10 Pounds Planters Bank

The Planters Bank of Jamaica was one of several competing colonial banking houses operating in Kingston during the early nineteenth century, all issuing their own notes against reserves that were frequently tested by the island's volatile sugar economy. John Scott of Glasgow was a respectable provincial printer, but his involvement here reflects the common practice of Caribbean issuers commissioning plates from British firms — cheaper than London engravers and perfectly adequate for colonial circulation.

The "Planters Bank" name is worth pausing on: the institution drew its capital base almost entirely from sugar estate proprietors, many of them absentee landlords, and its fortunes tracked the collapse of the plantation economy following emancipation in 1834 with uncomfortable precision.