By the late eighteenth century, slaveholders in Jamaica faced a series of new challenges. The American Revolution precipitated many of these problems. The loss of the thirteen mainland colonies meant that the number of slaves in the British empire had been halved. The conflict between Britain and the mainland colonies also helped to heighten metropolitan hostility towards white colonists and to precipitate the national soul-searching that inspired the abolitionist movement. Along with these political concerns, the slaveholders faced new economic difficulties. In the years after the American War, sugar production had increased, and Jamaican colonists could still hope to make substantial profits from slavery, but they were struggling to compete with newer British colonies, and the bright prospects that they had enjoyed during the middle decades of the eighteenth century began to wane at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The end of the slave trade created further difficulties, and during the 1820s, a drop in sugar prices led to an economic crisis for the planters. Meanwhile, in far broader terms, the rapid expansion of British possessions in other parts of the world meant that the West Indies diminished in strategic importance to the empire as a whole. These transformations meant that slaveholders in Jamaica were poorly placed to resist local challenges that undermined the world of white privilege that they had created on the island.

Free people of colour and missionaries exercised more influence in the early nineteenth century than at any previous period in Jamaican history, and with the support of metropolitan allies, people from both groups became vocal advocates of change. Jamaican free people of colour worked to improve their political and social standing, and as Gad Heuman has shown, after 1830 men from this group ‘formed an opposition to the white planter class’ and foresaw a time when the colony would be ‘controlled by blacks and browns rather than by whites’. Meanwhile, missionaries developed dreams of what Catherine Hall describes as ‘a new Jerusalem in Jamaica, of a society of new Christian subjects, living a familial, domesticated, industrious life in villages centred around a chapel, a mission school and a mission house’.