Caribbean Project: Review: An Empire Divided

British West Indies

Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy’s An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean is an excellent book which sheds considerable light on how Southerners ended up marooned in this Clusterfuck Union.

In 1776, there were 26 – not 13 – British colonies in the Americas. Half of the colonies revolted and won their independence in the American Revolution.

The other 13 colonies remained loyal to King George III and their paths diverged from the United States. The American Revolution altered the course of world history in all kinds of unforeseen ways.

This book is concerned with the American Revolution and its impact on the British West Indies: Jamaica, Barbados, the Leeward Islands (Antigua, St. Kitts, Nevis, and Montserrat), and the Windward Islands (Dominica, St. Vincent, Grenada, the Grenadines, and Tobago) in the Lesser Antilles.

Prior to the American Revolution, the Lower South and the British West Indies had more in common with each other than either had with New England. South Carolina was founded in 1670 by settlers from Barbados who had spread their culture through the Leeward Islands and Jamaica before arriving on the mainland.

These Barbadians transplanted the domestic institution of negro slavery, the plantation system, the slave code, speech patterns, and their architectural styles to South Carolina from the British West Indies. The culture of South Carolina and the Lower South was just as much an extension of the British West Indies as Rhode Island and Connecticut were extensions of Massachusetts.

Compared to the Southern colonies, the British West Indies were blacker, wealthier, more enslaved, more racialist, more conservative, more authoritarian, more aristocratic, and more loyalist – in almost every way, they represented a more extreme example of what we would recognize as Southern culture.

According to O’Shaughnessy, the sundering of the British West Indies from the Southern mainland colonies in the American Revolution stemmed from two fundamental causes:

(1) First, the British West Indies are in the tropics, whereas South Carolina has a sub-tropical climate. In the Caribbean, malaria and yellow fever decimated the White population and led to demographic failure. In South Carolina, a settler society emerged because the climate was healthier and the infant mortality rate was much lower.

(2) Second, the British West Indies and South Carolina were both slave societies with plantation systems, but the former were sugar colonies whereas the latter was a rice and indigo colony at the outset. Sugar was a more profitable crop. The sugar plantations in the British West Indies were bigger and required more slaves which resulted in a smaller and wealthier oligarchy.

In this way, the same cultural pattern in the British West Indies and the Lower South produced sojourner societies in the Caribbean – White slaveowners resigned to demographic failure owing to tropical disease, lost and alienated in a sea of blackness, and clinging to England as a result – and expansionist settler societies in North America – White slaveowners who were poorer and more fecund cousins, but who stood to gain a lot more from American independence.

West Indian planters were far more likely to be educated in Britain and to be absentees than their North American counterparts. They were less likely to be religious dissenters. They were more dependent on British military protection due to their greater ratio of slaves to Whites and their closer proximity to rival French and Spanish colonies in the Caribbean.

Economically speaking, over 90 percent of the sugar and rum produced in the British West Indies was consumed in Britain. The sugar planters in the British West Indies were unable to compete with their competitors in the French West Indies and owed their fortunes to mercantilist protection within the British Empire.

In 1776, the British West Indies were a prosperous and contented region within the British Empire. They were happy to quarter British troops because of their anxiety over potential slave rebellions. They were happy to have the Royal Navy protecting them from conquest by the French or the Spanish. They were willing to submit to the Stamp Act and the Townshend Acts because protectionism within the imperial system worked to their advantage.

New England, however, was on a collision course with Britain:

(1) Yankees resented the Sugar Act and sought to trade with Spanish America and the French West Indies.

(2) Yankees had nothing to fear from the French who had recently ceded Canada to Britain in order to retain Guadeloupe and Martinique.

(3) Yankees saw British troops as a menacing threat to their liberties instead of a potential savior because they lacked a large slave population like Jamaica and the Leeward Islands.

(4) Yankees saw Britain as an obstacle to their commerce and territorial expansion.

When the American Revolution broke out in 1775 at Lexington and Concord, the British West Indies remained loyal to the Empire. After France declared war on Britain in 1778 (and Spain in 1779 and the Netherlands in 1780), the epicenter of the conflict shifted from North America to the Caribbean where the British prioritized the defense of their wealthiest colonies.

In 1778, the British abandoned Philadelphia – the capital of the Patriot cause – in order free five thousand troops to invade the French island of St. Lucia in the Caribbean. General Henry Clinton also dispatched Lord Cornwallis with four thousand troops to defend Jamaica while Admiral D’Estaing sailed to Saint-Domingue to collect more troops for the reconquest of Georgia.

King George III prioritized the defense of Jamaica – the jewel of the British Caribbean, and a major source of British wealth and power – above defense of Britain itself and all the other British colonies. In the course of the war, St. Kitts was invaded by the French, and the Windward Islands (Dominica, St. Vincent, Grenada, and Tobago) were reconquered by France. The escalation of the war between Britain and France in the Caribbean brought about American independence.

American independence severed the British West Indies from the Southern mainland colonies, created the novel concept that Yankees and Southerners shared a common civilization, halved the number of slaves in the British Empire, put the South under the rule of Washington, galvanized the abolitionist movement, and set the British West Indies on the road to long term economic decline.

Prior to the war, the British West Indies had depended on the North American colonies as a market for its rum and as a cheap source for lumber, staves, fresh food and other vital supplies that made slavery profitable. After the war, the American colonies were outside the British mercantilist system, and this created a conflict of interest between West Indian planters and other interest groups vying for influence over Parliament.

As the conflict between the West Indian planters and the abolitionists escalated in the early nineteenth century, West Indian threats of secession and joining the United States as slave states became commonplace. Unfortunately, British naval supremacy in the Caribbean and the ever present threat posed by slave rebellions and Revolutionary France and the growing hostility of the Yankee to slavery in the United States precluded the possibility of reunion.

The damage had been done. The Golden Circle had been broken. The result of the American Revolution was the triumph of abolition in the British West Indies in 1834 and the destruction of the Confederacy by the Union in 1865.

If we could do it over again, would we have made a different choice?