The Plantation Machine. Trevor Burnard

at the heart of British/French rivalry in the Caribbean. During the conflict, in the years 1745–48, only seven French slave ships went to Saint-Domingue, unloading 1,741 Africans.⁸ Meanwhile, 109 British slave ships docked at Jamaica, carrying 29,786 slaves.⁹ In the 1740s conflict, unlike the Seven Years’ War, the French navy mounted an effective system of convoys between France and the Caribbean. But in 1747 the British learned how to intercept these expeditions, cutting Bordeaux colonial sugar imports in half in 1748.¹⁰ British naval superiority ensured that Jamaica’s average annual exports to Britain were more affected by drought than by the war, falling only 5 percent in value during the conflict. The island’s sugar exports actually increased slightly, from £311,680 per annum to £317,390 in the same period.¹¹

      The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 did not change French and British fears about each other’s intentions. British West Indians were especially concerned about Saint-Domingue’s growing prosperity. Admiral Edward Vernon proclaimed in Parliament that this expansion would soon lead to the French being in control of all the sugar islands.¹² Governor Edward Trelawny of Jamaica was especially fierce on the matter, declaring “unless French Hispaniola is ruined during the war, they will, upon a peace, ruin our sugar colonies by the quantity they will make and the low price they afford to sell it at.”¹³ Such thinking led to the last act of the war, a daring raid by Admiral Charles Knowles, supported by Trelawny, on the French fort of St. Louis, on Saint-Domingue’s southern coast.¹⁴ This was one of Saint-Domingue’s best defended harbors, but militia forces there laid down their arms after only eighty-five minutes of British cannon fire. Local indigo planters then concluded a massive sale to the attackers, transferring the dye onto British warships. Later, in Europe, Admiral Knowles signed and remitted a bill of exchange from St. Louis planters. To top it off, down the coast at Tiburon, the Jamaica governor, Trelawny, accepted planters’ invitation to come ashore for tea.¹⁵ As this anecdote suggests, French planters were more interested in trade than in war. That attitude would be a major theme in the Seven Years’ War, to the dismay of Versailles.

      The Seven Years’ War began deep in the North American interior. In the 1750s, financial exigencies and a lack of stable leadership in the Naval Ministry weakened France’s Indian alliances and claims over the territories south and west of the Saint Lawrence River.¹⁶ At the same time, the rapid population growth of British colonies like Pennsylvania and Virginia put new pressure on those claims. After Versailles began to build forts in the Ohio valley to strengthen its position, conflict broke out in July 1754 when a troop of French soldiers and Canadian militia defeated a militia unit commanded by Colonel George Washington in modern-day Pennsylvania. A more serious incident occurred a year later when French, Canadian, and Indian troops defeated General Edward Braddock on the Monongahela River.¹⁷

      These imperial disputes fed into a balance-of-power struggle in Europe, as Austria, with French and Russian backing, sought to defend itself from the growing power of Frederick II’s Prussia, allied with Britain. By the time war was formally declared on 15 May 1756, British and French navies had already clashed off the North American coast. In the autumn of 1755, the British captured hundreds of ships and thousands of French sailors.¹⁸ In spite of the fact that France had built 34 new ships of the line between 1749 and 1754, its navy was still far behind the British. In 1755 they had just 57 battleships and 31 cruisers compared to 117 and 74 respectively for the British. By 1760, the gap was even larger, with the British having 135 battleships and 115 cruisers compared to France’s 54 and 27.¹⁹ Moreover, France’s new ships, designed to accompany convoys, were lighter and with fewer guns than their counterparts.²⁰

