Jeppe Mulich. In a Sea of Empires: Networks and Crossings in the Revolutionary Caribbean. Cambridge Oceanic Histories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. xii + 204 pp. $80.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-108-48972-0.
Reviewed by Vanessa Mongey (National Coalition of Independent Scholars)
Published on H-LatAm (September, 2021)
Commissioned by Casey M. Lurtz (Johns Hopkins University)
A controversy erupted in 2018 when the famous French artist Johnny Hallyday (sometimes known as the French Elvis or France’s rock-and-roll “national hero”) was buried in the island of St. Barthélemy. Many fans complained about this decision. Hallyday's first wife—herself a celebrated singer—publicly lamented the decision to bury the singer “so far from all of us who loved him so much.”[1] Even though St. Barthélemy has been under France’s jurisdiction since 1878, the controversy around Hallyday's burial site is a reminder that, for many French people, St. Barthélemy is not really part of France.
Jeppe Mulich’s In a Sea of Empires fosters our understanding of the complicated and multilayered place of the Caribbean in historical imagination. The book explores the Leeward Islands, an archipelago of small islands in the northeastern Caribbean, in particular the British Virgin Islands (Antigua and St. Christopher), the Danish Virgin Islands (St. Thomas and St. Croix), and the Swedish St. Barthélemy (France colonized the island in 1648 and sold it to Sweden in 1784 before gaining it back in 1878). These islands shared many features: they had a highly polyglot and diverse population, the majority of which was enslaved; they were home to a higher share of free people of African descent than larger plantation islands; their expansive coasts and rocky terrains made them more suited for maritime trade while other colonies relied on large-scale agricultural plantation production; they had small military forces. Furthermore, neither Sweden nor Denmark was particularly interested in the day-to-day administration of their colonies and lacked the enforcement to do so, leading to a form of “laissez-faire sovereignty” (p. 78) that characterized life in the Leeward Islands.
Adopting a micro-regional perspective, Mulich frames the book around the concept of “inter-imperial region,” which he defined 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” (p. 16). Various groups of actors tied together in overlapping and layered networks. Inter-imperial micro-regions consisted of numerous networks, both formal and informal. For Mulich, this inter-imperial lens helps uncover new connections and practices that are not visible through the examination of a single locale. Drawing from worlds-systems theory, In a Sea of Empires proves that movement of people across imperial borders formed an integral aspect of micro-regional systems. The book builds on recent scholarship on diplomacy and foreign relations at ground-level perspective and brings this ground-level perspective to little-studied smaller imperial powers in the Atlantic world such as Sweden and Denmark-Norway.
Following the introduction, chapter 2 delves into the formal and informal trade of King Mammon. It studies political economy and commercial practices and networks. The chapter starts with the end of the imperially sanctioned trading companies, the Danish West India and Guinea Company and the Swedish West India Company, in the 1780s. The Danish and Swedish colonies were declared free ports and British colonies replaced state-sponsored smuggling practices of the eighteenth century through the practice of free trade. More than an ideological decision, the demise of earlier systems of trade control was a practical response to the fact that European powers could not regulate the flow of trade in the region. In this ground-up study of trade, Mullich details how colonial administrators ranged from attempting to enforce imperial trade policies to actively facilitating and profiting from them. The colonies used free trade to compete with one another.
Chapter 3 switches to the goddess of war Bellona. The eighteenth- and the early nineteenth-century world, Mulich reminds us, was a world at war. Limited military infrastructures left the Leeward Islands vulnerable to invasions, insurrections, and rebellions. In this chapter, Mulich carefully shows how the colonial social and political order managed to remain stable in an era of revolutions and upheavals. Inter-imperial rivalries take center stage in the chapter, especially during the 1790s, and the fear that the French Atlantic Revolution would spread its brand of republicanism to the Leeward Islands alongside the fear that enslaved people would rise up like they did in the French colonies. This fear of insurrection (Mullich uses the term paranoia several times) prompted colonial administrators to push aside their rivalries to protect their political and social system from the perceived threats of slave uprisings and colonial rebellions.
The heirs to Francis Drake and Robert Surcouf are the topic of chapter 4 with the resurgence of privateering during the Napoleonic Wars (1803-15) and the start of the Latin American independence movements after 1808. Privateers received commissions, or letters of marque, from countries at war in the Greater Caribbean region. They took advantage of the location of the Leeward Islands as well as the environment of the islands, hiding in coves and islets to attack enemy vessels. The islands were also the perfect markets for the merchandise and human beings they seized from enemy ships. St Barthélemy became a central privateering hub in the region thanks to preexisting human and commercial networks and a lenient governor. The focal point of this chapter is not so much on privateers themselves as on the establishment of prize courts especially in the British islands: Mullich argues that prize courts illustrate the clashes over jurisdiction that characterized the region and eventually led to British ascendance.
