Episode 9: The Sugar

 Worlds Turned Upside Down
Episode Nine: “The Sugar”

Written by Jim Ambuske
Published 7/27/2024

JIM AMBUSKE: This episode of Worlds Turned Upside Down is supported by the John Carter Brown Library, an independent research library located on the campus of Brown University.

AMBUSKE: This episode of Worlds Turned Upside Down is dedicated to Trevor Burnard, colleague, historian, mentor, and friend.  

AMBUSKE: By some accounts, Jamaica was a paradise. In the eighteenth century, more than one visitor to this crown jewel of British America fell for the island’s wonders. Charles Leslie, a colonist from the island of Barbados, marveled at a place that had, as he wrote, “too many Beauties, not to engage my Attention.” The island had “a thousand surprising Curiosities.” What he called “a sultry Sun” had blessed Jamaica “with Varieties few Countries can boast of.”

AMBUSKE: Rivers descended from the island’s mountainous interior to coastal plains filled with fertile soil. Everything seemed to be green. 

AMBUSKE: A look at Thomas Jeffrey’s map of The West Indies finds Jamaica alone among a sea of Spanish and French colonies. It lies south of Cuba and west of Saint-Domingue, part of the island of Hispaniola that would in time become the republic of Haiti. In 1655, the English conquered Jamaica as part of Oliver Cromwell’s bid to break Spanish power in the Caribbean and secure the island and its sugar fields for England and its growing American empire. 

AMBUSKE: On Jamaica’s southeast coast, merchant vessels arriving from Great Britain, West Africa, or mainland colonies like Rhode Island and Providence Plantations sailed past Port Royal, on their way into Kingston Harbor. Port Royal had once been Jamaica’s main port, but in 1692 a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami all but destroyed the city. 

AMBUSKE: The town of Kingston rose to take its place. By the late eighteenth century Kingston, together with the colony’s capital of Spanish Town had become a center of British society and culture for the white sugar planters who dominated the island. It was the fourth largest and the wealthiest city in British America. 

AMBUSKE: Many years – and a revolution later – a New Jersey-born British colonist named Maria Nugent rode on horseback to the top of a mountain and cast her gaze across the parish of St. Thomas-in-the-east. From atop the mountain, she beheld a view she described as “really charming.”

MARIA NUGENT: “In front you see a rich vale, full of sugar estates, the works of which look like so many little villages, and the soft bright green of the canes, from this height, seems like velvet.”

AMBUSKE: The distant sugar fields rippled in the breeze, almost like ocean waves in the calm before a storm.

NUGENT: “Plantain-Garden River runs through the whole, and loses itself in the sea, at the bottom of the vale.”

AMBUSKE: Within the “little villages” that Nugent spied from atop the mountain, enslaved West Africans labored under brutal conditions to make the sugar that was at the heart of the planters’ astounding wealth. The sound of the sea breeze was replaced by the crack of the whip, the grinding of gears, and fire.

AMBUSKE: On Jamaica, Barbados, Antigua, and other islands throughout the Caribbean, men called drivers drove organized gangs of enslaved laborers into the twelve-foot high sugar cane fields. During the harvest season, in February and March, the drivers kept watch as the enslaved used machetes to cut the crop in a relentless process that felled fields of sugar cane and broke enslaved bodies. 

AMBUSKE: In nearby mills, great machines powered by wind and water squeezed the juice from the harvested cane. The work often continued long into the night. The enslaved poured the juice into large copper cauldrons and boiled it over intense fires to remove most of the water, resulting in a scalding, viscous slurry that was sent to the curing house to cool and crystallize. Juice rendered from the curing process became molasses. Some of it was distilled into rum. 

AMBUSKE: Once the sugar dried and the molasses cooled, the enslaved packed them into great barrels called hogsheads and placed them aboard waiting ships. From there, ship captains and their crews sailed on ocean currents that carried them north to the mainland colonies, and on to Great Britain. British subjects on both sides of the Atlantic used the sugar to sweeten tea imported from India and China. 

AMBUSKE: In the New England colonies, some of the Caribbean molasses was distilled into rum, where it was loaded onto ships bound for West Africa. Ship captains from Providence or Boston used the rum and other trade goods to purchase more enslaved people from European and African slave traders, who congregated their captives at forts in the middle of rivers or along the African coast

AMBUSKE: Most of the enslaved men, women, and children headed for British America in this triangle trade were destined for the sugar colonies instead of the mainland. So great was the profit and demand for their labor, that sugar planters could easily afford to replace workers who had not survived the previous year.

AMBUSKE: When the planting season arrived in early summer, many of the newly purchased enslaved people were put to work manuring the fields and digging holes for new sugar cane. The work of turning sugar into molasses into rum into slaves began again. 

AMBUSKE: And so great was the sugar trade’s importance to the empire, that when King George III’s ministers began searching for new ways to alleviate the financial burden of defending British America in the years after the Seven Years’ War,  they looked west from London to the islands of sugar. 

AMBUSKE: I’m Jim Ambuske, and this is Worlds Turned Upside Down. A podcast about the history of the American Revolution. Episode 9: “The Sugar.”

AMBUSKE: In 1762, as the Seven Years’ War neared its end, Lord Bute, the soon to be former-prime minister of Great Britain, tasked Scottish lawyer John Campbell with championing the possibilities that awaited them in the Caribbean islands that France would soon cede to the British king.

AMBUSKE: With the stroke of a pen in the Treaty of Paris signed a year later, Dominica, Grenada, St. Vincent, and Tobago joined Jamaica, Antigua, Barbados, and the mainland colonies as part of Britain’s American Empire. 

AMBUSKE: In what Campbell called his, “Candid and impartial considerations on the nature of the sugar trade,” he outlined all the ways that British subjects benefited from the sugar islands.

AMBUSKE: British manufacturers made the tools, textiles, and other trade goods used to purchase and clothe enslaved West Africans, and the materials necessary to build sugar works and plantation homes. The mainland colonies supplied the islands with lumber and vital foodstuffs. Ships and their crews delivered goods and enslaved people to the islands, and carried away sugar and other commodities for delivery to the mainland or back to Britain.  

AMBUSKE: It was a vital part of the British Atlantic economy, one that touched all the king’s subjects and contributed to the common imperial good. From this vantage point, Campbell wrote:

JOHN CAMPBELL: “[W]e may from thence form a competent idea of the prodigious value of our sugar colonies, and a just conception of their immense importance to the grandeur and prosperity of this[,] their mother country, to whom from the circumstance of this relation, they pay without repining such prodigious tributes.” 

