Jamaica
.svg.png)
Jamaica is an island country in the Caribbean. The population today is almost universally black, and the island is the third most populous anglophone country in the Americas, after the United States and Canada. It is the natural homeland and birthplace of Mrs. Doreen Lawrence.
History
Jamaica is an island nation of the Greater Antilles, 234 kilometres (146 mi) in length and as much as 80 kilometres (50 mi) in width situated in the Caribbean Sea. It is about 145 kilometres (90 mi) south of Cuba, and 190 kilometres (120 mi) west of the island of Hispaniola, on which Haiti and the Dominican Republic are situated. Its indigenous Arawakan-speaking Taíno inhabitants named the island Xaymaca, meaning the "Land of Wood and Water", or the "Land of Springs".
Formerly a Spanish possession known as Santiago, it later became the British West Indies Crown colony of Jamaica. It is best known for its vast numbers of Black slaves imported to work on the island's extensive sugar plantations, of which three better known plantation owners were Sir John Gladstone, M.P., the father of the 19th century Liberal Prime Minister, William Beckford, the famous antiquarian who built Fonthill Abbey, and the Grants of Kilgraston, near Perth in Scotland.
