At the time of the Revolution, Great Britain had many more colonies in North America than the 13 that revolted and became the United States. As I understand it there were no special political or economic ties between these 13 that did not exist more broadly across all of the colonies (and in fact this lack of cross-colonial identity was a major problem for the Revolution and the early United States). Indeed, it seems to me like the economic links between New York and the Caribbean were much stronger than those between New York and, say, Georgia or the Carolinas.
I have heard it explained that the Canadian colonies did not join the Revolution because the primarily French Catholic character of Quebec separated them from their Protestant neighbors in New England, and the other colonies in Canada were too sparsely populated for a rebellion to succeed.
Fair enough, but that doesn't explain why the Caribbean colonies-- with their strong economic ties to the merchant cities of the Mid-Atlantic and New England-- didn't join the Revolution or become part of the United States after independence. I wondered if the Caribbean colonies' deeper reliance on slavery or more agrarian character might have made the difference, but in that case, wouldn't the same arguments have applied to the southern colonies on the continent? Why is Georgia one of the 13 original states, but not Jamaica or Bermuda?
There are two very simple answers: Sugar, and slavery.
Sugar first: Britain’s West Indian colonies were its most valuable. Sugar was a highly prized product, and British West Indian colonies were major producers of sugar. As the Trinidadian historian Eric Williams noted, Jamaica in the mid eighteenth century was more valuable than the thirteen mainland colonies •combined.. Under the Navigation Acts those colonies had a guaranteed market in Britain which they did not want to lose. Their decline from prosperity came in the mid—nineteenth century, when Britain adopted a policy of free trade, and West Indian sugar couldn’t compete with Brazilian and Cuban sugar on the British market,let alone any other.
During the eighteenth century Britain and France fought a series of wars for control of the sugar islands. This meant a substantial military, and naval presence, with naval stations in Antigua, Barbados, and, most importantly, Jamaica.
Sugar was cultivated, and processed by black slave labor. Jamaica, in particular, faced significant numbers of slave revolts, and every other colony faced servile revolts from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.
In consequence, Britain maintained substantial garrisons in the colonies. The local planters, and merchants, depended on the garrisons and naval stations for defense from the enslaved. In consequence, while planters, and merchants, in the West Indies shared many of the complaints of their fellow colonial subjects on mainland North America, as attested by Edward Long, in his History of Jamaica, which was highly polemical, in 1774, and Bryan Edwards, in his History of the West Indies, in 1803, they did not dare to revolt.
The imperial government also had at its disposal the ability to abolish slavery. This would have subjected the planter/merchant class to armed force, the slaves possessed machetes, from both above and below. The white population of the colonies was inadequate to defend itself from servile revolt.
In consequence of all this, regardless of what white West Indians felt or believed, they could not revolt against the authority of the Crown. Their silence during the American Revolution followed from this.