Reviews of Books

"The thirteen colonies in North America," begins Andrew O'Shaughnessy's An Empire Divided, "represented only half the colonies of British America in 1776" (p. xi). The other half, extending from Canada to Bermuda and the island colonies of the Caribbean, seldom receive much notice from historians of the American Revolution, even though the British West Indies, with their lucrative sugar plantations, were the crown jewels of the first British empire. Focusing on the major possessions in Britain's Caribbean domain--Jamaica, Barbados, the Leeward and Windward Islands--O'Shaughnessy, associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh, asks why the white planters of those islands stayed loyal to Britain while their neighbors to the north rebelled. Commercial ties bound the Caribbean closely to the North American mainland, as did a common political tradition. The West Indies claimed the same heritage of English liberties as did the mainland American colonists and shared their grievances against parliamentary taxation and imperial interference with local governance. It was Barbados, not Boston, that as early as 1651 announced the principle of "no taxation without representation."1 Yet, such affinities dissolved in the crisis of 1776, for reasons no historian has fully plumbed.	1
To O'Shaughnessy, the die was cast long before the Declaration of Independence. As he sees it, the island plantocracies had followed a separate path from the mainland colonies, and the consequence was marked in the two groups' contrasting relations with the imperial center. A culture of absenteeism was pervasive among the West Indian elites. Planters and merchants sent their sons and daughters "home" to England for school, while future leaders of the North American colonies were educated locally. Few Caribbean youth ventured north to attend a colonial college, and only a handful married into North American families. After making their fortunes in sugar, leading West Indian "nabobs" returned to England to establish themselves on country estates and enter into politics. Thanks to such absentees, the island colonies were plugged far more deeply into Britain's landed and mercantile establishments than comparable North American groups. The West India interest ran a daunting political machine.	2
If the two groups of colonists started well apart, they diverged still more in their reactions to the Stamp Act and the ensuing political crises of the 1760s and 1770s. O'Shaughnessy stresses the force of self-interest in muting West Indian opposition to imperial measures. High production costs in most of the islands left their sugar and rum uncompetitive without the tariff protection offered by the Navigation Acts, which enabled West Indian exports to dominate the British market. Even more crucial was the vulnerability of the sugar colonies to attack, both from without and within. The West Indian settlements needed military protection, not just from their French and Spanish neighbors a day or so's sail away, but even more from the vast numbers of slaves on the plantations. Periodic slave plots and uprisings reminded island elites of their precarious state: as the Assembly of Tobago acknowledged in 1774, "the idea of regaining freedom seems to be universally spread amongst our slaves in all parts of the colony" (p. 146). While the North Americans wailed about quartering the king's troops, the island assemblies continued to pay subsistence money to royal garrisons and erect new barracks. They wanted a gendarmerie.	. . .