Raynal’s insights mirrored those of William Burke, a cousin of Edmund Burke and a colonial official in Guadeloupe in 1760, then only recently seized by England from France. “It is by means of the West-Indian trade that a great part of North America is at all enabled to trade with us,” he wrote. “[I]n Reality the Trade of these North American Provinces . . . is, as well as that of Africa, to be regarded as a dependent Member, and subordinate Department of the West-Indian Trade; it must rise and fall exactly as the West-Indies flourish or decay.”
