Career
Brown began his career as an estate bookkeeper[4] but acquired significant land holdings and agricultural interests in the British colony of Jamaica. He was a pen-keeper (cattle breeder) and was responsible for a large cattle fair held on Pedro Plains in Saint Elizabeth Parish in 1829.[5] He also grew sugar[6] and owned the Antrim, Colliston, Grier Park, and Minard plantations, all in St Ann, as well as having interests in numerous others.[3]
He gave his name to Brown's Town, originally known as Hamilton Town, in St Ann, which he founded,[4][7] and in 1805 he paid for the construction of the original St Mark's Anglican Church in Brown's Town.[8]
He was a member of the House of Assembly of Jamaica in 1820[9] and represented Saint Ann Parish in that assembly for 22 years.[7] In 1832, he met Henry Whiteley on his trip to Jamaica to whom he argued that Jamaican slaves were better off than the English poor and therefore the British government should not interfere with the way the Jamaican planters managed their slaves; Whiteley went on to witness harsh and arbitrary whipping of slaves at the plantations that he visited during his stay.[10]
According to the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership at the University College London, Brown was awarded a payment under the Slave Compensation Act 1837 as a former slave owner in the aftermath of the Slavery Abolition Act 1833. The British Government took out a £15 million loan (worth £1.51 billion in 2024[11]) with interest from Nathan Mayer Rothschild and Moses Montefiore which was subsequently paid off by the British taxpayers (ending in 2015).[12] Brown was a prolific slave owner in the context of Jamaican society and was associated with a large number of claims, twenty-five in total, he owned 1,120 slaves most of them on sugar plantations in Saint Ann Parish and received a £24,144 (equivalent to £2.44 million in 2024[11]) payment at the time.[13]
Brown was active in trying to recruit Irish people to work in Jamaica. In December 1835, 121 people from Ballymoney, Antrim, set off from Belfast for Jamaica on the James Ray, a brig owned by Brown. They settled in St Ann. In 1836 he brought a further 185 Irish people to Saint Ann. An effort by planters in 1840 to encourage large-scale Irish migration to Jamaica to settle lands that might otherwise be occupied by newly freed slaves, failed after the project was criticised in Ireland as potentially transforming the migrants into slaves.[14]