The Setting

2019 ◽  
pp. 95-104
Author(s):  
P. J. Marshall
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Political Connection ◽  
West Indians ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
The West ◽  
Eighteenth Century Britain

Many people in later eighteenth-century Britain, varying from rich merchants and absentee planters to workers on ships or in manufactures serving the islands, had concerns with the West Indies. In leading ports like London, Bristol, and Liverpool, West Indians organized themselves into associations to promote their interests. Such people sought to influence government and to act as a group in the House of Commons. Such influence as they were able to exert depended principally on the persuasive case that they were able to establish about the importance for Britain of the wealth generated by the West Indies. Edmund Burke and his political connection, the Rockingham Whigs, were firmly committed to this view and sought to enlist British West Indians as their political allies.

The West Indies and the American Crisis

2019 ◽  
pp. 125-154
Author(s):  
P. J. Marshall
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
West Indians ◽  
British West Indies ◽  
The West ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
The North ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
The Government

The conflict between Britain and the North American colonies, which led to a worldwide war involving Britain’s European enemies, caused dire problems for the British West Indies. North America was an essential source of foodstuffs and other supplies to the islands. To bring pressure on Britain the American colonies cut off supplies to the British islands, much to their detriment. When war broke out in 1778, the French had the ascendancy in the Caribbean, capturing a number of British islands. Edmund Burke and his associates in the Rockingham party were highly critical of both the government policies that led to war with America and of the way in which the war was conducted. They sought to enlist West Indian interests in Britain in their opposition to Lord North. Although most West Indians saw little alternative to putting their trust in the government, Burke played a part in shaping the London Merchants and Planters’ pleas for moderating policy towards America in 1775. In 1781, in two powerful speeches, he took up the cause of those in Britain and the West Indies who were trying to limit the damage the war was inflicting on them by trading through neutral channels. Admiral Rodney’s seizure of the Dutch island of St Eustatius was a very serious blow to British merchants, which Burke denounced as amounting to robbery.

‘Sailing on the same uncertain sea’

2021 ◽  
pp. 77-96
Author(s):  
Douglas Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
West Indies ◽  
The West ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Imperial Rivalry

Although they were small, the islands of the Caribbean were central rather than peripheral to the idea of empire. By the seventeenth century, the islands of the Antillean archipelago were already integral to European imperial rivalry and—as a result—came to shape European notions of what empires were and what they were for. This chapter explores the shifting nature of these islands as they emerged to become imperial powerhouses in the eighteenth century. This transformation was set against the backdrop of the great upheavals of war and revolution. The shifting demography of the West Indies and their economic and strategic importance exposed them particularly to the threats created by the geopolitical maelstrom around them. This chapter argues that their island nature intensified how they were affected by, and responded to, the profound and unprecedented uncertainties of the Age of Revolutions.

“One of the Finest and Most Fruitful Spots in America”: An Analysis of Eighteenth-Century Carriacou

2013 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 539-570 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Beck Ryden
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Information Costs ◽  
The West

Analysis of the 1776 and 1790 agricultural censuses from Carriacou overturns the notion that only farmers with small holdings cultivated cotton in the West Indies. The evidence shows that cotton squeezed out all other crops on Carriacou during the first phase of the Industrial Revolution. The island's cotton planters were socially diverse; the yeomanry with their small their farms often competed successfully with the owners of the large plantations financed by wealthy metropolitan investors. Despite the viability of the more modest operations in this industry, however, the largest estates offered creditors comparatively lower transaction and information costs. Furthermore, the data from 1790 indicate that the largest estates achieved the highest output per hand, provided that the “gangs” of enslaved laborers were sufficiently monitored by free workers.

The Bishop of Jamaica and Slave Instruction

1975 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 363-378 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Turner
Keyword(s):  
West Indies ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Anglican Church ◽  
The West ◽  
Religious Instruction ◽  
Reform Programme ◽  
Windward Islands ◽  
Moral Instruction ◽  
The Government ◽  
Future Condition

In July 1824 two new bishoprics were organised in the West Indies, the bishopric of Jamaica including Honduras and the bishopric of Barbados and the Leeward and Windward islands, to promote the activity of the Anglican Church among the slave population. A series of resolutions passed in the House of Commons in May 1823 committed the government to reforms intended to prepare the slaves for eventual freedom, and primary importance was given to their need for religious instruction. Knowledge of Christianity was regarded as an ‘indispensable necessity to…the foundation of every beneficial change in their character and future condition’. Most of the reform programme, which included the abolition of flogging for women, the admission of slave evidence in court and the improvement of manumission facilities, involved revision of existing slave codes and implementation, therefore, depended, outside the crown colonies, on the cooperation of the island assemblies. The imperial government, however, was free to promote religious instruction and chose to appoint the bishops. Under their supervision the Anglican Church in the West Indies was to become a missionary force. As the Secretary of State explained to the governor of Jamaica, ‘his Majesty's Government have been anxious to prove the deep interest which they feel in the encouragement of the religious and moral instruction of the Negroes, by at once taking upon themselves the whole charge of placing the Clergy of the West Indies under Episcopal control’. Funds were voted to pay the bishop of Jamaica £5,600 p.a. and salaries were also provided for six auxiliary curates and an archdeacon to help to supervise the clergy.

The Chinese in West Indian Fiction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne-Marie Lee-Loy
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
West Indies ◽  
West Indian ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
West Indians ◽  
The West ◽  
Indian Identity ◽  
Literary Landscapes ◽  
Marginal Status

Asians in the West Indies are primarily migrants and their descendants from either South Asia or China. The representation of the Chinese in West Indian fiction is integrally connected to the specific development of the region. Indeed, to consider the role that the Chinese play in West Indian fiction is to engage, more generally, in the act of imaginatively locating the West Indies. Despite the fact that numerically, they have always held a marginal status in the region, the Chinese are very much present in West Indian literary landscapes. The recurring representations of the Chinese and Chineseness in such fiction are intimately tied to locating the metaphorical and discursive contours of the West Indies and of West Indians. In this context, depictions of the Chinese in West Indian literary texts tend to follow three lines of representation: (1) defining the region as an exotic “other place”; (2) negotiating the boundaries of West Indian belonging; and (3) complicating settled narratives of West Indian identity.

Edmund Burke and the British Empire in the West Indies

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. J. Marshall
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
West Indian ◽  
Political Connection ◽  
The West ◽  
Plantation Economy ◽  
Comprehensive Plan ◽  
Important Addition ◽  
Personal Level

In the later eighteenth century the West Indian sugar islands were a source of conspicuous wealth for some individuals and an important addition to the resources of Great Britain. They were generally reckoned to be the most valuable of Britain’s imperial possessions, a view which Burke fully endorsed. This book examines his long involvement with the West Indies, at a personal level through the ambitions of his brother and some of his closest friends, as a politician and what contemporaries called ‘a man of business’ in the management of a great national asset and in trying to win the support of powerful West Indian interests for his political connection. He became a participant in debates about the ethics of enslavement and the slave trade. Burke deplored both slavery and the trade, but he recognized that the plantation economy of the West Indies depended on them and that therefore they played a crucial role in Britain’s immensely valuable Atlantic commerce. The policies that he advocated for the further development of the West Indian and African trades inevitably involved more enslaved Africans in the British Empire and on occasions he was drawn into implicitly endorsing the slave trade. Except for a few years from 1788 to 1791, Burke was not prepared to countenance immediate abolition of the trade, but he did devise a comprehensive plan for reforming both it and the institution of slavery, that in the very long term would make both redundant.

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