057769 1.98 1741 2.8 0 0 0 JAMAICA 1966 .0055694 2.104 1766 2.8 0 0 0 JAMAICA 1967 .0054559 2.179 1791 2.8 0 0 0 JAMAICA 1968 .0053797 2.234 1816 2.8 0 0 0 JAMAICA 1969 .0049543 2.497 1843 2.8 0 0 0 JAMAICA 1970 .0048033 2.604 1869 2.8 0 0 0 JAMAICA 1971 .0047579 2.645 1896 2.8 0 0 0 JAMAICA 1972 .0046549 2.724 1925 2.8 0 0 0 JAMAICA 1973 .0041333 3.099 1955 2.8 0 0 0 JAMAICA 1974 .0045228 2.838 1985 2.8 0 0 0 JAMAICA 1975 .0044187 2.922 2013 2.8 0 0 0 JAMAICA 1976 .0044449 2.916 2039 2.8 0 0 0 JAMAICA 1977 .0046539 2.787 2063 2.8 0 0 0 JAMAICA 1978 .0047746 2.719 2086 2.8 0 0 0 JAMAICA 1979 .0049786 2.601 2109 2.8 0 0 0 JAMAICA 1980 .0051487 2.508 2133 2.8 0 0 0 JAMAICA 1981 .0054185 2.362 2158 2.8 0 0 0 JAMAICA 1982 .0054292 2.366 2185 2.8 0 0 0 JAMAICA 1983 .0054073 2.389 2211 2.8 0 0 0 JAMAICA 1984 .0054146 2.395 2236 2.8 0 0 0 JAMAICA 1985 .0055053 2.354 2260 2.8 0 0 0 JAMAICA 1986 .0057793 2.215 2282 2.8 0 0 0 JAMAICA 1987 .0057894 2.218 2302 2.8 0 0 0 JAMAICA 1988 .0056349 2.308 2321 2.8 0 0 0 JAMAICA 1989 .0054034 2.443 2339 2.8 0 0 0 JAMAICA 1990 .0052576 2.533 2356 2.8 0 0 0 JAMAICA 1991 .0052477 2.545 2376 2.8 0 0 0 JAMAICA 1992 .0054445 2.44 2470 2.8 0 0 0 JAMAICA 1993 .0054772 2.455 2471.6 2.8 0 0 0 JAMAICA 1994 .0054585 2.466 2496 2.8 0 0 0 JAMAICA 1995 .0054253 2.493 2522.1 2.8 0 0 0 JAMAICA 1996 .0054555 2.485 2538 2.8 0 0 0 JAMAICA 1997 .0055482 2.439 2554 2.8 0 0 0 JAMAICA 1998 .0056778 2.374 2576.66 2.8 0 0 0


JAMAICA 1999 .0057519 2.342 . 2.8 0 0 0 Variable | Obs Mean Std. Dev. Min Max -------------+-------------------------------------------------------- pr | 38 .0067476 .00645 .0041333 .0336846 gdpenl | 38 2.431789 .2958247 1.809 3.099 pop | 37 2128.685 276.3592 1669 2576.66 mtnest | 38 2.8 0 2.8 2.8 Oil | 38 0 0 0 0 -------------+-------------------------------------------------------- instab | 38 0 0 0 0 anocl | 38 0 0 0 0 Variable | Obs Mean Std. Dev. Min Max -------------+-------------------------------------------------------- pr | 1175 .01337 .00935 .0003045 .0634642 gdpenl | 1175 2.863283 1.86085 .562 11.738 pop | 1187 13595.62 24721.73 621 165873.6 mtnest | 1210 22.25446 17.80127 0 57.59999 Oil | 1210 .1363636 .3433162 0 1 -------------+-------------------------------------------------------- instab | 1210 .1950413 .3963963 0 1 anocl | 1210 .3570248 .4793203 0 1 Variable | Obs Mean Std. Dev. Min Max -------------+-------------------------------------------------------- pr | 6327 .0165329 .0229956 2.09e-10 .4913677 gdpenl | 6373 3.651117 4.536645 .048 66.735 pop | 6433 31786.92 102560.8 222 1238599 mtnest | 6610 18.08833 20.96648 0 94.3 Oil | 6610 .1295008 .3357787 0 1 -------------+-------------------------------------------------------- instab | 6596 .1464524 .353586 0 1 anocl | 6541 .2256536 .418044 0 1 .

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