The Jesuits and Jamaican Plantations: Religion in Chains

In the history of the Caribbean, few subjects are as morally unsettling as the relationship between Christian missionaries and the slave economy. The Jesuits—members of the Society of Jesus, one of Catholicism’s most intellectual and missionary orders—are often remembered as educators, theologians, and cultural intermediaries. Yet in Jamaica, they were also landlords, slave owners, and economic actors embedded within the brutal plantation complex.

To understand how an institution founded on moral uplift became entangled in the economics of bondage, one must examine the landscape of early colonial Jamaica, the global function of Jesuit wealth, and the theological contradictions that underpinned their involvement.

 

The Jesuits came to the Caribbean during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with an ostensibly noble goal: evangelize enslaved Africans and Indigenous peoples. But the Caribbean was not simply a mission field—it was the center of the Atlantic sugar empire, a world where religion, capital, and violence formed a single structure of power.

Theologian Claude Geffré captures the paradox of religious missions under empire:

“The missionary message becomes ambiguous when it is inserted into structures of domination; the evangelizer is never innocent of the civilization that carries him.”
In Jamaica, this ambiguity became a total contradiction. The Jesuits did not merely preach within plantation society; they owned and operated estates sustained by enslaved labor, positioning themselves within the very apparatus of oppression.

 

The Jesuits maintained estates in Jamaica that were financially essential to sustaining their educational and ecclesiastical networks. As historian John McGreevy observes in a wider Atlantic context:

“Religious orders were not only spiritual institutions; they were landowning corporations whose profits flowed into seminaries, orphanages, and missionary projects.”

This corporate dimension was not an accident, but a structural necessity of early modern Catholicism. Wealth was required to educate clergy, run schools, and finance missions abroad. In the Caribbean, slaves became the capital that sustained religious enterprise.

On Jesuit-owned Jamaican estates:

• Enslaved Africans cultivated sugar and provisions.
• Forced labor financed religious institutions in Europe and the Americas.
• The order participated in crop markets, land purchases, and slave transactions.

A troubling truth emerges: religion was not merely complicit with slavery—it profited from it.

 

Christian justifications for slavery were not invented in Jamaica, but they found aggressive expression there. Colonial clergy embraced interpretations of scripture that portrayed bondage as divine discipline or a path to salvation.

Historian David Brion Davis famously notes:

“Slavery was the most fundamental institution of Western civilization between 1492 and the late nineteenth century.”
Within such a world, Jesuits were not unusual; they were typical. They reasoned that ownership of slaves allowed for “Christian care,” baptism, and moral supervision. The enslaved body was a commodity; the enslaved soul was a subject of salvation.

This was theology narrowed into convenience: save the spirit, exploit the flesh.

 

Reports from the Caribbean show Jesuit priests encouraging religious discipline among enslaved workers—yet this “care” did not translate into emancipation or equality. Evangelization became a tool of social order.

Albert Raboteau, the preeminent historian of African-American Christianity, explains the plantation logic:

“The religious instruction of slaves was intended not to liberate them, but to make them more governable.”
Baptism served as pacification. Confession became surveillance. Religious festivals—like Feast days—were tightly regulated and often weaponized to reinforce labor rhythms.

In Jesuit-run estates, the sacraments reinforced existing hierarchies:

• The priest-servant relationship mirrored the master-slave relationship.
• Obedience became sacred.
• Rebellion became sin.

Religion was no longer sanctuary; it was discipline with a halo.

 

Jesuit involvement in Caribbean slavery must be understood globally, not locally. Revenues from plantations streamed into transatlantic Catholic networks. Profits from Jamaica subsidized institutions in Europe; wealth extracted from coerced African labor was sent to support “holy works” thousands of miles away.

Historian Trevor Burnard, writing on Jamaican slave society, observed:

“What mattered most was not morality, but profitability.”
In the Jesuit plantation paradigm, the sacred and the profitable collided—and profit won.

This is why the order continued to own slaves even when individual priests expressed discomfort. The enterprise was not sustained by personal sin, but by systemic necessity.

 

The Jesuits’ 1773 suppression by Pope Clement XIV led colonial governments to seize their assets. Jamaica’s Jesuit estates were confiscated—not because of humanitarian outrage, but because rival elites wanted control of profitable land.

The aftermath reveals the truth of the matter:

• The Church did not free the enslaved.
• Colonial governments merely transferred ownership.
• The plantation continued uninterrupted.

The Jesuit experiment proved what Caribbean history shows repeatedly: institutions adapt to slavery before they challenge it.

Philosopher Aimé Césaire’s indictment of colonial hypocrisy applies perfectly:

“No one colonizes innocently, no one colonizes with impunity either.”
The Jesuits believed they were civilizing souls; they ultimately mortgaged their spirituality to sugar.

 

Modern Catholic leaders often reference slavery as a “historic tragedy,” but rarely confront how religious corporations participated directly in racial capitalism. The Jamaican case forces uncomfortable questions:

• Can a religion preach equality while profiting from extraction?
• Can salvation be offered in a language built on domination?
• What is forgiveness without accountability?

The Caribbean’s landscape of ruins—abandoned mills, slave cemeteries beneath resorts, decaying chapels—speaks its own theology. It whispers that faith, unexamined, can become a chain.

 

The Jesuit presence on Jamaican plantations is not a footnote—it is a mirror held up to Western Christianity. Their involvement shows how moral institutions, when embedded in empire, become instruments of oppression.

The Jesuits prayed over the enslaved while they counted sugar profits. They promised heaven while delivering labor quotas. They brought the cross to Jamaica, but it was hammered together with iron shackles.

Their history teaches us that:

Faith, without resistance to injustice, becomes the handmaiden of power.

Until Caribbean religious history acknowledges this truth fully, the ghosts of the plantation will remain unburied.

References

Burnard, T. (2004). Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Burnard, T. (2015). Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650–1820. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Césaire, A. (2000). Discourse on Colonialism (J. Pinkham, Trans.). New York: Monthly Review Press. (Original work published 1950)

Davis, D. B. (2006). Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. New York: Oxford University Press.

Geffré, C. (2005). Christianity and Religious Pluralism. London: SCM Press.

McGreevy, J. T. (2013). Catholicism and American Freedom: A History. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

McGreevy, J. T. (2016). “Religious Orders and the Business of Empire.” In Faith and Capital in the Atlantic World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Raboteau, A. J. (2004). Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press.

Sweet, J. H. (2003). Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441–1770. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Thornton, J. (1998). Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Williams, E. (1994). Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. (Original work published 1944)

Wright, J. (2011). The Jesuit Estates in the British Caribbean: Wealth, Slavery, and Suppression. London: Routledge.

Županov, I. G. (1999). Disputed Mission: Jesuit Experiments and Brahmanical Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
(Used comparatively for Jesuit missionary-economic structures across empires.)