Island and Empires in the Age of Sail

In this blog, Douglas Hamilton, Professor of History at SHU, tells us about his new book on islands and the British empire. You can also see the online exhibition at the National Maritime Museum that accompanies the project.

In the great Age of Sail – from the late sixteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century – islands played vital roles in establishing and securing European empires around the world. They had an importance far beyond their small size and isolation in distant seas. Instead, they offer sites for us to consider the big themes of imperialism, global wars, and revolutions and to reflect on their impact on diverse populations.

The idea for our new book emerged from a series of workshops that I and Dr John McAleer (Southampton University) organised with funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/N003225/1) between 2016 and 2019. We invited historians and museum specialists from Britain, the United States and Australia with interests in islands to discuss their work and then to contribute to the book.

As a result of the research by the contributors, which was discussed in our seminars, our book argues that we should not see islands just as little fragments of land in the middle of vast oceans. Instead, we suggest that islands were crucial to the British empire: by providing vital strategic stops for sailing ships, islands connected the empire. But they were more than that: islands were great prizes in themselves. Some (like those in the Caribbean) provided sources of wealth for Britain, while others were important sites of scientific enquiry. The significance of the islands meant that European countries fought over them, and so they were drawn into the great global power struggles of the eighteenth century.

It’s important to remember, too, that many of these islands were already inhabited. For indigenous populations, or for enslaved people trafficked there, this is a history of invasion and exploitation. Their opposition shows some of the ways that people resisted the British empire, in ways that sometimes connect to the tumultuous Age of Revolutions. You can study these issues in modules on the BA History at Sheffield Hallam.

As well as thinking about how we could write about the history of islands, we wanted to produce something visual, in the form of an online exhibition. To do this, we worked closely with our friends at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. You can see the exhibition based on the NMM collections – ‘Islands and Empires’ – on the museum’s website.