This collection contains diaries, weather records, and commonplace books of Thomas Thistlewood for the years 1748-1786. His diaries (37 volumes) cover two years in England (in London and in Lincolnshire) and the remaining time in Jamaica (1750-1786). This is a rich source for agricultural, daily routines, slave life, folklore, natural history, medical diagnosis and remedies, the intellectural world of an Anglo-Jamaican, his sex life, and the climatic history of Jamaica. There are also miscellaneous volumes, such as a list of slaves, 1758-1766. Included in the collection is the journal of his nephew, John Thistlewood, 1763-1765, describing his voyage to Jamaica and life on his uncle's plantation.

Isaac Jackson managed several estates in northern Jamaica during the years of transition from slavery to free labor. Based in Hanover Parish, County of Cornwall, Jackson oversaw the interests of as many as a dozen estates engaged in the production of sugar and other crops, rum, and cattle during the 1830s and 1840s. Jackson's letterbooks contain approximately 825 letters pertaining to the daily management of Jamaican plantations. Beginning just a year after the end of apprenticeship, the mostly formulaic letters addressed to absentee British landowners, their attorneys, ship captains, and other estate managers touch on sugar and rum production and crop yields and cattle husbandry, but more importantly, they map out the course of the hard-edged negotiations between landowners and laborers as they struggled to shape the new labor regime.