CHAPTER 4
The Seven Years’ War in the West Indies
The Seven Years’ War in the West Indies was important in two ways, besides including the Caribbean in what is sometimes called the first global war. First, Britain’s capture of Canada, Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Havana threatened the cohesiveness of France’s New World empire. Although British negotiators refrained from a peace treaty that would allow George III to dominate the Caribbean, the war showed that London’s power in the region was as much commercial as military. French planters in Guadeloupe and Martinique, like their counterparts in Cuba, profited from the British occupation, while colonists in Saint-Domingue chafed under what they saw as an overly harsh wartime regime. The postwar history of Saint-Domingue was devoted to government reforms designed to strengthen colonists’ loyalty to the French Empire. Second, the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War marked the beginning of a period of prolonged economic prosperity in the plantation economies of Jamaica and Saint-Domingue. Planters were never more powerful than in the three decades following the Peace of Paris in 1763.
Nevertheless, colonists faced challenges from metropolitan authorities. London and Versailles recognized the importance of each colony to imperial prosperity and insisted that they could control sometimes recalcitrant colonists. In Jamaica, moreover, planters faced the most violent slave uprising that had ever occurred in the Caribbean to that date. Their reaction to that challenge was to establish a new racial regime on the island, as Chapter 5 explains.
After establishing their first Antillean colonies on the smaller islands of the eastern Caribbean in the 1620s and 1630s, Britain and France found footholds in the Spanish-dominated Greater Antilles several decades later. For the next century, the two nations tangled with each other in the western Caribbean in a series of intense but short-lived local conflicts, while building up their plantations and transforming their colonies into profitable but brutal slave societies. Conflict heated up in the 1740s, starting in 1744 when France entered an Anglo-Spanish conflict that had begun in 1739 (the War of Jenkins’s Ear), thereby joining it to the ongoing European War of the Austrian Succession. It is instructive to dwell a little on this conflict because it highlights, in its limited aims, how different the Seven Years’ War was from previous Caribbean wars. France began the war in 1744 with only twenty-seven ships of the line, compared to the British navy, which had seventy-seven ships of the line.1 This naval imbalance allowed England to attack Spanish ports in Peru and Chile and capture a Spanish treasure galleon in the Philippines.2 Despite its naval superiority, Britain gained no new Caribbean territory in this conflict, thus preserving the balance of power it had established with France and Spain in the 1650s. It captured Spanish Porto Bello in 1739 and made an abortive attack on Cartagena in 1741.3 But these conquests were relinquished at the peace, for the primary aim of these assaults had been to harass the Spanish, not to gain new territory. Significantly, in the War of Austrian Succession (1744–48) Britain did not attack France’s Caribbean colonies. This war’s major theaters were in North America, India, and Europe as British colonists did not want to gain new sugar lands, since expanding sugar production might reduce its overall price. Perhaps more important, Caribbean warfare was amazingly destructive of manpower. Even a short occupation, as in Cartagena in 1741, resulted in thousands of deaths of British regular and colonial troops, mostly from disease.4
Consequently, the only clamor for annexation of French and Spanish West Indian islands came from a couple of British newspapers unaware of the dread demography of the region. A correspondent in the Newcastle Courant wondered “whether Quebec, St. Augustine, the Havannah, St. Domingo, or the fortress of Martinico, be not of more importance to us” than land in Flanders.5 In any event, British statesmen were impervious to such calls for action. The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle of 1748, which ended the war, left Caribbean territory unchanged. Britain returned the fortress at Louisburg, in modern Nova Scotia, to France, which saw this installation as essential to its status as a maritime power.6 In return France withdrew from the Austrian Netherlands, an ideal staging ground for an invasion of Britain.7
The War of Austrian Succession illustrates how commercial shipping, more than naval combat, was 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