Jurisdictional tensions and legal-political struggles are also present in chapter 5, this time around slave codes and legal frameworks and practices around slavery. In a rich and dense chapter, Mulich tackles various topics such as the rise of abolitionist sentiment in Europe, amelioration programs in the British world, its impact on the Leeward Islands, the efforts by free people of color to obtain political and economic rights, maritime marronage, and the villages, like Kingstown, set up for the Africans “liberated” by the British from foreign slave ships. The close proximity of the islands meant that slave codes were circulated, copied, and imitated, and so were ideas around freedom and self-liberation. Building on both Julius Scott’s pioneering and recently published The Common Wind and the growing scholarship on free people of color in the Americas, a separate chapter on free people of color’s commercial and political campaigns would have been a welcome addition to the book and would have allowed Mulich to explore what was unique (or not) about free men and women of African descent in the Leeward Islands.[2]
The last chapter focuses on the abolition of the slave trade. The Danish and British empires passed laws outlawing the trade in 1792 and 1807, respectively. Efforts to suppress the slave trade intensified after the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Mulich argues that a micro-regional perspective reveals the gaps between imperial policies and local practices since many administrators and merchants in the Leeward Islands circumvented decrees and decisions coming from Europe. This chapter also gives Mulich the opportunity to document the rise of British imperial influence in the region through slave trade treaties, mixed commission courts, and naval hegemony. Bans on international slave trade were not only inconsistently enforced, but they also did nothing to prevent “domestic” or inter-island slave trade, and enslaved people continued to be forcibly transported across islands.
By approaching major topics in economics, slavery, privateering, slave trading, and jurisdiction from a ground-level perspective, In the Sea of Empires emphasizes the importance of a regional lens to understand globalization and multiple intersecting networks. The book’s argument and methodology are convincing but I wish Mulich had explored how the Leeward Islands of the revolutionary era of the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century were different from other time periods. The era was indeed marked by political turmoil, conflict, and chaos but so were other periods in Caribbean history. The book argues that two deciding factors fueled the rise of British power in the region, mostly prize courts and free ports, but, as the book explains in great detail, few people on the Leeward Islands respected decisions and decrees coming from above. Free trade was indeed important but, as recent scholarship has shown, de facto free trade had long been practiced in the Caribbean and in the Americas more generally.[3] Did the “innovations” of the prize courts and free trade ports really affect these connections on the ground? Warfare was indeed rampant in the revolutionary era, but warfare had been a feature of Caribbean history for over two centuries. Seen from the perspective of the Leeward Islands, what was so special about the first age of global imperialism (to borrow C. A. Bayly’s expression to designate the 1760-1830 period)?
This well-crafted book will be of particular interest to people working on other micro-regions in the world. The book, and especially the introduction and conclusion, offers a theoretical framework of analysis around inter-imperial interactions that will lead to more fruitful historical exploration. In the Sea of Empires also opens up the possibility to trace more connections and networks between the Leeward Islands and other parts of the Caribbean and the Americas: links with the United States are well known with Alexander Hamilton and Denmark Vesey for instance, but more can be uncovered. Other scholars might be interested in placing the Leeward Islands in connection with the French and/or the Spanish Caribbean, Venezuela, and especially neighboring Haiti, which was the only free and independent country in the Caribbean. Mulich mentions fears around Haiti and especially the insurrections of the 1790s, but Haiti became a geopolitical player in the region in the early nineteenth century. The wonderful digitalization project by the Danish National Archives has made five million documents about the Danish West Indies available for free online: https://www.virgin-islands-history.org/en/. This amazing resource is sure to fuel our understanding of the place of the Leeward Islands in global history.
Notes
[1]. Agence France Presse, “Rocker Hallyday's first wife 'heartbroken' at Caribbean burial,” France 24, December 11, 2017.
[2]. Julius Scott, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution (London: Verso, 2018); Ale Pålsson, “Smugglers before the Swedish Throne: Political Activity of Free People of Color in Early Nineteenth-Century St Barthélemy,” Atlantic Studies 14, no. 3 (2017): 318-35; Michele Reid-Vazquez, “Caribbean-Atlantic Discourses of Race, Equality, and Humanity in the Age of Revolution,” Journal of Black Studies 50, no. 6 (2019): 507-27; John Garrison Marks, Black Freedom in the Age of Slavery: Race, Status, and Identity in the Urban Americas (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2020); Frederica Morelli, Free People of Color in the Spanish Atlantic: Race and Citizenship, 1780–1850 (New York: Routledge, 2020).
[3]. Jesse Cromwell, The Smugglers’ World: Illicit Trade and Atlantic Communities in Eighteenth-Century Venezuela (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018); Juan José Ponce Vázquez, Islanders and Empire: Smuggling and Political Defiance in Hispaniola, 1580–1690 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
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Citation:
Vanessa Mongey. Review of Mulich, Jeppe, In a Sea of Empires: Networks and Crossings in the Revolutionary Caribbean.
H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews.
September, 2021.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55809
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