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A Struggle for Empire: Resistance and Reform in the British Atlantic World, 1760-1778 The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Pellizzari, Peter. 2020. A Struggle for Empire: Resistance and Reform in the British Atlantic World, 1760-1778. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37365752 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA A Struggle for Empire: Resistance and Reform in the British Atlantic World, 1760-1778 A dissertation presented by Peter Pellizzari to The Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of History Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts May 2020 © 2020 Peter Pellizzari All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisors: Jane Kamensky and Jill Lepore Peter Pellizzari A Struggle for Empire: Resistance and Reform in the British Atlantic World, 1760-1778 Abstract The American Revolution not only marked the end of Britain’s control over thirteen rebellious colonies, but also the beginning of a division among subsequent historians that has long shaped our understanding of British America. Some historians have emphasized a continental approach and believe research should look west, toward the people that inhabited places outside the traditional “thirteen colonies” that would become the United States, such as the Gulf Coast or the Great Lakes region. In contrast, historians of the early Caribbean and the early modern British Empire have endorsed an Atlantic perspective that underlines the necessity of looking east, toward an imperial world governed by London officials and made up of Caribbean colonies worked by enslaved Africans. To date, however, little work has combined Britain’s North American and West Indian colonies into the same analytical frame to examine the Revolution along a north-south axis. This dissertation examines the interconnected worlds of Massachusetts, Jamaica, and London during the long decade between the Seven Years’ War (1756-63) and the outbreak of the American War of Independence (1775-78). Through a close reading of newspapers, personal letters, pamphlets, shipping lists, merchant business papers, official imperial correspondence, Parliamentary records, and slave testimonies, this dissertation uncovers the intertwined lives of merchants, planters, enslaved Africans, and imperial officials iii within the British Empire. I argue that the years before the Revolution are best understood as a unique interwar period within British imperial history, one that produced a great struggle for empire. This struggle was simultaneously a contest over imperial policy and the terms of Britishness, as well as a new, transformative phase in a multi-generational fight for freedom by the enslaved. Ultimately, my dissertation reveals the contested nature of politics and policymaking within geographically and demographically diverse empires, as well as the limits of colonial and enslaved resistance to imperial authority. iv Acknowledgements This dissertation would not exist without all the helpful comments, feedback, and conversations I had over the years with my main advisors, Jane Kamensky and Jill Lepore. Thank you for always setting such a high bar of excellence and pushing me to make my writing clearer, my arguments sharper, and my analysis stronger. Your kindness and compassion made research and writing this dissertation one of the greatest joys of my life. You have taught me how to think like an historian and I am forever grateful. I would also like to thank Vince Brown and Trevor Burnard for their dedication and intellectual generosity. Your insights into the history of slavery, the early Caribbean, and the early modern British empire shaped my thinking and writing in so many ways. I also want to thank all my friends and family for their constant support throughout this long process, especially my wonderful wife, Kaitlyn, who always believed in me, even when I didn’t believe in myself. This piece of work bears my name, but it has your fingerprints all over it. v Dedication To Kait, Always vi Table of Contents Abstract .................................................................................................................................... iii Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................................... v Dedication ................................................................................................................................. vi Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 1 Chapter 1 – Worlds Together (1760-1763) ................................................................................ 29 Chapter 2 – Worlds Apart (1764) .............................................................................................. 79 Chapter 3 – Reckoning (1765-1766)........................................................................................ 137 Chapter 4 – Crisis (1772-1774) ............................................................................................... 187 Chapter 5 – Unnatural Rebellion (1776-1778) ......................................................................... 238 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 288 Bibliography ........................................................................................................................... 300 Appendix 1 – Kingston Imports from North American Mainland Colonies (1752-69) ............. 321 Appendix 2 – Kingston Exports (1752-69) .............................................................................. 329 Appendix 3 – Impact of Seven Years’ War (All Locations) Kingston Import/Export Trade ..... 337 vii Introduction In 1763, Jamaica’s chief engineer, Thomas Craskell, collaborated with James Simpson, a local surveyor, to create a new, detailed map of Surry, a county located on the eastern side of the island. Commissioned by Henry Moore, the Governor of Jamaica, the map was one of three that the pair made, one for each of Jamaica’s counties. After squinting through the North-South sights on his circumferentor, Simpson staked a colored ranging rod in the distance and instructed laborers, likely enslaved Africans, to unfurl a chain of small metal links in a straight line. Meanwhile, under Craskell’s supervision, axmen hacked away any intervening trees or brush. When the chain ran taut, workers drove a pin through the end into the earth. One length. They then pulled the equipment forward and repeated the process until they reached the rod. Link by link, Simpson, Craskell, and their team carefully surveyed the Jamaican landscape, slowly binding the island in a network of chains.1 As Craskell and Simpson’s workers battled the hot and muggy Caribbean climate, British soldiers and imperial officials were engulfed in an empire-wide crisis. Indeed, the surveying took place during the Seven Years’ War, a period of intense global upheaval for the British. In North America and the Caribbean, the British struggled to defend their colonial interests from European rivals. At the same time he commissioned the maps, Governor Moore also directed island troops against a determined group of hundreds of enslaved men and women in Jamaica who had recently launched an insurgency campaign across the island. Fighting continued for 18 1 B.W. Higman, Jamaica Surveyed: Plantation Maps and Plans of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Barbados: University of the West Indies Press, 2001), 49-51; Hornsby, Surveyors of Empire: Samuel Holland, J.W.F. Des Barres, and the Making of the Atlantic Neptune (Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011). 1 months in what would prove to be the largest slave revolt the British empire had seen up to that date. From his mansion in Spanish Town, Moore sat on the frontline of both wars. After the slave rebellion was put down and the Seven Years’ War ended by the Treaty of Paris in 1763, Moore dedicated the map to George Grenville, the newly appointed Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer, in what was likely a gesture of good will. For the map was more than simply a guide to the island. It was also a diagram of imperial power. Moore’s gift came at a time when Grenville and Parliament had begun to rethink the organization and management of Britain’s colonial possessions. In the past, imperial officials had been comfortable exerting little administrative oversight over its American colonies, a style of control historians have called “salutary neglect.” Over the preceding decades, plans for reform had surfaced, but war with France continually impeded any large-scale change. After the Seven Years’ War, however, Parliament was pressed by the urgency of a swollen national debt and the difficulty of governing a newly expanded and demographically diverse empire. Grenville and his ministry decided that the existing imperial arrangement was inadequate in addressing these new problems. Reforms were needed. But what they should look like