      France survived the first half of the Seven Years’ War without disastrous losses in North America, largely because Britain did not devote enough troops or ships to the area. Versailles’s strategy was to use the overwhelming size of its European armies, now allied with Austria, to exert pressure on the British either through victories in the Austrian Netherlands, or in George II’s native Hanover. The West Indies became important only after William Pitt became Britain’s leading minister in late 1757. Of course, Britain had long noted with concern the growing wealth of the French sugar islands, especially Saint-Domingue. One correspondent of the Duke of Newcastle believed that “France was pushing for Universal Commerce” and that this push made him “more afraid … of French commerce than of French fleets and French armies.”²¹ The British were also concerned that the French colonists, in violation of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, had established themselves on St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Dominica, and Tobago, and “neutral” islands in the Lesser Antilles,²²

      As imperial tensions rose in North America in 1755, British and French Caribbean colonists had every reason to assume that they would be attacked. Jeremiah Meyler, a merchant in Savanna-la-Mar in western Jamaica, described how the threat of war “certainly has thrown things into confusion for the present & occasions people to desist from purchasing any quantity of sugar, rum &tc. the market being so uncertain.” Meyler’s partner, Robert Whatley, moved Meyler’s account books from Savanna la Mar to Kingston. He made copies of all the entries in case there was an invasion. Jamaican fears about invasion persisted during the war. When the French sent fleets into the Caribbean in 1756, 1757, 1759, and 1762, white Jamaicans were sure they were about to be invaded.²³ French colonists in Saint-Domingue experienced similar fears about possible British invasions. Their awareness of British naval superiority deepened their hostility and cynicism regarding the naval officers who governed their colony. After French ships lost a naval skirmish off Saint-Domingue’s northern coast in 1760, a critic of Saint-Domingue’s government wrote that “the poor navy, which furnishes us with officers who govern the colonies so well, is, they say, reduced to a very bad state. Happily … according to the accounts we have heard, there were few casualties. Thus, though we lack ships we still have officers and governors from this illustrious corps.”²⁴

      The war also disrupted trade. As Robert Stanton, a Kingston merchant, wrote to Henry Bright, in June 1757, “This damned wicked French war as it ’tis carried on will be the ruin of many, both planters and merchants, because no goods shipt from hence.” Stanton believed that no one could “bear the heavy charges of freight and insurance at the extravagant rate they now are.” The war also meant that trade with Spanish America, “by which means there was introduced a great deal of money, and large quantities of European goods taken off,” had virtually halted. At the same time it hindered the delivery of slaves to the island as ships that might have been sent from Bristol to Africa were instead turned into privateering vessels. Such complaints were carping, however, given what British American colonists in North America were being forced to deal with in the first two years of war, when the war went very badly for them.²⁵ Indeed, once the war turned in favor of the British, Jamaican merchants began to profit from the disruption of trade in the Caribbean. As British and Anglo-American privateers seized enemy ships, they brought them to West Indian ports, especially to Jamaica. By 1763–64, 123 former prize ships were noted as entering Jamaican ports and clearing customs. Of these, seventy-seven were registered in Jamaica. Thus, the war expanded the island’s commercial fleet, providing ships for Kingston merchants to use in regional trade.²⁶

      Before Pitt’s ascension to power in 1757, the British experience of the war was one dismal event after another, culminating in the capitulation of the Duke of Cumberland to the French at Klosterzeven on 8 September 1757. This defeat allowed Pitt to take control of the navy, army, and diplomatic corps, giving him close to total direction of the war. He immediately initiated what he called his “system,” a pragmatic, fluid mixture of strategies that allowed Britain to attack France where it was weakest—in North America, India, West Africa, and the West Indies—rather than where France was strongest—in Europe. Leaving the European war mainly to his Prussian ally, Frederick, he turned his attention to the imperial periphery, where for the rest of the war Britain fought most of its battles. It was a bold and original strategy, for no one prior to Pitt had seen the war as a means of attacking the sources of French wealth.²⁷ Neither were the French able to take advantage of Britain’s lack of focus before Pitt’s ascension. Until late 1758, when the Duc de Choiseul rose to power, the French war effort was bogged down by a Council of State whose ministers were divided over war aims, by generals who were unable to take advantage of their victories