"British Security and American Sovereignty in Revolutionary Border-sea Spaces, 1783-1815" with Ross Nedervelt

The final 2024-2025 David Center for the American Revolution Seminar will take place May 7, 2025 at 3:00 p.m. ET on Zoom.

The speaker, Dr. Ross Nedervelt, is a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow with the Massachusetts Historical Society, and an adjunct professor of history at Florida International University in Miami, FL. His research focuses on revolutions, border regions, identity, and security in the British Atlantic world during the long eighteenth century. Nedervelt is currently working on his first book, presently titled Revolutionary Border-sea: Security, Imperial Reconstitution, and the British Atlantic Islands, 1763-1825, which examines the American Revolution’s transformative impact on Bermuda and the Bahamas, and their strategic importance for both British and American security in the Age of the American Revolution. This paper is drawn from the book manuscript’s sixth chapter titled: "British Security and American Sovereignty in Revolutionary Border-sea Spaces, 1783-1815.” A description of the paper is below. The paper will be pre-circulated to registered participants in advance of the seminar meeting.

To attend the seminar and to receive a copy of the paper, please register via Zoom.

The David Center for the American Revolution Seminar serves as a forum for works-in-progress that explore topics in the era of the American Revolution (1750-1820). Questions about the series may be directed to Brenna Holland, Assistant Director of Library & Museum Programs, at [email protected].

NOTE: Seminars are designed as spaces for sharing ideas and works still in-progress. For this reason, this event will not be recorded.

British Security and American Sovereignty in Revolutionary Border-sea Spaces, 1783-1815

With the nascent United States' formal independence from the British Empire in 1783, the western Atlantic transformed into a significant, contested border-sea space. In this new Atlantic border-sea space, Bermuda and the Bahamas took on a new strategic, political, and military importance for British and American officials keen on gaining and maintaining regional authority. In early 1776, American patriot leaders understood the strategic importance of the western Atlantic’s border-sea to the security and survival of their fledgling nation. Benjamin Franklin and Silas Deane argued that by annexing Bermuda and the Bahamas, an independent United States could extend its authority further into the Atlantic and secure its coastline, port cities, and maritime commerce from future retaliatory attacks by Great Britain. Yet, Patriot forces and diplomats failed to annex the two archipelagos by the American Revolution’s end, and British military forces and political influence entrenched allegiance to Great Britain. 

Great Britain’s control over the Atlantic border-sea through Bermuda and the Bahamas enabled hostile American loyalist refugees, the Royal Navy, and privateers to threaten the United States’ post-war security and national sovereignty. From 1783 through 1812, Britain’s fortified border-sea constrained the United States’s commercial and territorial expansion into the Atlantic and Caribbean, limiting the nation’s expansion westward towards the Pacific, and contested Americans’ citizenship through privateering and impressment operations on the Atlantic. British warships and privateers’ continued pressure and harassment of American mariners compelled the United States to declare war on Great Britain in 1812. Under Admirals Alexander Cochrane and George Cockburn’s commands, British naval forces used the border-sea to launch a naval blockade and devastating attack against Washington, D.C., during the War of 1812. Bermuda and the Bahamas’ emergence as a border-sea dividing the British Empire from the nascent United States highlights their strategic role in securing and extending British power in the post-revolutionary Atlantic.