This chapter examines the twin threats of invasion and insurrection that most English tropical colonies faced because of dwindling white migration and the English reliance on bondage and forced migration to populate and build the tropical empire. It focuses on the period between 1675 and 1720, when a series of large-scale slave insurrection plots began to rock English settlements in the Atlantic. It shows how the very real threats of invasion and insurrection shaped these colonies and how the English navigated these twin threats. Ultimately, English settlers and governors in the Caribbean turned to brutal and draconian policies of slave management to maintain their colonies, while English agents in Asia and Africa were forced to rely on others to help them control the enslaved and defend their factories and settlements. Yet, by the end of the seventeenth century, the English in both the East and West Indies had begun to tentatively explore arming the enslaved, turning to their non-European bondsmen to build, populate, and even help defend the empire. Armed slaves became agents of empire.

The epilogue takes a broad and expansive view of the nature of the British empire in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tropics. It argues that the British largely abandoned the settlement of the tropics by Europeans by the eighteenth century, becoming more convinced that it was a dangerously unhealthy place. They maintained their hold on the tropics by relying on non-Europeans. The ratios of non-Europeans to Europeans in the tropical empire continued to grow. Ideas about racial differences hardened and became more fully and ardently articulated. They were interwoven with notions of environmental determinism. The British turned more fully to soldiers of African descent in the Caribbean and Sepoy armies in India to help defend the empire. The epilogue explores the large-scale rebellions that erupted against the empire in nineteenth-century India and in the Caribbean, arguing that internal resistance helped to end slavery and, ultimately, the empire. It also underscores the ways in which English colonization and trade across the tropical zone was linked and how the wealth accrued through tropical exploitation and slavery helped facilitate the rise of the British empire.

Focusing on a comparative study of diverse socio-political movements and rebellions that developed in the Caribbean coast of New Granada and Venezuela during the last decade of the eighteenth century, this chapter will analyze the complex and distinctive reverberations of Saint Domingue’s rebellion in the Spanish American mainland. The vast and exposed Caribbean coast of New Granada and Venezuela with its vibrant port cities and coastal towns allowed for the emergence of multicultural and multilingual hubs for Atlantic encounters and exchange. The open, varied, and dynamic configuration of port societies facilitated the flow of information about the Atlantic Revolutions, but especially about the Haitian Revolution. Of the three Atlantic Revolutions—the American, the French, and the Haitian—the Haitian one became the most tangible for the inhabitants of coastal Venezuela and New Granada, who used the impressions of the turbulent Caribbean insurgency as shared knowledge, an everyday reference point that was exploited by insurgents during negotiations with the colonial state and, at the same time, by those very elites and state agents to justify repression or, alternatively, to make concessions to “calm the spirits” of rebellion in the region.

This chapter traces debates and arguments around black freedom that animated discussions on amelioration and emancipation in both British metropole and colony. Much of this was predicated on fear, where the ever present Hydra of slave rebellion and disorder threatened, even as enslaved people’s revolutionary acts helped stimulate a metropolitan abolitionist movement. The chapter argues that this preeminent association of black freedom with disorder shaped the boundaries of emancipation and thus the parameters of the experiment.