Carla Gardina Pestana is Professor of History and Joyce Appleby Endowed Chair of America in the World at the University of California, Los Angeles. A Guggenheim Fellow, she is author of The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell’s Bid for Empire and The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640–1661.
The English Conquest of Jamaica vividly demonstrates the huge
investment of money, men and ships that went into Cromwell’s plan
to enlarge and rationalize the English presence in America. This
field-transforming book shows that the Western Design actually set
the stage for the Restoration government’s aspirations to build and
control the empire.
*Karen Ordahl Kupperman, author of The Jamestown
Project*
In a bold and well-argued book, Pestana contends that Cromwell’s
Western Design was a major shift in English imperial thinking, with
much greater consequences than have hitherto been realized.
Jamaica’s rather inglorious first five years as an English colony
are thus not an irrelevant oddity in Atlantic history but signal
the beginning of a new phase in British American empire. This
engaging book is greatly to be welcomed.
*Trevor Burnard, author of Planters, Merchants, and
Slaves*
Meticulously researched and convincingly argued, Pestana’s book
contains a trove of information on the Cromwellian empire, the
growing professionalism of the English army and navy, and England’s
relations with other European powers. It is a must-read for
historians of Britain and its seventeenth-century empire.
*Eliga H. Gould, author of Among the Powers of the
Earth*
Compared with his role in winning the civil wars of the 1640s,
subduing Ireland and ruling England as a republic, Cromwell’s
Western Design is barely remembered. But his plan to expand
England’s presence in the Americas by dismantling the Spanish
empire did much to shape the course of British imperial history.
Pestana’s richly detailed narrative takes this little-known story
to another level.
*Financial Times*
With much colorful detail and intelligent analysis, reinforced by
informative footnotes, this book illuminates a significant event
too often overlooked in historiographical studies of Britain and
its empire.
*Washington Times*
[A] thorough, revelatory reassessment of the Western Design and its
ultimate purpose.
*Times Literary Supplement*
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