In a Sea of Empires: Networks and Crossings in the Revolutionary Caribbean by Jeppe Mulich

Abstract

Reviewed by: In a Sea of Empires: Networks and Crossings in the Revolutionary Caribbean by Jeppe Mulich Pernille Røge In a Sea of Empires: Networks and Crossings in the Revolutionary Caribbean. By Jeppe Mulich. Cambridge Oceanic Histories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 216 pages. Cloth, ebook. In recent years, the dwindling reliance on national and single-imperial frameworks of analysis in favor of an emphasis on connectivity and entanglement has stimulated a surge of fresh transimperial and colonial histories. This shift in focus has been especially pronounced in the study of the early modern Caribbean, where it has also generated an invigorating new trend focusing on broader regional integration. Scholars now regularly embrace multilingual research projects to explore how lived experiences of colonial officials, planters, merchants, and enslaved and free people of color in the Caribbean were shaped by interisland and regional networks as much as by the assertions of sovereignty issued from distant imperial metropoles. By attending to illicit commercial networks, shared responses to natural disasters, and maritime border crossings, historians have produced textured understandings of regional integration and brought into view a Greater Caribbean as a recognizable unit of historical analysis.1 In In a Sea of Empires, Jeppe Mulich both narrows and expands this focus, for though he concentrates specifically on the Leeward Islands in the northeastern corner of the Caribbean, he also makes the case that integration at the microregional level was a critical component of early nineteenth-century globalization. By examining formal and informal relations among the Dutch, French, Spanish, British, Danish, and Swedish colonies from the end of the American Revolution through the abolition of slavery in the British Caribbean, Mulich argues that layered networks forged through cross-imperial practices of contraband trade, slavery, and privateering made the Leeward Islands "a politically polyglot zone of thin sovereignty and local integration" (2). As a result, he suggests, they serve as a historical example of an "inter-imperial microregion" (2), an ideal type that Mulich suggests can be found across the globe but whose role in early globalization remains little explored. As both a sociological model for the analysis of globalization from a regional perspective and a historical case study of the Leeward Islands, In a Sea of Empires is well-written and conceptually stimulating. The theoretical [End Page 341] framework for integration Mulich develops in the introductory chapter alone makes the book worthwhile. Drawing on network analysis and a relational approach, Mulich defines an "inter-imperial microregion" as a "geographical area inhabited by multiple polities, with a particularly high density of relations and interactions between and across the formal boundaries of these polities" (16). Some, but not all, of these must be imperial polities and have connections to authorities outside the microregion, "placing their subjects in a situation of potential conflict between regional and metropolitan interests" (16). Though Mulich first introduced this model in an article in 2013, he develops it further in this book, explicitly highlighting its utility in understanding processes of globalization and integration within geographically defined spaces.2 As he explains in the conclusion, studies of interimperial microregions can help historians recognize that globalization occurred not only through top-down macro developments "but also through the bottom-up activities of people making a living in spaces that became increasingly integrated into widening networks of connectivity and interdependence" (176). Mulich's interest in the Leeward Islands is therefore predominantly programmatic, and the five chapters that follow the introduction serve to test the model of an "inter-imperial microregion" as a unit of analysis. Mulich particularly focuses on the British and Danish Virgin Islands and Swedish Saint Barthélemy, surveying the dense networks and connections among these islands as drivers of integration. Chapter 2 examines smuggling and clandestine maritime trade. Mulich shows how Danish Saint Thomas and Swedish Saint Barthélemy flourished as Caribbean centers of contraband trade in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars due to these islands' status as free ports and Danish and Swedish neutrality.3 Chapter 3 explores warfare and colonial violence, arguing that white colonists' interisland reliance on military assistance during threats of slave uprisings was another engine of integration. Chapter 4 studies privateering and how...