Governors' siege journals, ministerial dispatches, administrators' memoranda and petitions from the French chambers of commerce supply the evidence, read alongside the published accounts of British officers. Harvey opens with the loss of Guadeloupe in 1759, where planters moved to protect their estates while officers were willing to see them burn, and where both commands bid for the support of enslaved and free Black men whose loyalty neither trusted. Recrimination followed. Ministers concluded that the colonists had gone soft on luxury and self-interest, and two decades of argument opened over fleets, militias and troops who could survive the climate. Commerce is the second front. The trade monopoly gave way through deliberate policy as much as through wartime necessity, as officials expanded plantation exports, opened free ports and let smuggling pass while merchants at home protested. Freer trade and harder bondage advanced together, and the chapters that follow carry that strain into taxation, racial boundaries, hierarchy, labour and law.