it was all about the sugar islands…

Book review:

An Empire Divided:

The American Revolution

and the British Caribbean

by Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000

O’Shaughnessy opens a new chapter in American history for me. One of his central themes is: why didn’t the British West Indies, the “sugar islands,” rebel at the same time as the North American mainland colonies that we know (incompletely) as the 13 original colonies? In fact, why didn’t the fabulously wealthy sugar islands rebel, period?

The West Indies—Barbados, Jamaica, and others in the British Caribbean—were part of the English colonial frontier throughout the period that we customarily regard as colonial American history, but we customarily ignore them. That’s a mistake. The West Indies were strongly integrated with the mainland colonies by trade, but politically they were a breed apart: much more strongly tied to the mother country through their protected status and monopoly exports of sugar products, and therefore much less inclined to rebel and throw away their continuing access to that richly rewarding connection. They needed the English navy to keep predatory French and Spanish forces at bay.

O’Shaughnessy’s prose is engaging, if a bit redundant here and there. He makes it plain that King George and his Privy Council and Parliament consistently dealt with the “big picture” of their Atlantic colonies, and he gives new context to the repeated punitive tax and other policies that helped to precipitate the Revolution.

An interesting revelation is that England never committed and never actually had enough military strength on our side of the pond to defeat Gen. Washington’s somewhat ragtag army.

Apparently the King and his ministers

wanted to hang on to the sugar islands

more urgently than they wanted

to keep the 13 colonies in the family.

Indeed, O’Shaughnessy takes pains to outline his argument that “the defense of the islands influenced British military strategy and contributed to the eventual British defeat at Yorktown,” sealing the victory of the rebellious mainland colonies in 1781 (p. xvi). The demands of West Indies plantation owners for protection, and the desire of the British government to secure the vast wealth of the sugar trade, caused naval and army forces to be allocated to the West Indies and thus drawn away from the Revolutionary War theater.

An Empire Divided was an insightful learning experience for me.

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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

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