A Sea of Possibilities
The story of a cunning sea captain whose tempestuous life charts new dimensions of the American Revolution
This is the gripping tale of how ambitious sea captain Thomas Allen and his family navigated the gales of the American Revolution. Starting as a rogue and smuggler, Allen won and lost several fortunes before eventually establishing himself as a wealthy merchant with Loyalist leanings in Connecticut. Then, imprisoned by the Patriots during the War for Independence, Allen lost nearly everything and everyone. Rather than fleeing, he stayed and rebuilt, emerging from the crucible of revolution as an outspoken and influential champion of the new Constitution and new nation.
This telling of Allen’s experience captures the everyday lives, material circumstances, and values of a middling settler family working hard and scheming harder to gain respectability and wealth in the colonial Atlantic World. In vivid detail, Kenneth Banks shows that maritime life is as crucial to our understanding of the Revolutionary era as the debates over taxation in colonial legislatures, migration and violent agitation in the backcountry, or the rise of a market-driven society. Like the Revolution itself, Allen's story is one of reinvention in a rapidly changing world.
- Christian Koot, Towson University, author of A Biography of a Map in Motion: Augustine Herrman’s ChesapeakeA well-told, entertaining, and important biography of a fascinating character. Shifting focus from major port cities, farmers, and revolutionary politics to the water and wharfside helps us understand the broader effects of a changing British empire.
- Cathy Matson, University of Delaware, author of Merchants and Empire: Trading in Colonial New YorkA Sea of Possibilities puts maritime enterprise and experience at the center of North Americans’ uncertain path toward the Revolution. Through the rising and falling fortunes of ship captain and merchant Thomas Allen, Kenneth Banks provides a compelling panorama onto countless other middling people of the sea whose opportunities rose and fell, whose fortunes alternated between windfalls and insolvency. Banks provides a rare but essential portrait of a New England captain at work in the Caribbean waters of opportunity, seeking cooperation and pursuing debtors, moving goods about, cultivating customers, and always focused on practical self-interested decisions about his trade. It is this middling experience-driven Allen who will be poised to share with thousands of others the twists and turns of Revolutionary opportunity.
- Christopher P. Magra, University of Tennessee, author of Poseidon’s Curse: British Naval Impressment and Atlantic Origins of the American RevolutionThomas Allen of New London, Connecticut stands on center stage in this narrative. He was a sea captain and a merchant who traveled around the Atlantic World. Through Allen and his family, we see how the Atlantic served as a laboratory for independence. From the counting houses of New England to the lucrative, contraband-filled waters of the Caribbean, Kenneth J. Banks masterfully weaves together the experiences of commercial mariners, shoreside women, and privateers.
A Sea of Possibilities expertly combines the Atlantic World perspective with a gripping personal biography. This book charts a new course through familiar waters. It is an essential read for anyone seeking to understand how Americans transformed maritime commercial needs into a radical new vision of political liberty.
- David J. Hancock, University of Michigan, author of Oceans of Wine: Madeira and the Organization of the Atlantic Market, 1640-1815The story of the American Revolution is generally presented as a gripping narrative of virtuous and focused American colonists overthrowing decadent and inattentive British overlords, as a stirring story of great men of principle succeeding against all odds in creating a republic where none like it had existed before, as a moral parable of the triumph of liberty over despotism and of the New World over the Old. Banks broadens and deepens our understanding with a beautifully written, full-bodied biography of Captain Thomas Allen of New London and an account of a world also populated and transformed by lesser mortals – men of the sea – who unwittingly got caught up in the War for America. With a sense of color, sound, light, space and place and in remarkably clean and clear prose unusual among historians working today, he deftly portrays “strivers” like Allen – variously over the course of his life an immigrant, trader/shopkeeper, smuggler, privateer, Patriot prisoner of war, merchant, tavernkeeper, entrepreneur, and citizen – as Atlantic opportunists who failed as much as they succeeded in their endeavors, yet, perhaps because of their failures and resilience, proved integral to the creation of an independent United States that remained inextricably intertwined with the economies of Britain and Europe. Banks offers nothing less than an essential and compelling corrective to the canonical interpretation of the Revolution.
Kenneth J. Banks is Professor of Atlantic World History at Wofford College and the author of the award-winning Chasing Empire Across the Sea: Communications and the State in the French Atlantic, 1713–1763.
