The History of Jamaica is a 1774 commentary on Jamaican affairs by Edward Long. Long was an enslaver and profited from the enslavement and enforced labour of Black Africans on his plantation at Lucky Valley in Clarendon Parish. His family was long connected to the slave trade and had been involved in Jamaica since the 1660s.
This book was written as a study of the island’s natural history, geography, history and politics but it is largely a polemic in support of the continued use of enslaved labour on sugar plantations. Long based his work on his own papers, his own thoughts on the subject and occasionally plagiarised the works of others. He regarded Black Africans who were transported to Jamaica as a different species to their enslavers, relying on racial prejudices to justify his beliefs, and attempted to portray enslavement as a benevolent practice. As calls for abolition grew later in the eighteenth century, Long was a staunch advocate for its continuation and his History was used by other pro-slavery writers as a basis for their own treatises (see RCINs 1196901 & 1022687-8).