AMBUSKE: The immense wealth that flowed out of the sugar fields enriched planters, kept thousands of British subjects employed, factories in operation, and fields under cultivation. But the production of these “prodigious tributes” relied on the continued importation of hundreds of thousands of enslaved people, and a connection with the Mother Country that made the British West Indies at once a part of British America, and yet something very different. 

AMBUSKE: So, how did the British build plantation societies in the Caribbean? How did trade forge bonds between George III’s subjects on the sugar islands and those on the mainland? And why, in the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War, did the king’s ministers find the sugar trade in need of urgent reform?

AMBUSKE: To begin answering these questions, we’ll head first to islands like Antigua and Jamaica, to explore the places and people who generated the empire’s sugar wealth. We’ll then sail north, to colonies like Rhode Island, where mainland merchants played a central role in making the sugar trade possible. Before stepping ashore in London, where the king’s ministers struggled to resolve a vexing problem and counter a pernicious threat.

AMBUSKE: By the early 1760s, the British colonies in the Caribbean had become arguably the most economically important provinces in British America. 

MARY DRAPER: On the eve of the American Revolution, there were 26 British colonies. Now we know about the 13 that rebelled. But the majority of the other 13 were actually in the Caribbean where they were incredibly profitable sugar plantations.

AMBUSKE: That’s Mary Draper, an Associate Professor of History at Midwestern State University.

DRAPER: Barbados had been the most profitable sugar plantation in the 17th century. But in the 18th century, both Jamaica and Antigua were incredibly important colonies in the British Empire.

ANDREW O'SHAUGHNESSY: The British Caribbean was at its height by the end of the Seven Years War. My name is Andrew O’Shaughnessy. I'm Professor of History at the University of Virginia.  The 1760s would be a great period prosperity, they expanded during that war, Britain conquered what were called the Ceded Islands, Grenada, Dominica, and St Vincent. Grenada especially became the second most important of the sugar islands after Jamaica as a major producer of sugar. And they tended to be much more closely connected with Britain for a number of reasons. But one of the most fundamental is that they were economically dependent on Britain.

AMBUSKE: Like Thomas Pownall, the former governor of Massachusetts Bay who envisioned the British Empire as a kind of imperial solar system with Britain at its heart, the lawyer John Campbell argued that the sugar colonies were a key part of an interdependent system of trade designed to channel wealth to the Mother Country:

CAMPBELL: “As the inhabitants of the sugar colonies, are continual purchasers from such as are settled upon the continent of America, the amount of their purchases constitutes a balance from them in the favour of all those who dispose of them. But on the other hand, the inhabitants of the northern colonies, drawing large and constant supplies of commodities and manufactures from hence, we for the same reason have a like balance in our favour against them. It is evident therefore from this deduction, that by transferring the balance due to them, in satisfaction for that which is due from them to us, the whole accumulated profits of these transactions ultimately center with the inhabitants of Great Britain. Such are the certain, the perpetual, the prodigious benefits, that accrue to us from our Plantations.”

AMBUSKE: But building a “perpetual” empire in the Caribbean was a capital and labor intensive process. And despite the serene observations of colonists like Charles Leslie and Maria Nugent, white settlers, enslaved people, and free people of color had to contend with often harsh environments in the West Indies. The island of Antigua helps us to understand why. Here’s Mary Draper:

DRAPER: Antigua in the 18th century is really at its prime. You look at Antigua on a map, it looks like an inkblot. There are tons of tiny peninsulas that penetrate out into the Caribbean Sea. And as a result, there are tons of really great harbors, these harbors, ended up sheltering vessels that both participated in trade. But also, Antigua would be one of the first places that ships would stop and deliver news and the 18th century. And so Antigua became this very important note for communication. And so it was pretty well integrated with the Empire. It's part of a larger colony called the Leeward Islands, and that referred to the islands of Antigua, Barbuda, Montserrat, St. Kitts, Nevis, and then what we were now called the Virgin Islands. This region within the northern part of the Eastern Caribbean, would have been a region where people were really used to inter Island travel. Beyond that, Antigua is a particularly environmentally vulnerable place. People that lived in Antigua throughout the 1700s in the 1800s would have been very used to drought, and they would have been very used to hurricanes, and tiga was well known for being a drought prone island. There is no freshwater source and in tiga, there were a series of years where they did not receive adequate rainfall.

AMBUSKE: In the winter of 1774, a Scottish visitor named Janet Shaw reflected on Antigua’s fresh water problem as she walked through fields of sugar cane:

JANET SHAW: “We walked thro’ many cane pieces, as they term the fields of Sugar-canes, and saw different ages of it. This has been a remarkable fine season, and every body is in fine spirits with the prospect of the Crop of Sugar. You have no doubt heard that Antigua has no water, but what falls in rain; A dry season therefore proves destructive to the crops, as the canes require more moisture.”

DRAPER: People in Antigua had to figure out how to adapt to that environment. So they they created cisterns, they dug wells. At one point in the early 1700s. They actually created an inter-island water trade to facilitate the trade and fresh water from nearby islands where there were freshwater sources. So that, coupled with hurricanes made it into a very, very precarious place.

AMBUSKE: As Janet Shaw’s jaunt through the sugar fields suggests, Antiguans needed fresh  water, and lots of it, for themselves and for their crops.

DRAPER: In the 18th century, Antigua was a plantation society, and it was a slave society. So it was a Caribbean island where there was an enslaved majority. And the rhythms of everyday life would have been absolutely dictated by the plantation landscape by the planting seasons. So people would have been very attuned about when to plant sugar, and when to harvest that sugar. The landscape itself would have been dotted with sugar mills, sugar mills are essentially windmills. So if you were to visit Antigua, today, you would still see just tons of dilapidated windmills that would harness the wind to allow people to process sugar into the commodity that people would buy.

AMBUSKE: As important as Antigua was to the empire, by the early 1760s it paled in comparison to the island of Jamaica.

BROOKE NEWMAN: Jamaica was of critical importance to the British Empire in this period. It's the wealthiest colony, both in terms of its total wealth, but also in regards to the wealth of individual colonists who have a stake on the island.  My name is Brooke Newman. I'm an associate professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University. It is exporting more than half of all the sugar and 85% of the ROM that's being imported into Britain at the time. And it's also one of the world's top sugar producers, second only to the French island of Santa Ming. And I think this just knowing these bare economic facts, helps to in some ways, enable you to think about what this place must have been like because this is a place that is rooted in agricultural production and sugar production and mono cultural production.

