Cressy, David. England’s Islands in a Sea of Troubles. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.
Great Britain is an island world, separated from mainland Europe and comprised of a diverse group of nations – England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. But even this mixture of different lands contains its own island fringe, smaller places surrounding the main islands that contain a heterogeneous assortment of people groups who, along with the physical islands on which they live, have made important contributions to British history. In England’s Islands in a Sea of Troubles, David Cressy focuses his attention on a number of these islands – primarily the islands of Man, Anglesey, Scilly, Wight, Guernsey, and Jersey – to show how they were noteworthy factors in the early modern history of Britain. A Humanities Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the Ohio State University, Cressy has written widely on the history of early modern England, and describes himself as an early modern social historian. For England’s Islands, he is expressly interested in relations between the center and periphery, and delves into multiple types of history, from the social to the legal, political, religious, military, maritime, and economic. He draws from a large range of documents, from manuscripts and letters of people involved in island history to government papers from groups such as the Privy Council and Parliament. Arguing that England’s islands are an under-served subject in the historiography, Cressy shows that the islands were diverse and complex places with varying degrees of autonomy that presented both challenges and opportunities for the central state government in London.
Cressy’s book does an excellent job of detailing the diversity among the different islands, showing how their locations, people, and histories impacted their particular cultures. On a number of the islands very few inhabitants spoke English, there were different religious practices, and distinct cultural differences from the mainland existed. There was also what Cressy refers to as a ‘legal pluralism’ in the islands’ relationships with the state, involving differing jurisdictional arrangements between particular islands and the central government. An apt example of this is evident in the contrasts among several of the islands. Anglesey, while heavily Welsh, was connected to the central state through having representation in parliament, being subject to English courts, and owing various subsidies and taxes to the state. The Isle of Wight had a similarly close relationship to mainland England, being politically and socially integrated with nearby southern England. But residents of Wight also enjoyed certain exemptions, such as not having to serve on juries, not paying rates for the county house of corrections, and their mariners being free from impressment. The Channel Islands of Guernsey and Jersey provide a strong contrast in that they were practically independent (almost French) satellites of England. The islands essentially traded their loyalty to England, in the form of military and commercial assets, in return for privileges and immunities from English interference in their affairs. The Channel Islands did not contribute to parliament, nor were they subject to English Common Law. They were not answerable to English courts or English taxes, and were not restricted in their choice of trading partners. As Cressy sums up, “they were under the English crown, but not controlled by the English state” (43). Taking all the peripheral islands into account, a view develops of the challenge faced by the central government in administering and dealing with numerous islands, each with a different relationship and set of rules and exceptions that favored their own liberties, traditions, and the status quo.
Even as the metropole had to manage the challenges of the periphery, there were simultaneous benefits provided by the island fringe that the state could take advantage of. First, the islands provided a certain degree of security to the mainland by essentially serving as maritime outposts of defense. Though Cressy points out that, at the same time, using the islands as defensive outposts presented its own challenges, such as push-back from islanders and the cost of providing and maintaining defensive structures and equipment. Arguably, the greatest benefit provided by the islands was their usefulness as prisons, a subject to which Cressy dedicates an entire section of his book. In the discussion of islands as prisons, he particularly focuses on the eras of the civil wars, the interregnum, and the Restoration to highlight how different leaders and governments all took advantage of the islands to isolate their enemies. The usefulness of this practice is seen in Cressy’s examination of several political prisoners who, while imprisoned in London, could still participate in the public sphere through the ability to meet with visitors and could write and publish pamphlets to spread their ideas. By imprisoning these types of government enemies on islands, the state could isolate them from almost all connections; as Cressy writes, “island prisons were intended to cut them off forever from the business of the world” (219). The state was able to hold its enemies in these prisons due to the paradoxes of the island fringe; they were connected to the state, but they were also somewhat extra-legal areas where normal legal codes, such as the writ of habeas corpus, did not reach. Governments could arbitrarily lock their enemies away in island prisons and those prisoners had no recourse to legal rights. Leaders from the Commonwealth to the Protectorate to the Restoration used this method to deal with enemies; even Charles I was a prisoner on the Isle of Wight.
Cressy notes that some of the islands have retained a measure of autonomy and distinct privileges into the present, but a major arc of his book shows a slow, steadily increasing hegemony of the center over the periphery. Through the shake-ups of the civil wars and changing governments there was a growing state power over the islands and a diminishing ability for them to go back to all the liberties of the past. Cressy lays out this argument by outlining many of the principal and high-profile actors in island events, but the perspectives of ordinary island residents are mostly absent. This could very well be due to a lack of documentation produced by or about these individuals, but it becomes a noticeable gap in the history of these islands. The inclusion of the viewpoints of ordinary people would have made this very good book into an excellent one.
England’s Islands in a Sea of Troubles explains the significance and complexity of the relationship between the center and the periphery in the early modern period, but it also points toward themes and events in the subsequent modern era, particularly the development of the modern nation-state. Britain’s interactions with its nearby islands also provided experience for its future efforts with colonialism in the wider Atlantic world and beyond. In the same way the British state sought to use its islands to its own profit, in its colonies it strived to both impose British law and culture while simultaneously taking advantage of the colonies as legal gray zones to engage in behavior that was prohibited at home. Its island fringe had provided it with long involvement in seeking mastery over peripheries in pursuit of achieving the greatest benefit for the British state.
Reviewed by Matthew Inman, George Mason University
