Why does Jamaica help explain geopolitics?

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This is the script for my video posted on July 7, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.

When most of us think of Jamaica, we think of beach resorts and reggae, but Jamaica is actually a perfect example of how geopolitics works in practice. It’s a small island of just 2.8m whose modern politics were forged by a plantation-slavery economy, whose geography as a small Caribbean island influences everything about its dynamics, and whose government has to operate within those constraints. So how did Jamaica come to be, and what can it tell us about geopolitics?

Jamaica is slightly smaller than the US state of Connecticut, making it the third-largest Caribbean island. It lies about 145km south of Cuba, right along the sea lanes that funnel shipping through the Jamaica Channel and the Windward Passage, which connect the Atlantic to the Caribbean, and ultimately the Panama Canal. This position made the country valuable to every historical hegemon, including Spain, Britain, and the US during the Cold War.

The country’s interior is dominated by the Blue Mountains in the east and the sinkhole-laden limestone karst of Cockpit Country in the west-central interior, which holds the country’s last reserves of high-grade bauxite, the primary ore for aluminum production. But over 80% of Jamaicans live within five miles of the sea and are highly exposed to climate change impacts like hurricanes and sea-level rise. Because it’s an island, Jamaica depends heavily on imported fossil fuels for energy and transportation, and this import dependence is a structural vulnerability that amplifies external shocks like changes in global oil prices because tourism and agriculture both rely on fuel, and about a third of Jamaicans work in those sectors.

In the early colonial period, Jamaica was inhabited by native Taino people, and when Spain first colonized the island in 1509 they brought enslaved Africans for free labor. In 1655, the English defeated the Spanish and took control of the island, and as the Spanish fled, formerly enslaved Africans fled into the mountainous interior, seeding the first Maroon communities who still live there today. England built a sugar-plantation economy by leveraging a huge number of enslaved people. By the early to mid 19th century, the enslaved population was about 300000, outnumbering white people at a ratio of about 12 to 1. And in the 1831 Christmas Rebellion, an initially peaceful strike involving up to 60000 slaves escalated into the largest slave uprising in the British West Indies, with plantations burned across the western part of the island. And though the English brutally retaliated, their response is credited with accelerating the end of British slavery.

But emancipation didn't bring political power. By 1865, reportedly fewer than 2000 men could vote out of a population of more than 400,000, and freedmen faced crushing poverty on top of floods, droughts, and epidemics. That year, a protest in the town of Morant Bay exploded into open rebellion, and Governor Edward Eyre's response was so brutal that hundreds were killed, the rebellion's leaders were executed, and hundreds of homes were burned. The fallout was severe enough that the planter-dominated House of Assembly, which had ruled the island for 200 years, was abolished, and Jamaica became a Crown Colony under direct British rule.

Unfortunately, things didn’t improve much during the 20th century. The colony faced labor uprisings during the Depression, which catalyzed the modern political organization. Trade unions were formed and the center-right Jamaica Labour Party and center-left People’s National Party came into being as well, which are the two dominant political entities in Jamaica today. For a few years in the 1950s and 1960s, Jamaica was a part of the West Indies Federation, a political union that included various islands under the British Empire, but Jamaicans voted to leave this in 1961, and in 1962 amid surging labor movements, economic unrest, and a growing public desire for self-determination, Jamaica finally gained its independence, though it remained a member of the British Commonwealth.

In the 1970s, a man named Michael Manley became Prime Minister on a democratic socialist platform that embraced free education and healthcare, land reforms, and public housing. He became a leading voice for the Non-Aligned Movement that opposed taking a side in the Cold War. He imposed a bauxite production levy on US and Canadian aluminum companies, renegotiated their agreements, and massively boosted the country’s revenue, but at a cost: the levy scared off foreign investment, and companies shifted to other bauxite producers. Manley also strengthened ties with Cuba under Fidel Castro. But the 1980 election became ideologically charged due to a complex political patronage system, severe economic troubles, and foreign interference due to the Cold War. Over 800 people were killed due to political violence, and in the end the JLP took power and realigned the country with the Reagan-era US.

That period saw both parties arm gangs to control urban constituencies, and over time these politically linked enclaves evolved into transnational organized crime networks. Basically, what were once plantations morphed into garrisons, which morphed into gangs, and you can trace a throughline from the colonial period all the way to the present day. That’s the core argument of geopolitics: that a country’s current conditions can be largely explained by its geography and its history.

Jamaica has recently had one of the most dramatic debt reductions in history. From 2012 to 2024, it cut the ratio of public debt to GDP from around 144% to only about 64%. The IMF has described this as an exceptional case, and it was achieved through sustained budget surpluses averaging over 6-7% of GDP for over a decade, as well as a strong Fiscal Responsibility Law, and independent fiscal oversight body, and a clear consensus across political party lines. This fiscal discipline has allowed Jamaica to be more economically agile. In this context, Jamaica joined China’s Belt and Road Initiative in 2019 as part of a strategy to hedge between the US and China. It aimed to prioritize its own debt reduction and increase US security ties while also benefitting from Chinese partnership.

But the country still faces a lot of structural threats. Tropical cyclones are becoming more and more dangerous, for example. In October 2025, Hurricane Melissa made landfall as a Category 5 storm with sustained winds around 185mph, the strongest storm on record to hit Jamaica. Physical damage estimates alone hit 8.8b USD, equivalent to 41% of the country’s 2024 GDP. Jamaica assembled a multibillion-dollar recovery package, but the storm forced it to pause its celebrated debt decline, with debt projected to tick back up to around 68% of GDP in 2026 before falling again. Recovery financing works, but it isn't a solution to the overall threat.

The country also spent decades with one of the highest murder rates in the Western Hemisphere, but in 2024 and 2025 homicides fell by nearly half, to the lowest rate since 1991. This is commonly attributed to intelligence-led policing, anti-gang operations, firearms interdictions, and huge investments into security. Realistically, even increased enforcement doesn’t fix the population’s reliance on vulnerable sectors like tourism and agriculture, the declining value of bauxite mining, and the harm threatened by climate change.

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I’m writing a book called Groundwork about the buried history beneath geopolitics. Join the waitlist to hear when it has a publisher, a cover, and a release date.