TREVOR BURNARD: It's a place of extremes. Jamaica is an extraordinary place in the middle of the 18th century. It was a constant mind from which person derives its riches. That was one explanation of it. It was the jewel in the British crown. There's another one. Trevor Burnard, Wilberforce Professor of Slavery and Emancipation. Wilberforce Institute, University of Hull. I would think of very much as quintessential Atlantic place. The traditional way we think of the Atlantic is a movement of people things and ideas. And Jamaica fits into that very, very well. It's in the middle of the Caribbean ocean. So it's connected very much to Atlantic trade circuits. It gets its population from various parts of Africa, or from various parts of Britain, Scotland, a little bit of Irish, and certainly a lot of English people as well. So it's a very heterogeneous sort of place. It's also highly connected to North America. It's hugely connected with New England and Wales, Pennsylvania and New York. Because one of the mysteries that we always wondered is the growing population of those areas bought huge amounts of goods from Britain. How did they pay for them? Well, they paid from a provision, say, sent to Jamaica, so Jamaica relied for its food on New England and Pennsylvania relied on its people from well developed linkages with Africa. But Jamaica is an extraordinarily brutal place, extraordinary rich place, a very modern place as well. It's a place where the pursuit of money the pursuit of short term advantage is extreme, where religion counts for very little. It's where people black but also white people live in a very loose relationships. Families are always breaking up both due to mortality, but also be due to people moving on. It's a place of flux. It's a place of violence. It's a place of wealth. It's a place of extremes in all sorts of ways. So if you include Jamaica, as I think you should, as part of America, it's very much at the extreme.

NEWMAN: There are a couple of key cities Kingston and Spanish Town, there is a growing population of free people of African and mixed ancestry, and also people of Jewish ancestry living in these urban locations. But the bulk of the population is scattered around the island, and it is composed primarily of enslaved people working on these plantations of various sizes. So some of them are massive plantations and some of them are smaller, but that is where the bulk of the population is in Jamaica.

BURNARD: Jamaica would rank as perhaps one of the most inegalitarian place. It has whites who ate like porpoises and drank like cormorants. It has 10 to 15,000 white settlers, some of whom are extraordinarily rich, the rest of whom live reasonably well and who cultivate by the middle of the 18th century, a very strong sense that whiteness is everything. In other words, they live very high have extraordinary standards of living, extraordinary wealth, these many of them ate, drank fornicated like crazy, it has free people of color to occupy an ambivalent place in society. On the other hand, you have the majority of the population 150,000 enslaved people who lived on the verge of starvation, even on the best of time, were mistreated, died in large numbers, and were incredibly resentful and were African much more than other places. So it's a place of extreme.

AMBUSKE: The extreme nature of Jamaican society was by the early 1760s a reflection of the choices that Jamaicans and British officials made since the colony’s incorporation into the empire a century earlier. 

AMBUSKE: In 1655, when English soldiers and sailors conquered Spanish Jamaica, they did so at a chaotic moment in English history. After nearly a decade of civil war, the king was dead, England was a republic, and Parliament reigned supreme. 

AMBUSKE: By this point, Barbados and Antigua had been English colonies for over twenty years, and while mainland colonies like Virginia struggled to find their footing and develop cash crops like tobacco. Barbados was already the most prominent and wealthy English colony in the Caribbean. Enslaved people made up nearly half of the island’s population, producing the sugar that was rapidly becoming central to the empire’s prosperity. But Barbados was becoming overcrowded, with too few opportunities for newly arrived white settlers and indentured servants. 

AMBUSKE: In the same moment, Parliament, under the leadership of Oliver Cromwell, was keen to disrupt Spanish dominance in the Americas and establish a greater English presence in the Caribbean. As part of a plan called “The Western Design,” Parliament sent a fleet to capture the island of Hispanolia. The fleet stopped first at Barbados, where men from throughout the English islands hoping to partake in the spoils of war,, but disease wrought havoc on the English force. And in April 1655, the Spanish defenders on Hispanolia repulsed the would-be conquerors. 

AMBUSKE: What remained of the English fleet sailed to Jamaica, an island not insignificant to the Spanish, but one far less important to them than Cuba or Hispaniola. While enslaved Indigenous and African peoples labored for Spanish colonists on the island, Jamaica was more of a military outpost than it was a plantation society. The English captured the more weakly defended Jamaica in May, a consolation prize from a failed expedition that would soon pay enormous dividends. 

AMBUSKE: In the years immediately following the conquest, the English sought to replicate their success in Barbados in the new colony of Jamaica. England sent indentured servants, prisoners, and other free white colonists to Jamaica in an effort to build up the island’s population. Enslaved Africans were imported to work the growing number of sugar plantations, but the population of both grew slowly, kept in check by disease. 

AMBUSKE: By 1661, however, the political winds began to shift throughout the emp ire. The English Republic had collapsed. Parliament restored the monarchy and proclaimed Charles II, the son of the decapitated king, as the nation’s rightful sovereign. The return of the king had profound implications for English Jamaica, a colony struggling to realize its grand ambitions. Brooke Newman explains how:

NEWMAN: I was initially interested in primarily the development of slave society, in Jamaica, and ultimately, free people who try to achieve equal rights with white subjects. But I became fascinated by the constitutional history of Jamaica, and how slavery and subject hood and ideas about that and whiteness were all intertwined. And I think Jamaica is a great case study because it was a conquered colony. And because it was conquered from the Spanish, the people who lived on the island who migrated there, they didn't have according to various legal principles at the time, any kind of inherent claim to the rights of English subjects.

AMBUSKE: In that sense, Jamaica was very different from contemporary mainland colonies like Virginia or Massachusetts Bay. They had been settled under corporate charters granted by the crown in the early seventeenth century. Those charters conferred the same English rights on settlers and their descendants as if they had been born in England. That was not the case for conquered colonies like Jamaica.

