Jamaica

Jamaica.An island country in the Caribbean Sea and the West Indies. It is the third largest island—after Cuba and Hispaniola—of the Greater Antilles and the Caribbean. Jamaica lies about 90 miles (145 km) south of Cuba and 119 miles (191 km) west of Hispaniola (the island containing Haiti and the Dominican Republic).

The indigenous Taíno peoples of the island gradually came under Spanish rule after the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1494. Many of the indigenous people either were killed or died of diseases, after which the Spanish brought large numbers of Africans to Jamaica as slaves.

The island remained a possession of Spain, under the name Santiago, until 1655, when England (part of what would become the Kingdom of Great Britain) conquered it and named it Jamaica. It became an important part of the colonial British West Indies.

Under Britain’s colonial rule, Jamaica became a leading sugar exporter, with a plantation economy dependent on continued importation of African slaves and their descendants. The British fully emancipated all slaves in 1838, and many freedmen chose to have subsistence farms rather than to work on plantations.

Beginning in the 1840s, the British began using Chinese and Indian indentured laborers for plantation work. Jamaicans achieved independence from the United Kingdom on August 6, 1962.

With almost three million people, Jamaica is the third most populous Anglophone country in the Americas (after the U.S. and Canada), and the fourth most populous country in the Caribbean.

Kingston is the country’s capital and largest city. Most Jamaicans are of Sub-Saharan African ancestry, with significant European, East Asian (primarily Chinese), Indian, Lebanese, and mixed-race minorities.

Because of a high rate of emigration for work since the 1960s, there is a large Jamaican diaspora, particularly in Canada, the U.K., and the U.S. The country has a global influence that belies its small size; it was the birthplace of the Rastafari religion, reggae music, and it is internationally prominent in sports, including cricket, sprinting, and athletics. Jamaica has sometimes been considered the ‘world’s least populous cultural superpower.’

Jamaica is an upper-middle-income country with an economy heavily dependent on tourism; it has an average of 4.3 million tourists a year. The country performs favorably in measures of press freedom, democratic governance, and sustainable well-being.

Jamaica is a parliamentary constitutional monarchy with power vested in the bicameral Parliament of Jamaica, consisting of an appointed Senate and a directly elected House of Representatives. Andrew Holness has served as Prime Minister of Jamaica since March 2016.

As a Commonwealth realm, with Charles III as its king, the appointed representative of the Crown is the Governor-General of Jamaica, an office held by Patrick Allen since 2009.