O'Shaughnessy opens a new chapter in American history for me. One of his central themes is: why didn't the British West Indies, the "sugar islands," rebel at the same time as the North American mainland colonies that we know (incompletely) as the 13 original colonies? In fact, why didn't the fabulously wealthy sugar islands rebel, period?
The West Indies—Barbados, Jamaica, and others in the British Caribbean—were part of the English colonial frontier throughout the period that we customarily regard as colonial American history, but we customarily ignore them. That's a mistake. The West Indies were strongly integrated with the mainland colonies by trade, but politically they were a breed apart: much more strongly tied to the mother country through their protected status and monopoly exports of sugar products, and therefore much less inclined to rebel and throw away their continuing access to that richly rewarding connection. They needed the English navy to keep predatory French and Spanish forces at bay.
O'Shaughnessy's prose is engaging, if a bit redundant here and there. He makes it plain that King George and his Privy Council and Parliament consistently dealt with the "big picture" of their Atlantic colonies, and he gives new context to the repeated punitive tax and other policies that helped to precipitate the Revolution.
For me, an interesting revelation is that England never committed and never actually had enough military strength on our side of the pond to defeat Gen. Washington's somewhat ragtag army. Apparently the King and his ministers wanted to hang on to the sugar islands more urgently than they wanted to keep the 13 colonies in the family.
You'll learn much by reading An Empire Divided.
Read more on my blog: http://barleyliterate.blogspot.com/ ( )

The most interesting and comprehensive account of the British West Indian colonies during the Revolution, focusing mainly on why they didn't join their mainland brethren in rebellion. ( )