NEWMAN: But Charles II as incoming King issued a proclamation in 1661, in order to attract settlers to this island, and it says, quote, that all children of any of our natural born subjects of England to be born in Jamaica shall have and I'm paraphrasing a little bit here at the same privileges as our freeborn subjects of England. This was regarded as the foundational Charter, which guaranteed the inherited rights of English subjects to Jamaican colonists and their children. And I think it's worth explaining for a minute, you know, what were these rights that they believe that they had, and that were so critical to being English and ultimately British. First, it was the right to representative government, and the power to legislate over local affairs, the right to due process and trial by jury, the right to vote and hold office subject to religious and property qualifications. And then the right and this was something they were very keen upon the right to buy, inherit and bequeath property, in land, in livestock, in slaves in all sorts of different things. And these rights were rights that they held very dear, but also which they believed. And then I'm talking specifically about white Jamaicans and particularly colonial authorities in Jamaica, that having these rights, gave them the same voice or should, as people who were born in what they would call the mother country and raise their and living there. And it was a way of essentially identifying as English and claiming the rights of subject hood, in a place where they were a minority of the population, and where the minority was getting smaller and smaller, over the decades.

AMBUSKE: As the minority white population continued to shrink relative to a growing enslaved population, the boundaries of subject hood became somewhat clearer.

NEWMAN: At the same time as they are in this island and trying to claim English subjecthood, it's becoming increasingly associated with whiteness, because the whiteness is the key to having all of these rights. None of these rights apply to enslaved people. And none of these rights apply to people who are not Protestant, who are not fitting the characteristics of what a subject should be a natural born subject. So they start to define people who are outside of the parameters, people who are African descent, people who are Jewish, free blacks, and also Catholics in the beginning Quakers, they want to prevent the majority of the population from having rights and from claiming this subject hood that they hold to be incredibly precious. But they also see it as a protection of both their personal rights but also their property rights.

AMBUSKE: The king’s proclamation led to the creation of a legislative assembly and the development of a political society that in many ways mirrored the mainland colonies. And with English rights and liberties guaranteed to certain kinds of white settlers and their property, increasing numbers of migrants from Britain and Ireland sought out new opportunities in Jamaica. 

AMBUSKE: And as Mary Draper explains, few things attracted aspiring white planters, merchants, and overseers to the British West Indies more than:

DRAPER: The prospect of incredible wealth. If you were to take the wealthiest people in all of British America, most of them would have lived in the Caribbean or been absentee planters with ties to the Caribbean. Someone had migrated from Great Britain to continental North America, they could make a decent living working as a merchant or working as an overseer enter a tobacco plantation or on a rice plantation. But the wealth that they could attain from those professions was nothing compared to the wealthy might possibly be able to attain from migrating to the Caribbean and working in the realm of sugar. So most overseers were the second signs the other family members of wealthier families in the Atlantic world who wanted to see if they could improve their lot in life. They would migrate places and oftentimes they are men on the makes that wanted to see if they could ascend the socio economic ladder. And so working as an overseer on a sugar plantation in the eyes of many would have been one way to maybe use whatever profits a person made, and launch a sugar plantation right acquire land.

AMBUSKE: On some islands, wealth and the transient nature of white society gave rise to a class of absentee planters who forged crucial links with Great Britain.  Wealth from the West Indies enabled such planters to buy extensive property and fund significant business ventures in places like London, Glasgow, and the Scottish Highlands. Here’s Andrew O’Shaughnessy:

O'SHAUGHNESSY: You have quite high absenteeism, especially in the Leeward Islands in St. Kitts. A lot of the major estates were owned by people that lived in England. Part of it was they just made so much money, they could actually afford to go and live in style in England. And you see a similar development in South Carolina from the 1750s. There's a lot of similarity incidentally, between South Carolina and the islands, that sort of culture and mentality the period not least because South Carolina was originally set up by Barbadians people from the island of Barbados, that the islands did not develop schools or colleges, unlike the Spanish islands, and even the French to be educated really either to get a British tutor to the plantation, or to actually go to England. And one of the things I did was a chart showing just the proportion of people in the assembly something like antique and more than half the people can be positively identified. And given that these lists of varying complete one suspects, the proportion was actually higher. A lots of them had been to places like Oxford and Cambridge schools like Eton. And that was due to their fabulous wealth.

AMBUSKE: Absenteeism and frequent white migration can make it difficult to imagine a colony like Jamaica as a settler society, but as Trevor Burnard argues, we should see it as one.

BURNARD: I would call it a settler society. It's just a different type of settler society. We don't have to have New England as the model of settler societies, even if many of them don't survive, even if the leading elite usually at only two or three generations in there. It doesn't have as much absenteeism as people think. But it does have people moving back to Britain, people who go there, from Britain, many of them are Scots from Lowland areas, many of them come from the south east, often from London, those sorts of areas as well, they tend to be a little bit of higher social status than some of the people going to North America. But they're people on the main, they're willing to take risks. And they go there for a couple of reasons. They go there, I think, to make money, but they also go there for a chance of a certain type of freedom. They don't need to drink, they don't need to fornicator going there to make money. They're going there to have fun. They see themselves as an extraordinary hospitable people. But it's not for everybody.

AMBUSKE: The exponential growth of sugar production in eighteenth-century Jamaica offers us some insight into the growing consumer demand for the sugar, molasses, and rum, the labor required to produce it, and the wealth it could create.

AMBUSKE: In 1739, there were 419 estates on the island. By the mid-1770s, that number had grown to 775 estates as the British brought more land under cultivation. Over roughly the same period of time, sugar output in Jamaica increased from 10,000 tons to 50,000 tons.

AMBUSKE: What did this mean in terms of wealth?

BURNARD: We're talking very large wealth. The wealthiest people in Jamaica, the Great Transatlantic merchants like Thomas Hibbert, the greatest slave trade of the period, people like Simon Taylor, a great planter. They have wealth, which would put them in the range of the senior aristocratic in Britain, or the wealthiest merchants. To put it into context and 1774. The richest man in British America dies with an inventory of £36,000 pounds. That's Peter Manigault, South Carolina. The wealthiest person in Jamaica dying in that year has an estate of about five times as much. At the very top levels, you're looking at people around 700 to 1000 enslaved people, wealth of £200,000. And the average white was also pretty well off as well. He Thomas, this will came from nothing, lived in Jamaica for quite a long time died worth about £3000 pounds, that wouldn't put him anywhere near the top ranks of Jamaican wealth. That means that he would be pretty wealthy by New England standards. We think of it as sugar plantations, but it has the fourth largest town and British America and easily the wealthiest town, it would be several times wealthier than Boston, probably Boston, New York and Philadelphia combined, wouldn't reach the wealth that Kingston had. So the average wealth of a white Jamaican is probably about £1500 pounds. The average wealth of a New Englander is about £48 pounds, you know, that sort of says something about the differences and of course, the wealth is very much concentrated at the top end.

