Edmund Burke, the Atlantic American War and the "Poor Jews at St. Eustatius". Empire and the Law of Nations

This essay is devoted to a relatively minor episode in Edmund Burke’s parliamentary career and political speculation involving the rights of war and international law in the final years of the American War of Independence. The starting point for Burke’s consideration of these questions was the affair of St. Eustatius, that is to say Britain’s conquest in 1781 of the Dutch West-Indian island early in the “fourth Anglo-Dutch War” of 1780-1784. The harsh treatment of the Dutch colony’s cosmopolitan community by the commanding officers of the British Navy and Army provoked a series of reactions in Britain and the colonies. The essay starts by outlining the identity of St. Eustatius with its economic, demographic and social features, its peculiar role in the eighteenth-century West Indies and its emblematic meaning in the historical literature of the Enlightenment as a symbol of the virtues of commerce and of economic liberty. It goes on to analyse the facts of the military conquest in 1781 and the ensuing occupation realized by Admiral George Rodney and Major-General John Vaughan, particularly as this affected the “poor Jews at St. Eustatius” (as Burke himself qualified them in his second speech on 4 December 1781), with the subsequent reactions of the Dutch and especially the British Atlantic world. We then examine Edmund Burke’s reasons for taking up this affair, including the political and ideological motives and the sources of arguments he used in the two parliamentary speeches he made on the topic during 1781, relating this to Burke’s ideas on international relations and imperial government during the 1770s and 1780s. We end by pointing to cultural links between Burke’s positions and a wider political, commercial and civic culture emerging in the British Atlantic world which reflected some of the most typical European Enlightenment values and ideological commitments.