Book Review

This book provides a careful treatment of the meaning of the American Revolution for the British West Indies. The first six chapters try to answer what Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy recognizes is an old question: why the British Caribbean colonies did not join the rebels of 1776. Historians from Eric Williams to Jack Greene have had a crack at this. O'Shaughnessy offers a detailed, reasoned, structured answer. It begins with three chapters on long-term circumstances that bound the white planter elite to Britain, such as social and cultural ties, educational experience, and the all-important fact that whites normally planned to return to Britain. O'Shaughnessy recognizes the military dependence of the planters on Britain, chiefly for protection against slave insurrection. He also emphasizes their reliance on the protected British market for their sugar, as they could not compete on price with French planters in St.-Domingue. These chapters are very clear and persuasive, but they do not explore the root of planter vulnerability and allegiance to Britain, which lay in the disease climate and demographic regime of the West Indies. Whites died much faster than other whites were born, so only constant immigration of people formed in Britain allowed planter society to persist; the proportion of the white population born and raised in the West Indies remained small (in sharp contrast to the North American colonies).

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