FORUM: 1776. Views from the British World. Bound for Independence: 1776 and the French Caribbean

Abstract

Timed to coincide with the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that launched a revolution that created the United States of America, this series of articles complicates traditional narratives of this transformative event by situating it in a larger British world context.This article places the Anglo-American events of 1776 in the context of developments in France and the French Caribbean. It argues that both French efforts to exploit the imperial crisis and the American patriots’ tenuous intercolonial unity were inseparable from the rapid, brutal expansion of slavery and the economic power generated by unfree labor in the French Caribbean. Although elided in the period's texts, the French Empire's enslaved population generated racial politics that influenced developments in the United States and Great Britain into the nineteenth century.