Jeppe Mulich's new book, In A Sea of Empires: Networks and Crossings in the Revolutionary Caribbean (Cambridge University Press, 2020) highlights the revolutionary fervor, political turmoil, conflict, and chaos in the Leeward Island region of the Caribbean in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These tense dynamics created opportunities for interconnected politics, laws, and networks in this "microregion" as British, Danish, French, Spanish, and Swedish actors both competed and cooperated with one another. By exploring the transnational networks involved in trade, slavery, smuggling, privateering, and marronage, he emphasizes the border-crossing nature of life in the Leeward Islands that fostered conflicts between local interests and imperial policy and subverted formal imperial boundaries and claims to sovereignty. All-in-all, Dr. Mulich argues that this early period of "globalization" was in-part initiated from the bottom-up, with local peoples, local concerns, and various cross-border networks encouraging regional integration.
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