or Bermuda. Prior to the war, with no useful landmass or natural resources, Bermuda was largely ignored and left to its own devices by the London government.
Due to those same limitations, before the war, in an effort to exploit all of the opportunities it could obtain by its maritime trade, Bermuda had played a role out of all proportion to its size in the development of the trans-Atlantic English and British Empires.
It had played key roles in settling new colonies, especially in the American South, and had used its merchant fleet and a web of expatriate Bermudian merchants to dominate trade through a number of American Atlantic Seaboard ports and the West Indies. Bermudians fished for cod on the Grand Banks, and were involved in the lumber industry in Central America. Most importantly, they dominated the North American salt trade with de facto control of the Turks Islands.
Had Bermuda not been so remote from the American coastline, and the Royal Navy not enjoyed supremacy on that part of the Atlantic, it would almost certainly have been the fourteenth colony to join the rebellion. The close economic, family, and historical ties ensured Bermudians were strongly sympathetic with the rebels at the start of the War, supplying them illegally with ships, salt and gunpowder. As the war progressed, economic realities caused Bermudians, if not to sympathise with the Crown, then to seize the economic opportunities available to them, chief of which was privateering against the Americans.
The end of the war, however, was to cause profound change in Bermuda, though some of those changes would take decades to crystallise. Following the war, with the build up of Naval and military forces in Bermuda, the primary leg of the Bermudian economy became defence infrastructure. Even after tourism began later in the 19th century, Bermuda remained, in the eyes of London, a base more than a colony, and this led to a change in the political dynamics within
