In the Margins

The American Revolution, when Britain was defeated by its 13 original colonies.

American History 101 right?

But if you look at a map of British colonies in the area, you'd see that Britain had way more colonies than just those 13.

Some were in Canada, but most were here in the Caribbean.

And the thing is, the mainland colonies and island colonies were close.

They weren't physically connected, but they were connected socially and by trade.

They both wanted to build their fortunes.

They both practiced slavery.

They both got hit with the same annoying taxes from Britain.

And while there's some ocean between them, it still took about half the time to travel from the mainland to the islands, then back to Britain.

So when these 13 North American colonies start a revolution, their neighbors to the south didn't.

So why did the Caribbean colonies join America in the Revolutionary War?

Let me give you a hint.

Sugar is going to play an important role in this story.

But first, let's set the scene in the Caribbean.

There are about 26 islands that Indigenous peoples called home for thousands of years.

Starting in the 1400s, Europeans descended on the region.

Imperial powers like England, Spain, France and the Netherlands all seized resource rich islands, and they fought over them constantly.

Tobago, for example, had been claimed by various European nations on 33 separate occasions.

Britain controlled about a dozen key islands in the West Indies, including Barbados, Grenada, the Leeward Islands and its crown jewel, Jamaica.

Jamaica was the largest and richest colony in the entire empire, thanks to its sugar plantations.

Then in 1765 came one of the first sparks of the revolution.

The Stamp Act.

It was a direct tax on all the American colonies, which required them to pay for a literal stamp on legal and official papers.

People were outraged.

They protested violently against taxation without representation.

Colonists in the Caribbean protested, too.

They even paid more of this tax than the rest of the American colonies.

A decade A decade later, as war loomed between American patriots and Britain, the Jamaican Assembly tried to cool things down.

They sent lobbyist Richard Glover to the House of Commons in London with the message of that war be economically disastrous for the Caribbean colonies.

But they were too late.

In April 1775, the first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord.

In July, the new revolutionaries to the north extended their quote, "warmest of gratitude for your pathetic mediation on our behalf with the crown."

Shade aside, Connecticut did invite Jamaica to join a committee of correspondence, which were groups formed to coordinate against the British.

But to the Caribbean colonists, this was a civil war, and they wanted no part of it.

To understand why, we need to understand the decision makers, aka the white colonists that owned plantations in the Caribbean colonies.

Sugar and slavery had made these men obscenely wealthy.

They were 50 times richer than the average Englishman and 35 times richer than the typical North American colonist.

Adjusting for inflation, the wealth of the West Indies was more than 4 billion pounds.

Unlike American colonists the majority of these sugar barons didn't live in the colonies.

They preferred Britain, where they could spend their fortunes in style, built opulent estates and put their kids in elite schools.

By 1800, it two thirds of Jamaican planters lived in England.

This meant that Caribbean planters kept closer ties to the British crown.

Their loyalties were both social and economic.

For all the sugar that British Caribbean planters produced, the sugar from the French colonies was consistently cheaper.

The French had access to more fertile land and controlled their plantations more efficiently by actually living there.

So to keep their Caribbean sugar industry afloat, the government mandated that only British sugar could be sold in Britain, effectively creating a monopoly for Caribbean planters.

Jamaica alone produced 40% of British sugar and 90% of the rum.

It was a deal that the Caribbean colonists couldn't refuse, much less lose, by rebelling.

On top of that, the North American colonies refused to offer the same exclusive trade deal.

They kept buying sugar and other staples from the French West Indies.

That turned out to be a major roadblock to an alliance between the Caribbean and North American colonies.

But the biggest reason why the island colonists didn't revolt is because they lived in constant terror of another kind of rebellion.

One from below.

Racial demographics were key to the revolutionary era.

In the British Caribbean, enslaved Black people outnumbered white slave owners up to 22 to 1.

There was an estimated 416,000 Black people to 50,000 white people in the Caribbean.

It was the exact opposite in North American colonies, which had 460,000 Black people to 2 million white people.

The Caribbeans racial breakdown was partly due to colonists living in Britain, like I mentioned, but also because sugarcane is an incredibly labor intensive crop to grow.

After being trafficked from Africa, enslaved people lived for an average of 13 years before succumbing to the brutal working conditions enforced by overseers.

This tragically short lifespan meant that Caribbean planters relied on the British slave trade for ever more labor instead of growing their enslaved population through forced birth like in the North American colonies.

And while American colonists resented the presence of British soldiers, outnumbered Caribbean planters welcomed these troops to protect them from the threat of slave rebellions, which on the islands were constant.

Since the start of chattel slavery, Black people escaped and created free Maroon communities, especially on the larger islands.

In Jamaica, the British government and leaders of Maroons from Trelawny Town struck a grim peace treaty in 1739 after a decade of fighting.

