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 in Germany, and by financial problems that prevented the navy from building a fleet as large as that of the British.28
Pitt’s first overseas victories came in West Africa in 1758 when expeditions seized French trade counters at Senegal and Gorée and on the River Gambia.29 Encouraged by this success, Pitt turned to the West Indies, where he hoped to knock out French power and destroy French colonial wealth. William Beckford, the London-based head of Jamaica’s most politically important family, urged him to take an ill-guarded Martinique. This easy conquest, Beckford argued, would acquire for Britain an island with slaves and property worth more than £4 million or 92.1 million livres. He exhorted Pitt: “For God’s sake, attempt it without delay.”30
The minister was well aware of other strategic reasons for such a campaign. Not only did France produce more sugar at cheaper prices than Britain, but in the struggle between the two empires geography and wind patterns favored the French. Privateers sailing out of Martinique posed a serious threat to Barbados, which had no capacity for a naval harbor. Antigua, which did have a British naval station, was downwind from both Martinique and Barbados, so its ships found it impossible to shut down French privateers.31 Attacking Martinique would strike a major blow at the privateers and at the French sugar industry. Pitt did not, however, intend to keep his West Indian conquests. As he saw it, Martinique would be an ideal chip with which to gain back the Mediterranean island of Minorca, which the French had taken from Britain in 1756.32
The French were keenly aware of their naval inferiority, but Britain’s 1759 campaign in the eastern Caribbean drove home a more unsettling realization: French planters would not sacrifice themselves or their property in order to repel a British attack. In the years following the Seven Years’ War, this insight had a profound effect on politics in Saint-Domingue, as Versailles sought to build imperial patriotism in its most valuable colony. It was the example of Guadeloupe and Martinique in 1759 and 1762 that created this reaction. On 12 November 1758, Pitt sent off a large force of nine thousand men in seventy-three ships to the West Indies. The expedition was hindered by the medical complications that European troops always faced in the Caribbean. Within a month of arrival in Barbados, disease had reduced the number of men fit for service to five thousand. Within another month this force had nearly halved again to just fewer than three thousand. The primary killer was, as always, yellow fever.33
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