There were 26--not 13--British colonies in America in 1776. Of these,
the six colonies in the Caribbean--Jamaica, Barbados, the Leeward
Islands, Grenada and Tobago, St. Vincent; and Dominica--were among the
wealthiest. These island colonies were closely related to the mainland
by social ties and tightly connected by trade. In a period when most
British colonists in North America lived less than 200 miles inland and
the major cities were all situated along the coast, the ocean often
acted as a highway between islands and mainland rather than a barrier.
The plantation system of the islands was so similar to that of the
southern mainland colonies that these regions had more in common with
each other, some historians argue, than either had with New England.
Political developments in all the colonies moved along parallel tracks,
with elected assemblies in the Caribbean, like their mainland
counterparts, seeking to increase their authority at the expense of
colonial executives. Yet when revolution came, the majority of the white
island colonists did not side with their compatriots on the mainland.
A major contribution to the history of the American Revolution, An
Empire Divided traces a split in the politics of the mainland and
island colonies after the Stamp Act Crisis of 1765-66, when the
colonists on the islands chose not to emulate the resistance of the
patriots on the mainland. Once war came, it was increasingly unpopular
in the British Caribbean; nonetheless, the white colonists cooperated
with the British in defense of their islands. O'Shaughnessy decisively
refutes the widespread belief that there was broad backing among the
Caribbean colonists for the American Revolution and deftly reconstructs
the history of how the island colonies followed an increasingly
divergent course from the former colonies to the north.
