I really do think one of the most interesting aspects of the American Revolution is that it fragmented the British Atlantic. Not only were the Thirteen Colonies separated from the British Home Islands, but they were separated from Canada and the British West Indies too, which remained under British rule.
Many have argued that the severance of the American colonies from the British West Indies contributed to the end of slavery in the latter.
Today much of the Caribbean remains under European rule, which you might wish to call imperialist (I certainly think so to some degree but I don’t care to argue about this with anyone.)
The link between the Caribbean colonies and the Thirteen Colonies ought to be given more attention. The two were intimately connected economically, as the plantation economies in the Caribbean were monoculture cash-crop economies that produced primarily sugar but also tobacco and coffee, crops of comparatively high financial value but pretty worthless nutritionally. Which means that they had to import foods from the mainland (and still do).
So there was an economic link where food and timber (the sugar plantations also destroyed what limited foreststand there was on the islands) was sold to the Caribbean in exchange for sugar, coffee, and tobacco. But sugar above all.
This might sound like a nice little set up, but it wasn’t. The problem for the Thirteen Colonies was that the French islands produced sugar more cheaply than the British. Also, interestingly, b/c the French preferred wine to rum, the molasses was basically worthless to the French sugar producers and they were willing to sell it to the American colonies for almost nothing.
In a fair market economy, then, the trade would have been between the British colonies in North America and the *French* colonies in the Caribbean. The British sugar producers would sink.
But they were a powerful lobby in Parliament so the British Government enacted legislation that made trade with the French colonies illegal and attempted to force the Americans to trade with the British islands instead.
This greatly annoyed the Americans bc British sugar and molasses was far more expensive than French, and the Sugar Act of 1764 was a major contribution to growing discontent in the colonies.
It also demonstrates a growing rift between the British sugar islands, the British Government, and the Thirteen Colonies. The British Government felt that propping up the sugar planters was essential for the well-being of the empire overall, even though that meant hurting the interests of the American colonies in particular.
The American colonies might well have asked themselves why they ought to subsidize sugar planters in Barbados and Jamaica, to sacrifice for their economic gain, especially when these planters lived luxuriously and were often horrible people who owned thousands of slaves.
Obviously the American colonies had no interest in funding the British sugar economy and this put them at odds not just with the sugar planters but with Parliament. It’s an aspect that is frequently ignored.
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