Zones of Occupation: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Caribbean during the Seven Years' War

This paper offers a comparative analysis of zones of military occupation during the Seven Years’ War. It focuses on the Caribbean theater of the war and the British occupations of Havana, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Grenada, but comparisons are also made with the British occupation of Manila. The paper will assess how British military occupation affected commerce, slave trading, legal regimes, and the rights of populations of African descent (and other subaltern, colonized peoples in the occupied zones).

Historians seldom theorize military occupation, particularly before the era of nation states. Nor do they often engage with zones of military occupation before the twentieth century as sites of history that demand their own analysis. And yet military occupations took place with frequency in the eighteenth century, and geopolitically strategic zones found themselves attacked and occupied time and time again, during an era when warring imperial powers purposefully acquired territories as bargaining chips in the peace treaty at the conclusion of hostilities.

This paper considers these eighteenth-century occupations as zones of layered sovereignty that offer a window on the mechanisms of war, trade, and slavery operational during times of both war and peace. It argues that wartime occupations acted as a motor of economic integration and cultural, political, and legal transfer across imperial boundaries. Like colonialism itself, military occupations were “negotiated systems” with their own winners and losers, both near and far from the territory in question.