The Ledger That Still Bleeds

The Middle Passage & Liverpool’s Rise — Jamaica (1660s–1807)

Between the late 1600s and 1807, British ships moved over 3.1 million African people across the Atlantic, and Jamaica became the empire’s beating sugar heart. Liverpool merchants designed the trade with clinical cruelty: three points, three ledgers, three profits. Bodies stacked as cargo funded mansions, banks, political dynasties. And yet, even on the darkest decks, people sang, prayed, resisted — leaving Britain with an inheritance it never paid for and wounds it cannot erase. The sea still carries their names in its salt.