The principal method of recruiting the population of Jamaica during slavery, the slave trade, together with the policy aimed at inducing large numbers of Europeans to settle in the island, constituted in effect state-sponsored programmes for increasing the population. Similarly the whole movement of indenture immigration surveyed in Chapter 4 illustrates another aspect of policy designed to recruit the population of the island. But it was not solely in terms of immigration that policy for promoting population growth was framed. An important and entirely different line of policy developed during the later slave period had also as its aim the promotion of population growth. Since in many respects this policy conforms to what is generally termed a population policy the conditions of its development and its precise methods of operation deserve some study. Two further lines of policy that emerged in the post-emancipation period are also treated in this chapter, though, as will be seen, they were in no sense continuations of the policies in operation during slavery or in any way aspects of a formal population policy. Still the controls these bodies of legislation introduced—controls over the general health of the population and over the legal status of family unions as well as over conditions of mating—are so closely interwoven in many basic elements of the demography of the island that they also must be considered here. These several types of policies are surveyed in terms of the main periods into which the island's history can be conveniently divided for the purpose of demographic analysis.

At the outset it is necessary to note some distinctive features of the policy formulated to encourage population growth among the slaves. It has been shown by Professor D. V. Glass that most of the population policies pursued in European countries rested on certain fundamental principles, summed up conveniently in the words of the Italian jurist Filangieri: ‘ [There is] no one government that has not reserved some prerogatives for the fathers of families, that has not granted some privileges and exemptions to those citizens who have given a certain number of children to the state; that has not provided some express laws to increase the number of marriages.’