The Royal Society and Slavery in Jamaica, 1660 to 1714

In this post, Eleanor Stephenson of the University of Cambridge introduces her research about the Royal Society and slavery in Jamaica, which has been supported by the Economic History Society’s Research Fund for Graduate Students.

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How was the Royal Society, formally “The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge”, connected to slavery in Jamaica? By tracing these social and economic colonial connections, as Professor Nuala Zahedieh and Keith Moore proposed several years ago, this study could contribute to the understanding of how institutional science in Britain, from its inception, was shaped by the Atlantic slavery system and how, in turn, it enhanced the profitability of Britain’s imperial enterprise.

Now in the last year of this AHRC-funded PhD project with the University of Cambridge and the Royal Society, I hope to answer this question in my thesis. However, the sources, such as biographical information on Fellows with property in Jamaica, were only available in archives and collections in Jamaica. So I spent twelve intense weeks researching at the Jamaica Archives and Island Record Office (IRO) in Spanish Town from January to February 2024 and November to December 2024.

I am still unpacking the contents of my many files from these trips, as the sources I consulted—wills, probate inventories, deeds, maps, and plats—were full of interesting facts, many vital to answering the research questions I am answering in my doctoral work. But these research trips also came with their challenges: bomb scares, shootings, and power cuts meant the Jamaica Archives were, at times, risky to visit or altogether closed. Some of the archival sources at other sites were often in very fragile conditions, so much so that I was not allowed to view them. These colonial records are in much need of care, and attention by historians before they completely disintegrate.

Since this is still a work in progress, I wanted to share two examples of how records I visited in Jamaica are important to my research project.

The Royal Society’s connections to the Atlantic slavery system, especially the slave trading company, the Royal African Company (RAC), have long been known. Indeed, in his The History of the Royal Society (1667), Thomas Sprat (1635-1713) (FRS 1663) described the Society as the ‘Twin-Sister’ to ‘the Royal [African] Company’:

The early Fellows of the Royal Society who signed the patent granted to the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa, the precursor to the RAC, on January 10, 1663, included Thomas Povey (c.1613-1705) (FRS 1663), Matthew Wren (1629-1672) (FRS 1663), Joseph Williamson (1633-1701) (FRS 1663), Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) (FRS 1665), and Lord John Vaughan, 3rd Earl of Carbery (1639-1713) (FRS 1685). These figures were among the most active Fellows from 1660 to 1670. All these Fellows sat on the Society’s Council. Pepys, Vaughan and Williamson served as President.

Not only did prominent early Fellows invest and work for the RAC, but in 1682, the Royal Society paid £520 to invest in ‘£200 of Original stock … in the [Royal] African Company’, overseen by founding Fellow Abraham Hill (1633-1721) (FRS 1660), who simultaneously served as the Society’s treasurer and the RAC’s assistant and then deputy-governor.

The deeds in the IRO and the plats in the Jamaica Archives revealed that from 1677, the Royal African Company began to accept property as debt in Jamaica. Consequently, by 1696, the RAC owned almost 6,000 acres, which comprised plantations and sugar works, and in Morant Bay and Port Royal, wharves, storehouses, and houses, including a large house on the High Street, which was then occupied by Doctor Thomas Trapham (fl 1654-1700) (Hon FRCP 1664). These properties often came with enslaved Africans, so the RAC also owned 386 men, women, and children. Although James Robertson noted the RAC purchasing and building property in Jamaica, the extent and sequestration of property from indebted planters were not. This discovery draws the Royal Society, and all those investing in the RAC, into direct economic contact with slavery in Jamaica.

In the seven surviving volumes of Jamaican probate inventories from the period between 1674 and 1721, held at the Jamaica Archives, I recorded over 3,000 scientific objects (including timepieces, telescopes, surveying instruments, chemical bottles, and medicine chests). These sources allowed me to chart the influence of the Royal Society on Jamaica’s early population, which ranged from poor artisans to wealthy planters and even members of the Island’s free Black community, by, for example, the presence of Royal Society publications. The inventories also revealed new social connections between the Society and Jamaica.

For example, the ‘1 Microscope’ I read in an inventory from 1684 led me to discover that John Beale’s (1608-1683) (FRS 1663) eldest son, John Beale (1650-1684), had moved to Jamaica in 1676 and established himself as a physician, and slave and plantation owner in Liguanea, St Andrew (now Kingston). Beale brought costly scientific instruments, including a telescope worth £40, and probably also the microscope seen in his inventory, which was the first of its kind in English Jamaica and possibly all English colonies. He also carried letters with questions on Jamaica, on behalf of the Society’s first secretary (1663-1677), Henry Oldenburg (c.1619-1677) (FRS 1663), and a copy of Jean Prestet’s Élémens des mathématiques (1675) for the governor, then Lord John Vaughan, another early Fellow with connections to slavery in Jamaica. In this instance, records in Jamaica were vital to my understanding of the Society’s trans-Atlantic network and how the Society developed this network to gain knowledge of the ‘New World’ with the use of scientific instruments and correspondence.

To contact the author:

Email: ems220@cam.ac.uk