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The National Library of Jamaica houses a treasure trove of over twenty thousand maps and plans that together are known as the Estate Maps of Jamaica, 1655-1890. These documents represent an important part of the country’s national heritage during colonialism as they provide a medium through which the patterns and evolution of land tenure and ownership can be traced over a period of more than 200 hundred years. The layout and operations of large-scale plantations and pens (where stock were kept) presented in these documents are foundational to the re/construction of parish histories in Jamaica. Jamaican plantations cultivated crops such as sugar, coffee, pimento, cocoa and cotton—all essential produce to support English expansionism and British trade based on the produce of Caribbean plantations. 

These maps also provide physical evidence on the ways in which the hegemonic planter class in Jamaica regulated and restricted enslaved persons from having access to land for personal use before and after emancipation. The Estate Maps fonds also provides evidence of how England compensated those who carried out its policy of conquest and colonisation. Furthermore, David Buisseret notes that mapmaking techniques used by surveyors in colonial Jamaica influenced cartographic practices beyond this island.

Important information regarding early surveying and cartographic techniques useful to students and practitioners in both disciplines can be gleaned from this fonds. The historiography of slavery and the post-emancipation period up to the 1900s are also deeply enriched through the information this documentary heritage provides.