Te demographic context of creolization in early English Jamaica, 1655–1700 Silvia Kouwenberg Jamaica’s plantation economy was established during the fnal quarter of the seventeenth century, afer an initial two decades during which the economy of English Jamaica was dominated by privateering, centred around the prize market established in Port Royal. Population fgures for those frst two decades show a low proportion of blacks to whites, as might be expected in an economy not dependent on slave labour. Te demographic make-up of the island changes rapidly as sugar is established as a dominant crop during the fnal decades of the seventeenth century. Considering the sources of slaves strongly suggests that ethnic diversity was characteristic of English Jamaica’s slave population from the start. I argue that the fnal quarter of the seventeenth century should be considered the formative phase of Jamaican Creole. I survey the linguistic models that may have been available during this time, and argue that the early black population of Jamaica may not have provided accessible models for the slaves who were to work the plantations, as there was little continuity between the black population of the pre-1675 period and the slaves who populated the sugar plantations afer 1675. 1. Introduction In this paper, I attempt to follow in the footsteps of creolists such as Jacques Arends and John Victor Singler who pioneered the study of the historical demographic con- text of creole language formation in Caribbean plantation societies. 1 While I do not share Arends’s views on gradual creolization, I do agree with him that “creole genesis 1. Jacques Arends undertook his research with characteristic commitment and seriousness of purpose, setting high standards for others to follow. I wish to thank the Mona Campus Research Fellowship Committee, the Warwick University Caribbean Studies Centre, and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthrophology, whose awards of fellowships have aforded me the time and resources to undertake the research on which this article is based. I wish also to ac- knowledge good advise liberally given on various aspects of my research by Trevor Burnard, Gad Heuman, Patrick Manning, Salikoko Mufwene, Nicole Plummer, James Robertson, John