Castles in the Air: Sectarian Puritanism, the Revolutionary Caribbean and the Forgotten Colony of New Warwick, Trinidad

Abstract This article examines an overlooked attempt to colonize the island of Trinidad during the English Revolution of the 1640s. This project was engineered by a consortium of radical puritans, seeking to create a protected enclave in the New World for separatists, anabaptists and other sectaries. ‘New Warwick’, as the colony was called, quickly collapsed, but reconstructing the Trinidad enterprise allows for the examination of important developments in the history of the English Atlantic, including the rise of religious divisions in parliament's civil‐war armies; the interplay between the revolution and events in England's Atlantic colonies; the colonial policy of parliament during the wars; the emergence of pockets of religious toleration in the Caribbean and elsewhere in the English Atlantic; the radical shifts in the political economy of the West Indies during the formative rise of a regime centred on sugar and enslaved labour; and the conflicts that roiled the English Caribbean after the regicide, resulting ultimately in the consolidation of the newly integrated Atlantic empire under the English Republic during the era of the first Navigation Act (1651).