The American Revolution from The Caribbean

Most Americans are taught the Revolution as a story that runs from
Boston Harbor to Yorktown. The essay linked below looks at what
happens when you shift the vantage point to a British sugar island in
the Caribbean and follow the war through cane fields,
countinghouses and naval blockades rather than only across frozen
rivers and village greens.

Drawing on my novel Pursuit of Happiness, it traces the Revolution as
seen from St Catherine’s, a fictional sugar island built out of real
eighteenth century patterns. The piece looks at how slavery and sugar
financed the war, how Jewish merchants and French arsenals helped
arm it, and how figures like Benedict Arnold and a young Quaker
courier move through an Atlantic world where “pursuit of happiness”
is never an abstract phrase.

The aim is not to replace the familiar origin story, but to widen it.
Read from the Caribbean, the struggle for independence sits alongside
plantation life, covert arms traffic and the daily choices of people
whose freedom or bondage is bound up with events far beyond their
sight.

You can read the full essay here:
Medium: https://medium.com/@sheldonlgreene1254/the-american-revolution-
from-the-caribbean-904422177d89?postPublishedType=initial
Google: https://sites.google.com/view/sheldongreene2/home
Blogger: https://sheldonlgreene.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-american-revolution-from-caribbean.html