Beginning with Columbus’s visits to the island, Spain established political authority in Jamaica from 1509 onwards, sending out various governors appointed by the Spanish Crown. Jamaica became a Spanish royal colony in 1534. The Spanish treated the Tainos harshly, forcing them into submission under the repartimiento de Indias labour system and removing their lands under an encomienda labour regime. The Taino were also affected by a range of diseases through contact with the Spanish intruders. By 1600 there were very few Taino left living in Jamaica.

Spanish settlement in Jamaica never escalated. The population of Jamaica amounted to no more than 1,600 in the first half of the seventeenth century. Consequently, most of the island remained uncultivated. Spanish settlers supported their daily lives by growing crops and tending livestock, and they introduced numerous new foodstuffs to Jamaica, including sweet potatoes, cassava bread and cane sugar. Institutions of the Roman Catholic Church were introduced to Jamaica by Spanish settlers. The Spanish period in the island ended abruptly through an English military takeover. Cromwell’s Western Design of 1655 invaded, captured and consolidated Jamaica in English hands. The English then colonised the island as its major possession in the western Caribbean.

The Taino migrated to Jamaica from South America in broad waves between AD 600 and 900. They organised communities throughout Jamaica, preferring defendable hilltop settlements. Practising communal living under the leadership of caciques, the Taino forged a rich culture in which they excelled at woodcarving, pottery and making stone implements. Surviving rock art in caves testifies to their artistic skills. They undertook daily food gathering, picking fruits and seeds, fishing and planting root crops in conucos. Many crops they cultivated, including cassava, have had a lasting impact on the Jamaican diet.

The Taino believed in numerous deities and the afterlife and maintaining contact with the spirit world through possession of artefacts known as zemis and ritual cohoba ceremonies. As they left no written records and their language is extinct, knowledge of Taino culture in Jamaica is confined to knowledge of their settlements, artisan skills, rock art and religious practices. A revival of interest in the Tainos’ foundational role in Jamaican history has recently occurred. In May 2019 the Institute of Jamaica celebrated Taino Day with a series of talks and activities. In the following month a Taino cacique was installed in Jamaica for the first time in half a millennium.

Like all institutions, polities are physical things only in certain restricted senses. They can be materialised in practical facilities and visible symbolic expressions, both manifestations of the bundled schemas and resources that compose their structure. Yet in their conditioning of individual and group behaviour within idealised communities, polities emerge from, and essentially remain, “states of mind” (Yoffee 2005: 38–41). If we are to appreciate the sources of legitimacy and empowerment integral to governing authorities, we must turn our attention to how those minds saw politics as inherently entwined with the transcendent. The Classic Maya were far from alone in believing that political communities encompassed supernatural beings and the ancestral dead, not simply as distant abstractions but role-playing constituents.