‘Sailing on the same uncertain sea’

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.

Britain’s European Island-Empire, 1793–1815

This chapter explores the creation and maintenance of Britain’s European island empire during the wars against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. It traces the initial establishment of island bases in the Mediterranean, North and Baltic Seas, outlining their importance to British trade and strategy. It explains how and why British war aims came to rely on these imperial possessions. Across the Mediterranean, the war came to be defined by the extension of island empires. British victory in 1814 owed much to these islands, lynchpins of its wider European strategy. In northern waters, the island of Heligoland acted as a rendezvous point for trade with the continent, and was a key site from which Napoleon’s ‘Continental System’ could be undermined. Britain’s European island empire proved itself to be a crucial part of Britain’s wider imperial network, and its significance would continue into the nineteenth century and the era of Pax Britannica.

Introduction

Islands (and groups of islands) across the globe played crucial roles in the establishment and development of the British Empire. This chapter sets out the main themes and contours of the volume that follows. Islands acted as key nodal points, providing critical assistance for those embarked on long-distance voyages. Intercontinental maritime trade, colonial settlement, and scientific exploration would have been impossible without them. They also acted as sites of competition and conflict for rival European powers. The importance of islands outstripped their physical size, the populations they sustained, or their individual economic contribution to the imperial balance sheet. Standing at the centre of maritime routes of global connectivity, islands offer historians of the British Empire fresh perspectives on the intercontinental communication, commercial connections, and territorial expansion that characterized that empire.

Islands of Incarceration and Empire Building in Colonial Australia

This chapter examines the key roles played by Australia’s offshore prison islands in the British Empire. It begins with the arrival of the First Fleet at Botany Bay in 1788, and ends in 1868, when the last Antipodean colony, Western Australia, stopped accepting convicts. It builds on the volume’s focus on islands as integral to the imperial project, but foregrounds the specific role played by prison labourers. Paradoxically, islands embodied both isolation and connection, prison islands especially so. The British government strategically deployed isolation, by exiling populations resistant to frontier expansion to islands, and connection, by exploiting convict labour on islands to tap into imperial networks of communication and commerce. The Australian colonies were Britain’s most remote imperial possessions, with sailing ships journeying several months to reach their shores. The position of islands enabled them to act as prisons, trading outposts, Aboriginal ‘reserves’, hubs of infrastructure, and natural laboratories.

Empire in Oceania

The expansion of empire into the Pacific Ocean took place in the age of enlightenment as well as the age of sail. It coincided with new metropolitan methodologies for the acquisition and ordering of natural history, and speculation on the natural world’s relation to changing human and social worlds. Islands, in this context, were always more than just refuelling and repair points. In Oceania, these islands were small, self-contained, and often isolated enough to make them ideal spaces, or so it would seem, for seaborne natural historians. In Europe, Enlightenment philosophers had invented mythic islands. Now these were overlaid with, and interrupted by, rapidly accumulating knowledge of actual island-dwellers and their environments. This chapter explores the meeting point of Enlightenment mythic and literary islands with real encounters in the Sea of Islands, from James Cook’s voyages in the 1770s to T.H. Huxley and John MacGillivray’s in the 1840s.

Islands and the Age of Revolutions in the Indian and Pacific Oceans

The Age of Revolutions altered the map of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. More of these oceans were ‘filled in’ in the European mind, as voyages of discovery and scientific studies of oceans, coastlines, and environments proceeded. But the map of these oceans changed in more important ways too. For people of all kinds, the islands of these oceans served as spaces for rethinking politics, forms of association, and social organization. Islands were key locales for the discourses and debates of the Age of Revolutions and their globalization. They became imaginative spaces for considering the past and the future of human society and for deliberating what constituted enlightenment, progress, and varieties of reform. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, islands in these oceans became sites of counter-revolutionary imperialism. Ultimately, therefore, this chapter illustrates the changing place of islands on the globe and within Britain’s maritime empire.

Islands of Settlement

North Atlantic islands played a key role in early English imperial expansion as critical sites of precedent and experimentation. From John Cabot’s first landing in 1497, Newfoundland gave England both a claim to America and a base for an enormously profitable fishery. Further south, and following its initial accidental English occupation in 1609, Bermuda became England’s first fully settled overseas colony. Furthermore, and crucially, it provided a template for colonial success that was widely copied throughout the Caribbean. New England’s Nantucket Island offers a third maritime-oriented imperial site of innovation as a uniquely successful seventeenth-century whaling base. This chapter highlights the contributions these different North Atlantic islands made in British imperial expansion and their changing roles across time, especially in the wake of the American Revolution.

Islands, Voyaging and Empires in the Age of Sail

Successful transoceanic voyages relied on networks of islands. Some provided places where crew and passengers could rest; where ships could replenish their supplies of fresh food and water; and where dockyards allowed vessels to be repaired. Islands were thus often employed as way stations in this world of maritime endeavour. St Helena, in the South Atlantic Ocean, was one of the first islands to be put to such use in the burgeoning English overseas empire of the seventeenth century. Other islands were of value for what they could produce. They were not acquired to facilitate or protect British operations elsewhere; they themselves were the prizes. The contribution of islands to the geography of the British Empire in the age of sail was significant, and certainly of more importance than their mere physical size would suggest.

Britain’s Western Indian Ocean Island-Scape

The British Empire had a significant influence on the history of the islands in the western Indian Ocean. In turn, the location, size, culture, and environment of these islands shaped the history of empire. This chapter investigates these islands’ strategic significance, their role in trade and commerce, and their diverse colonial cultures. It also considers these islands as sites of confinement and scientific research. Taken together, this chapter highlights the pivotal role played by western Indian Ocean islands—and their distinctive cultures, environments, and geographies—in the expansion and maintenance of Britain’s maritime empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The Route to the East

The islands of the mid-Atlantic played crucial roles in forging and maintaining Britain’s empire in the age of sail. They were strategic hubs defending trade routes and offering benefits to military forces. Many provided opportunities to resupply ships and to recuperate men. For seafarers, Atlantic islands also acted as psychological and cultural acclimatisation stations. Finally, these islands offered opportunities for men of science to collect, to hypothesize, and to experiment. Taking these themes as its basis, this chapter demonstrates how Atlantic islands acted as ‘gateways’ to British imperial activities elsewhere in the world. By focusing on the part played by mid-Atlantic islands, it argues that the East India Company’s empire of trade, the Enlightenment empire of science, and the British Empire of colonies and fortified factories overlapped, coincided, and coexisted in the islands of the Atlantic. Ultimately, the islands of the mid-Atlantic were fulcra around which Britain’s global world turned.