AMBUSKE: Simon Taylor was the beneficiary of the rights, liberties, and wealth that the British were building in Jamaica. Taylor was born in Kingston in 1739 to Martha, the daughter of a wealthy planter, and Patrick, an emigrant Scot. When Patrick died in 1754, his first-born son inherited an estate valued at £50,000, nearly 1,000 acres of land in the Parish of St. Thomas-in-the-east, and numerous enslaved people. Over the next 30 years, Simon built a transatlantic sugar empire that spanned three plantations, a merchant business, other properties, and hundreds of enslaved laborers.

AMBUSKE: Here’s Brooke Newman.

NEWMAN: The economic success of Jamaica came at this really brutal price. This was to some extent, a cosmopolitan place with many different people different languages, but at the same time, a place that was 90% enslaved that was majority black that had a very small minority of white settlers who were exercising control over this very large enslaved population.

DRAPER: Sugar plantations are known to be very deadly sites of slavery. Of all of the plantations in the Atlantic world and you have plantations that produce cotton, you have plantations that produce rice, the plantations that produce sugar, were the plantations with the deadliest conditions for enslaved people.

BURNARD: Very few people ever grow up thinking I like to be sugar worker. And there's a reason for that is that it's just very difficult. You have a combination of very hard physical labor, great danger with sharp knives with boiling houses, and the necessity to do things at speed. At the same time, you have to work in sugars in gangs, so you don't have much individual incentive. And you're working in the middle of the sun as well. And British people had a myth, Americans do as well, that somehow rather Africans are suited to hot weather. They don't mind working in very hot weather doing very hard for work, all the demographic evidences against that, which is that it was just a terribly onerous form of work. And most classes, whether they be the individual planters or the overseers that they use to control slaves, but mostly concerned about getting as big a harvest as quickly as they can. And so slave welfare was very far down the list. If you wanted to choose what you wanted to do in the 18th century, being a sugar worker on a Jamaican the state would be bad as bad a job as you could get.

AMBUSKE: Enslaved people throughout the Atlantic world enjoyed no rights, no legal control over their own bodies, nor over those of their families, and lived with the fear of being sold at any moment. In these respects, there was no difference between the lives of enslaved people on the mainland and those in the Caribbean. The vicious nature of sugar work and the Caribbean environment, however, resulted in some key distinctions between plantation societies in British America. 

AMBUSKE: By the mid-eighteenth century, in the comparatively healthier environments of tobacco-growing Maryland and Virginia and rice-producing South Carolina, local enslaved populations were reproducing at rates that reduced those colonies’ reliance on the transatlantic slave trade. The same could not be said for the sugar growing colonies in the Caribbean. 

BURNARD: Jamaica relied on the transatlantic slave trade. They didn't say this, but this is what they thought there was a very crude idea that you buy rather than breed. They were not interested in having children. They were just a nuisance and they die anyway, women were used as a frontline and making sugar, destroying their health, all those sort of things, which means that four to 5%, perhaps in the 17th century 3% in the 18th century, of enslaved people died every year, and sometimes more than that, say always needed the slave trade. When it comes to the 1760s. I think something which is often not considered is that Virginia and South Carolina had freedom of action in terms relation to person. Places like Jamaica did not do because they didn't require the slave trade in order to maintain the plantation system.

AMBUSKE: Population numbers reveal the scale of Jamaica’s deadly connection to the transatlantic slave trade. In 1746, the island’s enslaved population was about 130,000 people. By 1805, that number had grown to 325,000. 

AMBUSKE: But over that same period of time, more than 610,000 enslaved people were imported into the colony.

AMBUSKE: The majority of the enslaved people came from West Africa, including the Bight of Biafra, the Gold Coast in what is now Ghana, and the Bight of Benin, in the Gulf of Guiana. The British referred to the peoples who came from the Gold Coast as “Coromantees,” a designation that obscures the many peoples and the many languages they spoke, but one that the British would associate with their military prowess both in West Africa and Jamaica.   

AMBUSKE: Jamaican planters relied heavily on British merchants on both sides of the Atlantic to feed their continued need for enslaved people. Rhode Island merchants were among the most prominent. 

AMBUSKE: Abby Chandler, an Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, notes how:

ABBY CHANDLER: Rhode Island is a colony that is deeply tied to the British slave trade. Rhode Island is a very maritime oriented colony. There, right there on Narragansett Island. You have a number of Rhode Island sea captains who become involved with the transport of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean. But you also have Rhode Island merchants who are involved in the transport, but who also own sugar plantations in the Caribbean transporting enslaved Africans across the ocean using their labor to grow sugar, which is then getting transported in those same ships up to Rhode Island where it's made into rum, which is then traded for enslaved people. And so that cycle goes around and around and around.

AMBUSKE: British American merchants supplied the Caribbean colonies and their enslaved populations in two critical ways. On the one hand, the intensive investment in sugar production, and the desire to bring every available acre under cultivation, meant that islanders had great need for North American provisions.

O'SHAUGHNESSY: The islands really depended a lot on North American food and supplies. Some of these smaller islands like St. Kitts used every square acre of ground to grow sugar if they could, and grew very few provisions.

DRAPER: They would have traded for foodstuffs, especially salted cod, they would have also traded for lumber because oftentimes Caribbean islands were not necessarily completely denuded, but significantly denuded of tree cover because those trees were used to fuel the fire to process sugar cane.

O'SHAUGHNESSY: Even some of the housing. I was amazed to discover that they had the equivalent of prefab houses ready made constructed kits that could be imported from America during the colonial period to the islands, so they're dependent on America in some ways.

AMBUSKE: British American merchant ships also transported enslaved people directly from West Africa to the Caribbean. 

AMBUSKE: In Rhode Island, merchants like William and Samuel Vernon sponsored slaving voyages, as did Nicholas Brown and Company of Providence. 

AMBUSKE: A 1764 slaving voyage outfitted by Brown and Company reveals how this trade was supposed to work and what could go wrong. 

AMBUSKE: When Brown and Company organized the voyage of the ship Sally, it had been five years since the firm last sponsored an expedition to West Africa. In 1764, however, a post-war depression plagued the Atlantic economy. In need of capital, Nicholas Brown and his brothers believed that a slaving voyage was a good option to improve the company’s fortunes. And the market for enslaved people in the Caribbean remained strong.  

