In England's Islands in a Sea of Troubles, his welcome addition to the literature covering the islands associated with the English crown, David Cressy provides an account of Guernsey, Jersey, the Isle of Man, Scilly, the Isle of Wight, and others in the seventeenth century. In doing so, he addresses an omission that he rightly identifies in the attempt to write a British history, or a history of the islands of what is loosely referred to as the North Atlantic archipelago. Since the 1970s, historians, led by John Pocock, have proclaimed the value of a history that encompasses all the elements of the dominions brought together under the rule of the kings of England, Scotland, and Ireland, yet they have signally failed to make much reference to these smaller islands. This omission is most glaring for the seventeenth century. With this book, Cressy has made a significant impact in addressing this gap in the literature.

In doing so, Cressy ranges across these islands’ social, economic, religious, political, and military experiences. He demonstrates some of the same ability to deliver an accessible narrative arc across a complex subject while engaging with complex historiography and theory as we have seen in recent impressive outings on the subjects of gypsies and saltpeter. Cressy tells stories rich in detail, demonstrating the impact that the conflicts of the century had in all of these islands, however small. He begins with Lundy, a tiny island that highlights this theme, in its capacity to feature during the wars of mid-century as, for example, a base for Thomas Bushell, the entrepreneurial royalist mining engineer.

The underlying narrative is one of peripheral and isolated corners of the king's dominions that faced centralizing pressures from the metropolitan core, bringing growing uniformity. Reformation and religious change and the violence of civil war were important drivers of this process. In developing these arguments about distinctiveness eroded, Cressy draws usefully on island studies. Important lessons can be learned from thinking about patterns of (inter)dependence with mainland territories, when economic and social conditions have changed dramatically. The islands that are the focus of the book may at times have felt isolated and peripheral—the general focus of Cressy's writing—but they were also at times more central and better connected than parts of “mainland” territories. Even with improvements in roads and other infrastructure, travel across water might be more straightforward than travel across land, and the islands in Cressy's book were in many cases important nodes in networks of trade and ideas. This could be given greater prominence; it is an issue that appears most clearly in Cressy's chapter on the economy, but even there, it is significant that (for example) in the cases of Guernsey and Jersey trade with England is discussed at length, but while Cressy acknowledges the predominance of trade into Normandy and Brittany, its extent needs to be restated. If in the 1660s, Jersey and Guernsey could be shipping approximately a quarter of a million pairs of stockings into France annually, and barely any into England, then it was an ease of connection across and beyond the islands of the North Atlantic Archipelago that was a continuing distinctive feature of the islands considered here.

England's Islands in a Sea of Troubles benefits from Cressy's wide reading in relevant historiography, and especially for the Channel Islands a good coverage of English primary source materials, especially those representing central government activity. Here, where Cressy's reading in secondary and primary sources is most extensive, he is often impressively and characteristically sure-footed. Cressy's book is perhaps inevitably less well based in local primary sources, with some consulted directly in Jersey and Guernsey but for example none in the Isle of Man.

Cressy himself highlights the argument made by early exponents of the so-called “British” history that Anglocentric narratives and explanatory devices are unsatisfactory. And yet, Cressy's account in England's Islands remains in many ways an instinctively Anglocentric account, focused on relationships with the English core. Perhaps this is unsurprising, given the strengthening emphasis of the orthodox historiography on growing centripetal forces—whether in Mark Stoyle's “ethnic” history of the wars of mid-century as a struggle of Englishness against “strangers” (Soldiers and Strangers: An Ethnic History of the English Civil War [2005]) or in the quickening pace of English state-formation identified by Mike Braddick (State Formation in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1700 [2000]). Still, in the face of the power of the English New Model Army and Parliament's other forces, or the agencies of the English state, or the social and cultural power of Englishness, whether in the 1650s or the 1690s there are limited signs of a concerted campaign to erase the difference represented by these islands’ societies, cultures, polities, and constitutional and legal systems.

It must be considered in what ways these were, in fact, England's islands when they were in many cases culturally, socially, geographically and economically so strongly associated elsewhere. Finally, this complexity is something Cressy accepts: it represents a continuing manifestation, he proposes, of the islands’ value and status, however confused and misunderstood this might often have been. Islands like Guernsey, Jersey, and the Isle of Man are left, for him, as “strange, separate, and perversely independent” (301). It is therefore unsurprising that central to the book is an account of the use by the English of the islands as prisons—such as for William Prynne, who spent time in Mont Orgueil Castle on Jersey. For Cressy, these cases illustrate the ways in which the islands’ geographical and cultural distance and isolation and their distinctive legal position offered opportunities to English regimes that wanted to deal with opponents who might generate publicity but could not be executed.

England's Islands in a Sea of Troubles is to be welcomed for its effective introduction of island narratives into the wider sphere of seventeenth-century history and reminder of the complexity that continued to exist within these territories subject to the English crown. Cressy's book will undoubtedly prompt further useful work on the communities he describes and their many important interconnections.