Abigail Swingen’s new book narrates political debates focused on how to manage the politics and economy of the most prosperous of England’s Atlantic colonies, the West Indian islands of Barbados and Jamaica to 1718. Using official correspondence and published pamphlet literature, the bulk of the seven chapters review discussions over the governance of these outposts (in particular the balance between the authority of the core and some autonomy at the periphery) and how best to organize their economic development to profit the empire and the merchants who facilitated trade. These debates circle around questions of sovereignty, authority and monopoly. While Swingen asserts that shifting ideas about population within England also played a role, she does not fully grant it the explanatory power that the introduction suggests.

Swingen situates her work firmly within British historians’ exploration of politics at the centre of the empire. Competing visions of empire articulated there receive the bulk of her attention. Her quick sketches of the historiographical landscape and use of general terms such as “Whig” and “Tory” assume some knowledge of that field. She does not address the development of colonial society or the mechanisms of European expansion, despite what her subtitle might lead Itinerario readers to anticipate. The Royal African Company serves as a focal point of her analysis. The study enters most directly into dialogue with the recent and excellent work of William A. Pettigrew (Freedom’s Debt: The Royal African Company and the Politics of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1672-1752), which not only reviews similar debates about empire but also explores the workings of the company itself. Swingen’s work also contrasts with a recent study of early attitudes toward slavery by Michael Guasco (Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World [2014]) in that its analysis of labour and slavery exclusively relates to political economy, matters of policy and profit for merchants, imperial administrators and planters.

Swingen argues that merchants and, eventually, English authorities perceived the potential for an empire based on slave labour and plantation agriculture and that a shifting collection of merchants fought consistently to create conditions susceptible to that vision. This argument works best for the period after 1660 and particularly after the 1672 restructuring of the second African monopoly company. Her efforts to push this argument back to the advent of colonization, however, are less successful. As a result, the first two chapters (on the early adoption of slavery in Barbados and on the Western Design) are the book’s least strong. Whereas many scholars believe that profiting from empire was worked out on the ground over time, Swingen states that, from the start, merchants pursued the goal of slave labour and monoculture. To fit this merchant and slavery led vision of empire, she revises the narrative of the origins and prosecution of Oliver Cromwell’s Western Design to argue that leading merchants dictated imperial policy to Cromwell. Swingen under appreciates the discontinuity from republic to protectorate and the fact that many supporters of parliamentary dominance (including key merchants and financiers) abandoned the project when Cromwell came to power and that his expansionist policies failed, in part, because he lacked support from the men who had raised public funds under the government he displaced. The handful of major merchants active under Cromwell, in Swingen’s account, emerge as the architects of the Design and England’s imperial future.

Leaving this early period, the ground she occupies become somewhat firmer: the Restoration offers more sources, allows for the focus on the Royal African Company and includes evidence of merchants and government officials actively engaged in the relevant debates. Still, the idea that the slave trade served as the engine that created English expansion is asserted rather than defended. This argument is partially sustained by framing the origins and progress of the early English (and later British) empire without adequate reference to the more profitable, more frequently debated and more significant East Indies. Making claims about the origins of empire while only focusing on the Atlantic arena hampers Swingen’s efforts. Her book’s main strength is in revisiting of the debates around the Royal African Company rather than its broader claims about how a desire to exploit slaves and grow sugar always guided expansion and shaped empire.