AMBUSKE: In September, the Sally departed Rhode Island for Africa under the command of Esek Hopkins. The ship’s inventory lists the variety of items that Hopkins and his crew would use to purchase a cargo of enslaved people, among them 1,800 bunches of onions, 30 boxes of whale oil candles, 40 barrels of beef and pork, and over 17,000 gallons of New England-made rum. 

AMBUSKE: The Sally arrived on the African coast two months later only to find sizable competition from other merchant vessels, including many from Rhode Island. That November, Hopkins purchased an African boy and girl from another slave ship for a barrel of flour and 156 gallons of rum. 

AMBUSKE: In early December the Sally, dropped anchor off a small island in the Gambia River. The island sits in the middle of the river, fifteenth or so miles from its mouth, in what is now the West African nation of Gambia. More than a century before the Sally's arrival, the English had captured the island from their Dutch rivals. The conquerors renamed it James Island, after James, the Duke of York, and gave the future king’s name to the fort on the island as well. 

AMBUSKE: There, Hopkins purchased another 13 enslaved people from the governor of the British fort for 1,200 gallons of rum and other supplies. 

AMBUSKE: But the competition from other merchants complicated his ability to purchase a full cargo of enslaved people. The voyage was not going as he or his employers had hoped. The Sally remained off the African coast for nine months, taking on enslaved people and keeping them captive aboard ship, before departing for the Caribbean on August 20, 1765. By then, Hopkins had purchased 196 Africans, but the ship left with only 155 aboard. Nineteen had already died aboard the ship. Hopkins left another woman near death behind, and he sold 21 to other traders. 

AMBUSKE: Eight days later, on August 28th, someone wrote a very brief entry in the ship’s account book:

ESEK HOPKINS: "Slaves Rose on us was obliged fire on them and Destroyed 8."

AMBUSKE: Hopkins and his crew suppressed the insurrection, killing eight Africans. Two more later died from their wounds. In the wake of the failed uprising, Hopkins later reported that some of the surviving Africans lost all hope:

HOPKINS: "Some Drowned them Selves Some Starved and Others Sickened & Dyed."

AMBUSKE: By the time the Sally arrived in Antigua seven weeks later, 68 captive Africans had died on the voyage. Another 20 perished after the ship put into port. On November 16th, the weakened survivors were auctioned off at very low prices.

AMBUSKE: For Nicholas Brown and Company, the voyage of the Sally was a financial failure. Most, but not all of the Brown brothers, chose not to sponsor another slave trading expedition to West Africa, but they continued to invest in the production of rum and the provision trade to the Caribbean. 

AMBUSKE: Yet, the tragedy on the Sally points to something that ship captains and plantation masters feared was ever present: the possibility of slave insurrections. And in the West Indies, where enslaved people vastly outnumbered white settlers, British colonists sought ways to control their captive populations to prevent the next uprising. This included a significant reliance on British troops. Andrew O’Shaughnessy explains:

O'SHAUGHNESSY: One of the consequences that in some cases 90% of the population being black in some of these islands. That the whites really weren't quite fearful of rebellion from the 1730s. Both Jamaica and Antigua started paying almost the equivalent of doubling the salary of the troops in the islands, they pay a subsidy to have the troops there. And in Antigua, it's a result of a slave conspiracy in 1736 still debated how much truth there was turd but it was very real to people at the time. And in Jamaica, it was due to a maroon war. These were runaway slaves had gone to the interior of the island and most mountainous parts and had become separate societies. In the 1730s, the British fought the war against Moroons but they did not completely win it. It was a truce.

AMBUSKE: The Maroons who waged war against the British in Jamaica were the descendants of enslaved people who had fled into the island’s mountainous interior decades earlier. More recently escaped enslaved people found refuge in the Maroon communities as well. In response to Maroon raids on British plantations, British troops began attacking Maroon settlements in hopes of destroying them and establishing control over the island’s interior. 

AMBUSKE: The Maroons offered fierce resistance. Over the course of the 1730s, the Maroons and their British enemies fought a protracted war that ended in a stalemate. In 1739, the British signed treaties with the Maroons that recognized their autonomy in the interior. In exchange for their independence, the Maroons agreed to assist the British in capturing escaped slaves, and join with British forces to repel foreign invasions. 

AMBUSKE: The end of the Maroon War ushered in an era of relative stability in Jamaica. 

AMBUSKE: It didn’t last.

BURANRD: 1760 out of nowhere, a slave revolt occurs in several parts of Jamaica all at the same time.

AMBUSKE: When Tacky’s Revolt erupted on April 7, 1760, it did so at the same moment that British troops were battling Cherokee warriors in the Carolina backcountry, and fighting European forces across the Atlantic. The revolt is mostly commonly known as Tacky’s Revolt. It involved enslaved people in St. Mary’s Parish in the east and Westmoreland Parish in the west. Coromantees were among them. 

BURANRD: It's called Tacky’s Revolt. He was lieutenant rather than the major person the major person has this extraordinary site called Wager or Apongo, who was rumored to have been a prince in Guinea and a military leader. He conducts this in slave revolt with several plantations raised up at the same time. It's an extraordinarily dangerous moment for Jamaica.

NEWMAN: Tacky’s Revolt occur strategically during the Seven Years' War, because enslaved people are very savvy. They recognize that there are all these disruptions going on and they tend to pay attention to the movement of ships to different ports. They know when the island is particularly vulnerable. The massive rebellion that occurred in 1760, which lasted about a year involved around 1500 enslaved people, over 500 of them died and over 60 whites and this at the time was the most violent slave revolt to occur in either the French or the British Caribbean before the Haitian Revolution.

AMBUSKE: Apongo, who led the revolt in western Jamaica, had been a military leader in West Africa before he was captured and enslaved in the 1740s. He became the property of Captain Arthur Forrest, who gave Apongo the English name “Wager” after his ship, the HMS Wager. Forrest owned a plantation in Westmoreland Parish.

BURNARD: Wager wants to as far as we know, to create an African kingdom in the New World, and it gets very close to succeeding. He doesn't kill that many white people but he destroys lots of plantations and took maximum force and maximum luck by that man from Jamaican to put it down.

AMBUSKE: Tacky, who led the rebellion in St. Mary’s Parish, was killed within days of the uprising. Apongo was captured in July. He was hung in chains while awaiting execution, but he died before it could be carried out. Despite their deaths, the revolt continued until October 1761. By then a combination of British regulars, Jamaican militia, and Maroon forces finally managed to suppress it. 

AMBUSKE: Tacky’s Revolt had far reaching repercussions for Jamaica’s enslaved population.

