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By Flavio EichmannFor the last twenty years, scholarship on the Age of Revolutions in the Caribbean has been booming. The focus of this scholarly attention lies on the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), the only successful slave rebellion in world history. It did not only lead to the downfall of the most important sugar colony, in which half a million African slaves had been worked to death, but also to the independence of Haiti, as the former French colony of Saint Domingue henceforth had been called. In his award-winning studies, Laurent Dubois has argued that the Haitian Revolution was the direct result of transatlantic discourses on the universal character of citizenship and the rights of men, in which free men of colour and slaves actively participated. He claimed that former slaves in the French colonies were the leading figures of these discourses and vigorously defended their principles against Napoleon’s forces, which tried to re-establish slavery and metropolitan authority over the Caribbean colonies in 1802/3. Scholarship on the Age of Revolutions in the Caribbean thus mainly focuses on the agency of African slaves and the ways in which they broke the chains of their bondage.Rebellions and (civil) warschallenged European colonial rule over the archipelago in the French andBritish colonies of the Lesser Antilles as well. However, most of theseconflicts did not center on slave rebellions but on questions of governance andpolitical loyalty of the colonial plantation elite to the imperial metropolis. Forthe first time the study Krieg undRevolution in der Karibik: Die Kleinen Antillen, 1789–1815, examines theseconflicts in their longue durée– from the outbreak of the French Revolution untilthe end of the Napoleonic Wars.Flavio Eichmann, Krieg und Revolution in der Karibik: Die Kleinen Antillen, 1789–1815, Berlin (De Gruyter) 2019.  The book primarily focuses on theFrench colonies of Martinique and Guadeloupe. After the outbreak of the FrenchRevolution, white plantation owners quickly usurped the authority of the colonialstate in both colonies. They successfully undermined metropolitan attempts tore-establish authority over the islands. The plantation elite had set threegoals that were closely interwoven: political self-government, free trade and escapingtheir debts to metropolitan merchants. During the first years of therevolution, they had been supported by free men of color, many of whom ownedplantations themselves and believed that an alliance with the white plantationelite was a promising way to end their political and legal discrimination. Onthe other side of the political spectrum were the merchants of port cities andthe white urban proletariat – the so-called petitblancs. The events in both colonies were closely connected. Due to the proximityof the British colonies in the archipelago the latter were drawn into therevolutionary turmoil as well, hereby igniting social conflicts which soonerupted in bloody civil wars. In all this, African slaves fought on both sides.Their loyalty basically depended on local circumstances and the question whichside offered them a better prospect to flee from their misery. More often thannot, however, slaves were simply recruited by force to fill up the ranks ofyellow-fever stricken European armies. The abolition of slavery in theFrench Empire in February 1794 was certainly an important turning point. The decisionof the National Convention to do so was however not motivated by thephilosophical principles of the Revolution, according to which all men wereequal. After news had reached Paris that colonial elites in Martinique andGuadeloupe had handed over both colonies to the British, the reasons of the Frenchgovernment were much more tangible: The abolition was a useful instrument for punishingthe colonial elite by effectively destroying their socioeconomic foundation. Therefore,it was not by accident that the French expedition force destined for the LesserAntilles also had a mobile guillotine on board. Its commander, Victor Hugues,was ordered to relentlessly pursue disloyal colonists no matter what theircolor of skin was and to reestablish metropolitan control over the colonies.Abolition and terror were thus two sides of the same coin. It was telling thatthe abolition of slavery never became the driving principle for the Frenchforces in the Caribbean. In their war with their British opponents, theabolition was only used when no other option was available. And even whenslavery was abolished, it was usually replaced by a brutal force labor regimethat was only marginally better than the former slaves’ old bondage.The abolition of slavery did not endthe problems of imperial governance. In fact, the French empire continued tosilently dissolve. In Guadeloupe, Victor Hugues and his followers started acorsair war that soon got out of hand, as the French sails attacked neutral andeven allied shipping in Caribbean waters. All metropolitan attempts to end thisillegal privateering war were on the spot undermined by colonial officials who werefinancially involved in it. With their corsair war, authorities in Guadeloupesingle-handedly provoked the so-called Quasi-War with the United States, a war neitherside was actually interested in. It was only with the Convention ofMortefontaine in 1800 and the subsequent Peace of Amiens in 1802 that the Frenchmetropolis could temporarily end the conflicts with the United States as wellas the British Empire and re-establish control over its empire overseas.With peace finally established, Napoleon Bonaparte picked up older attempts of the Directory to give new life to the colonial plantation economy and to transform Guadeloupe from a quasi-independent corsair state back to a plantation colony. He believed the only way to do so was to regain the loyalty of the disgruntled white plantation elite, a social group that was part of the royalist opposition to his regime. The price for the loyalty of the latter was the reintroduction of slavery and the repossession of their plantations. Contrary to Napoleon’s failed attempt in Saint Domingue, French forces in Guadeloupe managed to re-establish slavery – not least thanks to British help. However, Napoleon’s hope for reconciliation with the plantation elite proved to be naïve. Contrary to his wishes, they did not support the French war effort in the Caribbean after war against the British broke again. In fact, they undermined it as best as they could. With no material support from Europe, colonial officials proved to be almost powerless in face of the planters’ disloyalty. Thus, the conflicts of loyalty lingered on and seriously hampered the global French war effort in the Caribbean until the end of the global conflict in 1815. Flavio Eichmann, Krieg und Revolution in der Karibik: Die Kleinen Antillen, 1789–1815, Berlin (De Gruyter) 2019. Flavio Eichmann is an Associated Researcher at the University of Bern, Switzerland. His study was awarded with the prestigious Erster Förderpreis für Militärgeschichte und Militärtechnikgeschichte by the German Bundeswehr in 2017 and the prize for the best dissertation of the University of Bern’s Institute of History in 2016.Citation: Flavio Eichmann, War and Revolution in the Caribbean – The Lesser Antilles, 1789–1815, in TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 28.05.2019, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/18693.