James Dawkins (1722 – 6 September 1757) was a British politician and antiquarian who represented Hindon in the House of Commons of Great Britain from 1754 to 1757.
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Early life and education
The Dawkins family settled on Jamaica shortly after its seizure from the Spanish in 1655.
James was the eldest son born to Henry Dawkins I (1698–1744), who was a wealthy sugar planter and slave owner of Clarendon, Jamaica, and his wife, Elizabeth (1697?–1757), third daughter of Edward Pennant of Clarendon, chief justice of the island and of Elizabeth Moore. His brothers were major slave owner William Dawkins (d. 1753) and Henry Dawkins II.
He went to England for his education, attending John Roysse's free school in Abingdon (now Abingdon School) (then headed by the Tory Thomas Woods) and matriculating at St John's College, Oxford on 7 December 1739. His father died in 1744 bequeathing to James 14,300 acres (and making smaller bequests to the two younger sons William and Henry). His plantations included Parnassus Estate, Dawkins Caymanas, Dawkins Salt Pond Pen, Friendship, Leicesterdfields and Old Plantation.
James graduated with a DCL in 1749.
Career
He embarked on a continental Grand Tour to Paris then Rome, meeting more Jacobite sympathisers along with the experienced traveller Robert Wood. On 5 May 1750, Wood, Dawkins, Dawkins' Oxford friend John Bouverie and the Italian draughtsman Giovanni Borra set off from Naples in the Matilda to tour and study the Aegean, the coast of Anatolia, Egypt, Nazareth, Syria (including the ruins of Palmyra and Baalbek), Tripoli and Cyprus, returning in Naples on 7 June 1751. Borra, Wood and Dawkins returned to England, where Dawkins funded Wood's publication of as well as that of James Stuart and Nicholas Revett's The Antiquities of Athens (it was on Stuart's suggestion that, in 1755, Dawkins was elected to the Society of Dilettanti).