BURNARD: The people putting down the revolt were mostly concerned with showing an example to other slaves by killing enslaved people as grisly a fashion as they could. The Jamaicans tightened up their slave system, they made security important they brought British troops over, they gave support to slave owners.

AMBUSKE: White Jamaicans had always used fear as a means to control their enslaved people. After Tacky’s Revolt, slavery in Jamaica became even more oppressive. White settlers used fear to great effect.

BURNARD: They use fear as a weapon. They create fear among their enslaved people by acting arbitrarily, which is not to say that they didn't get terrified themselves, the ratio of whites to blacks was one to 10 and rural areas could be one to 15. Many of these enslaved people had military experience, many of them were armed. If it didn't have guns, they had machetes if it didn't have those they had fire, which could burn down the thing. So they lived in a state of war. So you can see that in their houses, and you see lots of plantation houses at least before the 1760s or so, which looked like castles, and armed against their enslaved people. But I would emphasize very much that these are people who were naturally afraid. I mean, if you are a fearful person, you didn't go to Jamaica, just look at the portraits they have. They got their hands on their hips, in a typical sort of male thrusting out aggressive sort of style, their confidence and their ability to command themselves, command other people's they use violence against themselves. They're prepared to be violent, and to use violence, because they know that violence might be used against them, and so they create a workforce which is terrified of what might happen to them. If you're a woman, you're terrified not only a physical violence but of sexual coercion. If you're a man, you're likely to get whipped for a little bit of an infraction. And if you engage in such things as rebellion, they'll kill you and your family in the most grotesque ways.

AMBUSKE: For white Jamaicans, the revolt also led to a greater reckoning of what defined whiteness itself, and all the rights and liberties that came with claims to that racial status. Since the English conquest of Jamaica the previous century, whiteness in Jamaica had been the subject of constant debate and negotiation in Jamaica society and in the colonial assembly.

NEWMAN: The reason they eventually set up this really interesting system where they're defining and then redefining who is white and who is not. And who was eligible for the rights of English subjects and who was not on the basis of hereditary descent is because there is a small but increasingly vocal population of for Many people have mixed ancestry, who have fathers who are white, and who are either English or Scottish primarily. And they have decided to leave certain property to their offspring, even though their offspring are illicit and illegitimate. And even though in many cases, they're enslaved, and so they will sometimes free their offspring, and then give them property, give them land, and sometimes even slaves, or we'll send them back to Britain to be educated. And there is simply record where they discuss this, they actually sit down in multiple situations. And they talk about essentially, the drawbacks, and the benefits of privileging because that's how they see it, privileging the illicit offspring of these illicit, and or coerce sexual relationships between white men, and enslaved women. And of course, it's never the reverse. It's never white women and enslaved men, the progeny from those relationships, obviously, are off the table in this imagined world where they are deciding who is white and who is not. And essentially making up racial categories as they go. They'll have conversations where they'll say, Well, if x number of generations pass, then someone can be declared legally white. And then we'll just sort of fold them in to the planter elite, and they'll be on our side. And that helps bolster the dwindling white population against the enslaved population. But let's say they're not legally white yet. And they haven't gone through this laundering system of multiple generations. But they are close, and they have connections to the white elite establishment and they have wealth and they have money, then they can petition for a private bill to be passed in their favor, and then be declared legally white. And so they set up a system. In short, that gives them complete control over race, and racial categories, and the rights and privileges associated with those racial categories. What it really indicates, is substantial control on the part of colonial authorities to decide who is deserving and who isn't. have titles, property, land, wealth, and all of the trappings of whiteness, the ability to vote, the ability to hold property and not have it subject to any kind of qualifications, the ability to run for office, this is not something that even if you were a free black of substance that you could ever hope to achieve. If you didn't have connections, blood connections to members of the white elite.

AMBUSKE: The shock of Tacky’s Revolt injected a renewed sense of urgency into these debates.

NEWMAN: The assembly immediately became convinced that mixed race people in particular had too much wealth, and would attain political power unless they were subject to some kind of restriction, and that if they ever attained political power, they would side with slaves. And this would lead to a collapse of the slave system, and most importantly, at the time would drive away potential white settlers. So they see a connection between revolution on the part of enslaved people and the growing community of free people of color who are acquiring property who are trying to push for equal rights with white subjects and they see it all as connected and not as separate. And so they pass an act to prevent descendants of slaves from inheriting bequeathing, or purchasing property in excess of £2000 pounds. The goal of this act is that people who are descended from slaves can only have certain amount of property, and they can only inherit a certain mount of property and if they're going to have more than that they have to petition the Assembly for approval. So after Tacky's Revolt, it is much harder for someone of African and mixed descent to acquire land, to bequeath land to someone else or any other kind of property to inherit property without subject to any kind of qualifications, or to have any life that is independent of control from the Jamaican authorities. They need to know where people are at. They want them to register. They want to know where they live, who they live with. The tax records at the time also revealed that they kept track of people's race.

AMBUSKE: Tacky’s Revolt was a massive shock to white Jamaicans’ sense of place in the empire. It made their dependence on the transatlantic slave trade all the more evident as it did the vulnerabilities of living in a slave society and the threat to their lucrative sugar plantations. 

AMBUSKE: In London, George III’s ministers were also all too aware of sugar’s importance to the empire and how disruptions to the trade could undermine the common imperial good. A powerful West Indian lobby, including colonial agents, London merchants, absentee planters living in Britain, and Members of Parliament with interests in the Caribbean reminded the government of that fact with frequent regularity.

AMBUSKE: And in 1763 the government, now led by Prime Minister George Grenville, envisioned sugar as a key means of solving two very difficult imperial puzzles.

AMBUSKE: As the Seven Years’ War drew to a close, the British government began to confront a massive national debt in excess of £130,000,000. Much of that money had been borrowed to win the war. The interest on the debt alone consumed unsustainable levels of what revenue flowed into the Treasury from customs duties, excise taxes, and other sources. Grenville’s predecessor, Lord Bute, had supported an excise tax on domestic British cyder production in 1762, but the unpopularity of that tax, and the protests against it, helped to drive Bute from office. 

