Harvest Years? Reconfigurations of Empire in Jamaica, 1756 – 1807 Trevor Burnard At the end of the Seven Years’ War, Jamaican planters were in an extremely strong pos- ition within the British Empire. Immensely wealthy, geopolitically important and con- stitutionally assertive, Jamaican planters used their strong position to win a series of political battles against colonial governors in the 1750s and 1760s. In doing so, they jus- tified their self-asserted claims to being entitled to British rights and privileges. Never- theless, contemporaneous developments in metropolitan thinking about empire and white people’s place in empire undermined planters’ fond estimation of their position within empire. British thinkers came to see British West Indians, especially during and after the American Revolution, not as fellow citizens but as imperial subjects. The result was a cultural and ideological crisis for Jamaican planters as abolitionism emerged as a powerful political force, in which their insistence that they were British and entitled to the rights and privileges of Britons was not accepted. Thus, white Jamai- cans became the first in a long line of settler peoples of British descent to have their claims to Britishness denied by metropolitan opinion. This article thus contributes to a developing discussion about settler constitutional rights within the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British Empire. I The Seven Years’ War was important in the West Indies in four ways. First, it was the culmination of nearly a century’s conflict between France and Britain in the Carib- bean. Britain’s victories ensured that it would dominate this region, although British miscalculations allowed the French and the Spanish to reconfigure their West Indian empires in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. Second, the Seven Years’ War took the self-confidence of Jamaica’s planters to a new level, giving them an unprecedented level of political influence in the island and in London. Third, by changing the relationship between colony and metropolis, the Seven Years’ War brought new attention in London to the nature of West Indian The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History Vol. 40, No. 4, November 2012, pp. 533–555 Correspondence to: Trevor Burnard, School of History and Philosophy, University of Melbourne, Parkville Victoria 3010, Australia. Email: tburnard@unimelb.edu.au ISSN 0308-6534 print/1743-9329 online/12/040533–23 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03086534.2012.724234 # 2012 Taylor & Francis