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

Abstract

Using the Leeward Islands as a case study, Jeppe Mulich's In a Sea of Empires offers a new model for understanding late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century globalization. Focusing on the British Virgin Islands, the Danish Virgin Islands, and Swedish Saint Barthélemy as an example of what he terms an “inter-imperial microregion,” Mulich argues that the connections that people forged at the peripheries of European empires were “not an aberrant challenge to imperial rule but an inherent feature of colonial practice” (p. 2). By tracing how these on-the-ground links became embedded in increasingly wider networks, Mulich convincingly casts early globalization not as an abstract process but as the product of intensifying commercial and legal connections that frequently bypassed formal channels.In its “ideal-typical” form, which Mulich illustrates in the form of a graph, an inter-imperial microregion consists of layered and overlapping transimperial, interimperial, and intercolonial networks (p. 18). Because these networks often developed across formal political boundaries, Mulich argues, they created relationships that could undermine or act as an alternative to direct colonial control. This was especially true in regions where imperial sovereignty was thin and boundaries porous, such as the maritime borderland of the Lesser Antilles. Asserting that individual Caribbean islands “were not discrete entities at all,” Mulich eschews imperial comparisons in favor of focusing on the myriad entanglements that emerged when colonies took shape across narrow and frequently traversed channels (p. 6).After offering a detailed explanation of his model, Mulich devotes five tightly written chapters to examining how regional connections respectively shaped commerce, warfare, court systems, slave law, and slave trafficking in the Leeward Islands. Arguing that “networks of commerce trumped imperial allegiances time and again,” Mulich traces how a desire for profit also promoted cross-polity cooperation in the areas of law and defense (p. 27). This, in turn, fostered regional stability even during moments of broader disruption such as the Napoleonic Wars. A desire for protection against enslaved insurgency also encouraged considerable mimesis, as weaker European powers such as Sweden and Denmark-Norway worked to ensure that their slave codes would be intelligible to other empires. In short, trade networks forged as the subjects of different crowns settled in proximity to one another also helped give rise to military and legal relations that were decidedly transimperial in nature.At times, these regional connections proved strong enough to supersede imperial directives. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, as Great Britain deployed its naval power to exercise greater hegemony, British authorities used their 1807 ban on slave trafficking as a reason to police Caribbean waters. Yet as Mulich shows in chapter 6, long-standing interimperial routes allowed this traffic to continue illicitly for two decades after British abolition, as imperial authorities struggled to control “a maritime landscape that was almost made for clandestine commerce” (p. 156). By using abolition to highlight the tensions between top-down policy and local interest, Mulich calls attention to how the geographic and spatial realities of inter-imperial microregions shape global processes.Central to Mulich's model is a critique of Atlantic history, which he argues can obscure connections that extend well beyond a single sea. By instead emphasizing how global connectivity arose as inter-imperial microregions became embedded in broader networks, Mulich illustrates how the processes he describes for the Leeward Islands could be usefully applied in other contexts, including West Africa's Gold Coast, Mauritius and Seychelles, and nineteenth-century Shanghai.Yet in choosing to focus on networks, Mulich sometimes allows ordinary people to fade from view. While Mulich argues that his model allows him to highlight structural realities, institutional influences, and individual autonomy without having to rely on the “character-driven narratives” that often serve as the basis for traditional microhistories, the individuals who do appear in his text are overwhelmingly white men (p. 21). In addition to the magistrates, governors, and privateers who pepper Mulich's work, providing more detail on the many enslaved and free people of color as well as on any women who traversed this microregion could have further illustrated globalization as a lived experience.Despite this minor shortcoming, Mulich's succinct study makes several signal contributions to Caribbean historiography. In addition to offering information on the Swedish and Danish-Norwegian Antilles, about which there is precious little English-language scholarship, Mulich's focus on islands dominated by ports helps diversify understandings of the colonial Caribbean beyond the plantation contexts more familiar to historians.Informed by an impressive range of Danish-, Swedish-, French-, and English-language sources scattered across Europe, the Caribbean, and the United States, In a Sea of Empires will be of interest to scholars in the field of Caribbean history and well beyond. Through his case study of the Leeward Islands, Mulich convincingly uses a little-studied region to offer a fresh perspective on how early globalization was enacted on the ground and at sea.