AMBUSKE: The expansion of the empire itself placed additional burdens on the treasury. To enforce the Proclamation Line and keep the peace in the North American backcountry, the government stationed 10,000 British troops in the mainland colonies. That directive appeared wise given the outbreak of Pontiac’s War in May 1763, yet it would cost a further £225,000 per year to sustain this army.* 

AMBUSKE: Grenville, and other British officials like Charles Townsend, and the Earl of Halifax, believed that Parliament ought to take a more direct role in governing and regulating British America. In their view,  the colonists themselves ought to bear some of the financial burden of administering and defending an empire from which they derived so much benefit. 

AMBUSKE: The impending expiration of a thirty-year old law in 1763 opened a remarkably convenient window of opportunity. 

AMBUSKE: In 1733, Parliament passed the Molasses Act. Jon Kukla, a historian of early America, explains the act’s intent:

JON KUKLA: The original Act of 1733 had imposed a six pence per pound tax on sugar coming from French sugar Islands, which was a high enough tax that it basically made the cost of French sugar so expensive to protect the British sugar manufacturers in the Caribbean, and keep the French out of it.

AMBUSKE: Although Jamaica was the most productive of the British sugar islands, the French colony of Saint Domangue was even more so. Here’s Andrew O’Shaughnessy:

O'SHAUGHNESSY: The French could undersell the British, even in refined sugar by about 15% and sometimes higher percent.

KUKLA: Now the trouble is, when you've got that much of a discrepancy, it was easy for smugglers to bribe somebody for a penny or two A pound of sugar, evade the legal tax, and then smuggle this stuff to New England.

O'SHAUGHNESSY: And that meant that the planters and merchants in the British Caribbean were really keen on these acts which protected them from external competition.

AMBUSKE: Prime Minister Grenville believed that a new sugar act, one which imposed a lower duty on sugar and provided for more robust enforcement, would bring in much needed revenue to defray the costs of empire, reduce smuggling, and protect Britain’s lucrative sugar industry.

KUKLA: Everybody who looked very closely at the workings of the Act, as they were considering its renewal in the early 70s 60s, recognized that the ideal level of taxation would be two pence per pound because at that point, it's easier for a merchant to pay the tax than it is to risk having his ship and commodities captured in the act of smuggling. Well, Parliament wasn't quite ready to go that far, in part because the British sugar islands had quite a strong lobby and a number of members of parliament. They settled on three pence a pound rather than two pence a pound. And as a result, there was some smuggling that continued, but it was a step in the right direction.

M3 AMBUSKE: The new Sugar Act of 1764 received royal assent in April. Some minor protests broke out in British America over the new law, most especially in the New England colonies. The act put merchants in an awkward position. They feared that its lower duty on sugar and its stricter enforcement would compel them to pay higher prices for British sugar than what they might otherwise get by smuggling French sugar. Driving the French out of the market was, of course, one of the goals of the act. 

AMBUSKE: Rhode Island merchants wrote a remonstrance against the Sugar Act, claiming that it would harm the colony’s provisioning trade to the West Indies and the slave trade in West Africa. 

RHODE ISLAND MERCHANTS: “[W]ithout this trade, it would have been and will always be, utterly impossible for the inhabitants of this colony to subsist themselves, or to pay for any considerable quantity of British goods.”

AMBUSKE: Stephen Hopkins, the colony’s governor, delivered the remonstrance to London himself. The governor was the brother of Esek Hopkins, captain of the slave ship Sally. 

AMBUSKE: In Boston, a failed businessman and local tax collector named Samuel Adams offered a far more ominous warning:

SAMUEL ADAMS: "For if our Trade may be taxed why not our Lands? Why not the Produce of our Lands & every thing we possess or make use of? This we apprehend annihilates our Charter Right to govern & tax ourselves – It strikes our British Privileges, which as we have never forfeited them, we hold in common with our Fellow Subjects who are Natives of Britain: If Taxes are laid upon us in any shape without our having a legal Representation where they are laid, are we not reduced from the Character of free Subjects to the miserable State of tributary Slaves?"

O’SHAUGHNESSY: This was regarded as a victory for the British Caribbean. But it would be regarded as the beginning of the end in America.

CODA:

AMBUSKE: On August 11, 1764, the Earl of Halifax sat down at his desk in St. James Palace in London to compose a letter, copies of which would be sent to all the governors of His Majesty’s colonies in British America. 

AMBUSKE: As secretary of State for the Southern Department, Halifax had oversight of the colonies and managed them in collaboration with the Board of Trade. From time to time, he wrote letters to the governors, requesting information, or advising them of recent developments in Parliament and the empire. 

AMBUSKE: On this day, in a very short letter, Halifax did both. 

AMBUSKE: With the Sugar Act about to take effect, Halifax reported that the House of Commons had determined that with a need to defray “the necessary expenses of defending, protecting and securing the British Colonies & Plantations in America, it may be proper to charge certain stamp duties in the said Colonies and Plantations.”

AMBUSKE: The governors were commanded by Halifax to “transmit to me, without delay, a list of all instruments made use of in public transactions, law proceedings, Grants, conveyances, securities of Land or money within your Governt[s].” 

AMBUSKE: The information supplied by the governors would be useful, should indeed Parliament decide to levy a new stamp tax on the colonies.

AMBUSKE: British Americans would learn of Parliament’s decision soon enough.

AMBUSKE: Thanks for listening to Worlds Turned Upside Down. Worlds is a prodfuction of R2 Studios, part of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. 

 AMBUSKE:  I’m your host, Jim Ambuske.

AMBUSKE: This episode of Worlds was made possible with the support of the John Carter Brown Library, an independent research library located on the campus of Brown University.

AMBUSKE: Head to r2studios.org for a complete transcript of today’s episode and suggestions for further reading.

AMBUSKE:  Worlds is researched and written by me with additional research, writing, and script editing by Jeanette Patrick. 

AMBUSKE: Jeanette Patrick and I are the Executive Producers. Grace Mallon is our British Correspondent. 

AMBUSKE:  Our lead audio editor is Curt Dahl of CD Squared.

AMBUSKE:  Amber Pelham and Alexandra Miller are our graduate assistants

AMBUSKE: Our thanks to Trevor Burnard, Abby Chandler, Mary Draper, Jon Kukla, Andrew O’Shaughnessy, and Brooke Newman for sharing their expertise with us in this episode. 

AMBUSKE: Thanks also to our voice actors Anne Fertig, Norman Rodger, Dan Howlett, Nate Sleeter, and Beau Robbins. 

AMBUSKE:  Subscribe to Worlds on your favorite podcast app. Thanks, and we’ll see you next time.

*An earlier version of this episode incorrectly gave the cost of sustaining the British Army in North America as £250,000 per year.