Maroons will be left alone if they agree to help capture and return anyone who escaped in the future.

Resistance to slavery also happened in covert ways.

There are instances of suspicious fires and accidental deaths from meals prepared specifically for slave owners.

And when the Revolutionary War finally broke out in 1735, it made slave rebellions even more likely.

With white colonies distracted by war, enslaved people saw an opportunity to claim their freedom.

In fact, enslaved people had planned a massive revolt in Hanover, Jamaica.

The rebels timed their plot for July 1776, just as Britain's 50th Regiment troops were leaving to fight in North America.

But the plan was foiled by one Edward Chambers.

Chambers had one of the largest plantations in Hanover, Jamaica with almost 800 enslaved people.

He found out that his overseers' pistols had been loaded with black sand instead of gunpowder.

After almost being killed himself, he discovered that the plot spanned more than 40 estates and some 8,600 enslaved people.

It was organized who workers had the means to travel between estates.

Once the plot was discovered, many of the leaders were executed and martial law was declared to restore order.

The war also brought a British trade embargo with North America, creating a severe food shortage in the Caribbean which led to the death of thousands of enslaved people.

Famine and unrest led to less sugar production, which was incredibly important to the British government.

King George himself said, quote, "our islands must be defended even at the risk of an invasion of Britain.

If we lose our sugar islands, it will be impossible to raise money to continue the war, and then no peace can be obtained".

End quote.

So, as you can imagine, Britain's attention was split.

Instead of focusing all its forces on America, British troops were constantly sailing down to defend the Caribbean territories.

This was especially true once France entered the war, as they successfully took the British colonies of Dominica, Saint Vincent, Grenada.

and Tobago.

Ultimately, Britain's desperate attempts to hold on to the Caribbean so weakened their forces in America that they lost one of the last major revolutionary battles, at Yorktown.

So even though the Caribbean colonies didn't take up arms, they had each huge impact on the Revolutionary War.

And it goes both ways.

Within a few decades, the aftermath of the American Revolution would pave the way for a life altering change in the Caribbean.

The end of slavery.

Post-Revolutionary War, Britain looked terrible on the world stage.

Not only had they lost, they lost opposing the ideals of freedom, happiness, and justice for all.

At this moment, activists in London saw an opportunity.

They pushed the anti-slavery movement as a way for Britain to reclaim the moral high ground.

Plus, the pro-slavery bloc had been cut in half with the loss of representatives from southern colonies on the American mainland.

The majority of enslaved people were forced to work on sugarcane plantations in the Caribbean islands and Latin America, while 4% were taken to the North American mainland.

Abolitionists, like Olaudah Equiano, who was formerly enslaved, began publishing personal accounts which served as powerful rebukes against slavery, which at this point had stolen the lives of more than 12 million African people.

Quote.

"Oftentimes, my heart has bled at these partings when the friends of the departed have been at the waterside, and with sighs and tears have kept their eyes fixed on the vessel til it went out of sight".

End quote.

In 1807 Britain's Parliament outlawed the transatlantic slave trade.

But it didn't free the currently enslaved people.

So enslaved people took matters into their own hands.

In 1831, Jamaican preacher Sam Sharpe organized a general strike spreading across the entire island.

More than 20,000 people rose up in one of the largest slave revolts ever in British America.

Although Sharpe did not survive to see it, two years later, Britain finally agreed to free the 750,000 people still enslaved in the British Caribbean colonies over five years.

This was 30 years before the American Civil War.

The British government gave no reparations to enslaved people, yet somehow the government made sure to pay the slave owners, which included members of parliament and clergymen whose generational wealth was passed on to today's titans of British banking, railways and insurance companies.

The Revolutionary War wasn't simply a conflict between America and Britain.

It was a World War.

In the Caribbean, colonial powers battled fiercely to protect their claim on the islands, for which they extracted their wealth at the untold cost of human lives and suffering.

Caribbean people across many of the islands fought for their independence in the mid 1900s.

Yet the legacy of colonialism lingers.

Despite the Caribbean being rich in resources, many descendants of enslaved people still face economic disenfranchisement.

Today it's multinational corporations and the sugar, banana and oil industries that profit from the resources of Caribbean nations such as Jamaica, Trinidad and the Windward Islands.

Even though the Caribbean colonies didn't join the Americans, they ultimately had a massive impact on the course of each other's history.

For those of us paying attention, it's a reminder that regardless of borders, our lives and our futures are intertwined.

Before you go, we want to tell you about The Story in Us, a new PBS documentary mini series that explores the universal art of storytelling.

Films cover everything from Navajo weavers, West African griots and the deaf theater.

It all shows how these unique traditions preserve and communicate culture, history and identity.

There's a link in the description.

Thanks in advance.