Using the Leeward Islands as a case study, Jeppe Mulich's In a Sea of Empires offers a new model for understanding late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century globalization. Focusing on the British Virgin Islands, the Danish Virgin Islands, and Swedish Saint Barthélemy as an example of what he terms an “inter-imperial microregion,” Mulich argues that the connections that people forged at the peripheries of European empires were “not an aberrant challenge to imperial rule but an inherent feature of colonial practice” (p. 2). By tracing how these on-the-ground links became embedded in increasingly wider networks, Mulich convincingly casts early globalization not as an abstract process but as the product of intensifying commercial and legal connections that frequently bypassed formal channels.
In its “ideal-typical” form, which Mulich illustrates in the form of a graph, an inter-imperial microregion consists of layered and overlapping transimperial, interimperial, and intercolonial networks (p. 18). Because these networks...
