Introduction

Abstract

The relationship of Great Britain to her American colonies in the century before the Declaration of Independence is too often treated in the shadow of that document. Until recently, most textbooks focused on the 13 mainland colonies which declared their independence of Great Britain and became the United States. To treat the period before 1776 as the first chapter in the history of the USA, however, is to misunderstand its significance. For one thing it overlooks the fact that the thirteenth British colony to be acquired on the eastern seaboard of North America was not Georgia but Nova Scotia, which the French ceded to Britain at the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, 20 years before the launching of the southern settlement. More seriously, it ignores the West Indies. During the seventeenth century, the English acquired 11 islands in the Caribbean, of which the most significant were Barbados, Jamaica, Antigua, Montserrat, Nevis and St Kitts. These were regarded in many ways as more important than the continental colonies. Certainly Barbados was seen as the jewel in the crown, its sugar being more profitable to the royal revenues than the tobacco of the Chesapeake Bay or the rice of South Carolina.