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Introduction
In his recent book on the history of Bermuda, Michael Jarvis issued a call to historians, arguing that when we study the Atlantic world we 'need to pay as much attention to economic, cultural, migratory cross-cultural contact between places on the periphery as we do to contact between periphery and core'.1This call should be heeded, and the concerns outlined by Jarvis seem prudent when conducting work not just on the Atlantic but on any region with multiple imperial polities present. In order to add to the expansion of such research, the present article constructs a theoretical framework of analysis that emphasizes interconnectedness through exchanges, rivalries, and cooperation taking place across formal imperial and colonial boundaries. This framework is based on an analytical construct, that of the inter-imperial microregion, which draws upon insights from a range of disciplines and historical fields, and allows for an approach to the study of global history that connects the local with the global and opens the door for broad yet focused comparative analyses.
The empirical part of the article investigates the role of the Danish West Indies as an integral part of the inter-imperial microregion of the Leeward Islands in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It argues that the relationships between different European colonial peripheries in the Caribbean were in many cases more important for local conditions than were the direct relations to imperial metropoles. Since a detailed account of all the Leeward Islands is beyond the scope of this article, the more limited history of the Danish islands of St Thomas, St John, and Ste Croix serves as an example of the interconnectedness that characterized intercolonial relations and commercial networks in many parts of the maritime Atlantic world, and in other maritime regions with similar political and commercial conditions.2The relatively small geographic region of the Leeward Islands represented both a multitude of languages and nationalities and an exceptional degree of porousness in the social, economic, and legal boundaries between colonies.3As will become clear, the Danish colonies were particularly open to outside influences owing to the relatively weak administrative and military infrastructure of the empire, their reliance on foreign trade, their demographic composition, and the...