Andrew J. O'Shaughnessy

THE FORMATION OF A COMMERCIAL LOBBY: THE WEST INDIA INTEREST, BRITISH COLONIAL POLICY AND THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

British colonial policy initiatives of the 1760s and the American revolutionary war led to a period of sustained lobbying by the West India interest in Britain; lobbying which developed from an informal body into a more professionally organized lobby, along the lines of modern economic interest groups. The composition of the lobby and its activities during the revolutionary period are examined here. Its considerable influence is also assessed and explained. The article finds that the lobby won major concessions from the British government and vitally affected British policy towards North America. It nevertheless concludes that the lobby enjoyed its greatest influence in the early century when ironically its organization was weaker but its goals coincided more harmoniously with those of British colonial policy. Its later reorganization was a response to the increasing conflicts of interest between the white elites of the British Caribbean and the mother country which intensified during the period of the American revolution and its aftermath.

Absentee Control of Sugar Plantations in the British West Indies

Abstract Based on slave labour, sugar plantations in the British West Indies were a source of considerable wealth for many of their owners. Many chose to return to Britain to enjoy their prosperity while still retaining their interests in the Caribbean. Using a wide range of published historical documents and literature, in addition to archival material held in Britain and the West Indies, this paper reviews the means by which the absentee proprietors attempted to maintain control of their distant possessions. Particular attention is paid to the Payne family of St. Kitts.

Military Genius?: The Generalship of George Washington

A plethora of recent biographies of George Washington include popular works by best-selling authors such as Ron Chernow and Joe Ellis, all part of a continued trend of writing on the Founding Fathers that was dubbed Founders’ Chic in 2001. Stephen Brumwell does not attempt to justify another addition to this corpus, but his book is different in its virtually exclusive focus upon the military career of Washington from the French and Indian War to the 1790s. With distinguished exceptions like those of Dave R. Palmer and Ed Lengel, there are remarkably few such studies. Brumwell is a specialist in military history who wrote a widely acclaimed earlier book on the Seven Years War, Redcoats: The British Soldier and War in the Americas, 1755–1763 (Cambridge, England, 2002). His book is one of the first by a British author on Washington since Marcus Cunliffe’s George Washington: Man and Monument (1959). Brumwell is now an independent writer whose military biography is written in an engaging narrative style and intended for a broad audience. He rarely makes overt authorial judgments on his subject with the exception of the period of Washington’s early command during the French and Indian War. Washington emerges as a very flawed junior commander in that war, but one who learned from his mistakes to become a successful leader during the American Revolution. Brumwell leaves the reader in no doubt that Washington exceeded orders and helped spark the war on the frontier that was the prelude to a general conflagration known in Europe as the Seven Years War. Although the precise sequence of events as to who fired first is open to question, Washington’s “own journal and likewise his reports to Dinwiddie, leave no doubt that he approached” a force of thirty French troops in a rocky glen “with hostile intent” (p. 54). The dozen or so who escaped him insisted that they were on a diplomatic mission. At Fort Necessity, Washington experienced a “humiliating defeat” motivated by the personal desire of Captain Louis Coulon de Villiers to revenge the death of his younger brother during Washington’s