Chapter 7 deals with the violence unfolding at the local level and with the cobreros’ extrajudicial forms of mobilization in tandem with legal actions. Here the story of legal action merges with one of extrajudicial actions such as fugitivity and more violent action and shows how judicial and extrajudicial actions were entangled with each other. Cosme’s letters from Madrid also provided legitimacy to the cobreros’ extrajudicial actions by directly informing the community that the king’s edicts favored their freedom. Factoring into the escalating threat of violence and political conflict on the ground was the broader Atlantic context of revolution in Saint Domingue and war with the British during the 1790s. Imperial designs in this period seem to conflict with colonial ones in a triangulation of conflict that included the cobreros’ actions.

The chapter examines the distinctiveness of this composite freedom suit; the unorthodox Afro descendant community that took it to the highest imperial tribunal in Madrid; and the larger historical context that triggered the legal action in the early 1780s. It lays out the significance of the notions of “collective freedom” and “natives of a pueblo” deriving from colonial customary practices and from political, social, and juridical discourses rooted in the Spanish Atlantic world here reworked into novel proposals that challenged the approaching tsunami of slavery expansion in Cuba and the Atlantic world amid the Age of Revolutions, and it even presented a colonial alternative to slave-based plantation and extractive regimes. Linkages are made between the local, colonial, and imperial levels in which legal and political mobilizations unfolded. The chapter also surveys the various historiographies of slavery, race, Afro descendants, Indians, and law, politics and society that intersect in this study and discusses the sources and archives on which the study is based.

Chapter 4, “‘A Wandering Maniac’: Sojourner Truth’s Demonic Marronage” turns to a prophet seldom associated with the Caribbean. Yet Sojourner Truth, who was born in 1797 in the predominantly Dutch Ulster County, grew up in a world shaped by Atlantic empires; steeped in African, Native American, Caribbean, Spanish, Dutch, and French histories; and shaking with the tremors of the Haitian Revolution. Her first language was Dutch, her early spiritual beliefs were African, and her community was influenced by transatlantic and Caribbean channels of trade, labor, and revolution. This chapter examines the energy practices of Truth’s creolized milieu within a broader discourse on Truth’s celebrated mobility, historicizing her fugitivity within a transnational history of female marronage throughout the Americas. This hemispheric history of wandering evokes what Sylvia Wynter has understood as the “demonic grounds” of Black women’s liberation. Suturing the demonic (an energy force that emerges from Wynter’s critique of nineteenth-century physics) with Caribbean practices of marronage (a kinetic practice of flight against the immobilizing energy demands of chattel slavery), Truth, I argue, not only is an Atlantic subject but also expands critical understandings of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Caribbean philosophy and specifically Black women’s energy in the Americas.

The American Revolution had a significant impact on the non-British islands in the Caribbean. Especially during the first three years of the revolutionary war, the French colonies of Martinique and Saint-Domingue and the Dutch island of St. Eustatius played an active role in furnishing arms and ammunition to the Patriots. The subsequent formal declarations of war by France and Spain against Great Britain moved the war’s center of gravity to the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. Combined French and Spanish naval power there more than matched that of Britain, leading to the conquest of several British islands. In those islands that revolved around plantation agriculture based on slavery, the war created military possibilities for the growing group of free men of color and, by reducing food supplies, induced marronage. Free and enslaved nonwhites thus engaged in their own quest for freedom and equality in the shadow of the North American independence war.

Displacement and genocide, rather than fully eliminating the Haitian presence in Dominican territory, fomented new forms of contestation, tension, and conflict. Refugees’ prolonged patterns of contestation and resistance contributed to tense relations along the border throughout the 1940s. This chapter details ethnic Haitians’ methods of irregular resistance, which included secret farms, livestock-theft, the right of return, and in some rare cases, arson and vandalism. These incidents provide a window into some refugees’ political consciousness surrounding genocide, displacement, lost citizenship, and lost homeland. The chapter argues that ethnic Haitians challenged Trujillo’s territorial sovereignty and Dominicanization through land contestation, arson, and clandestine farming. Of these phenomena, clandestine farming was the most enduring and widespread form of resistance because it was the least dangerous and also functioned as a desperate survival strategy. The genocide continued throughout the 1940s in the form of isolated killings by which Trujillo’s government enforced the parallel policies of a closed border and Dominicanization. This chapter considers the ways in which desperate, irregular social contestation through nighttime farming and cross-border livestock-theft represented disturbing, latter-day echoes of colonial marronage.

This essay examines representations of maroons and marronage in nineteenth-century African American literature. It argues that maroons – enslaved people who fled from bondage and self-exiled to remote places like swamps, forests, and mountains – complicate the familiar notion of the U.S. South as a place of unfreedom for African Americans during the era of slavery. Like maroons themselves, whose lives necessitated concealment, marronage has often been overlooked in nineteenth-century African American literature because it does not comport with a teleology of freedom-seeking that originates in the South and moves unidirectionally toward the supposed beacons of freedom in the North and Canada. It reveals that enslaved people who participated in acts of marronage created spaces of freedom within the slaveholding South, spaces that linked them to diasporic traditions of enslaved resistance via marronage throughout the further souths of the Caribbean and Latin America.

This essay explores the legacy and afterlife of François Macandal, a man who escaped enslavement on an eighteenth-century plantation in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. His fame as a poisoner and immortal rebel persist over time and space, reflecting transcaribbean associations of fetish making with spiritual and physical resistance on the plantation. Stories of Macandal and the fetish objects he crafted, also called macandals, continued to circulate in nineteenth-century Louisiana as one of many narratives of slave uprising and Revolution in the Americas. One example of the reach of Macandal’s story is the 1892 novel, Le Macandal: Épisode de l’Insurrection des Noirs à St. Domingue, published in New Orleans, Louisiana, by Marie-Joséphine Augustin. This work is part of a larger archive of how Macandal and his macandals shaped the literary realm. His story moves across genres arguing that Macandal is simultaneously the man, the fetish object, and the story in its many forms.

Chapter 5 analyzes slave societies in the Leeward Islands by focusing on slave law and communities of free people of color. Within the microregion, slave laws and free communities brought together different colonies in different ways. New trans-imperial networks formed on the basis of the growing population of free people of color traversing the region, forming connections across colonial and imperial borders and strengthening the integration and communication between nonwhite communities. At the institutional level, legal codes became a crucial arena for contesting authority between imperial capitals and colonial territories. Such laws were also prime examples of the adaptation and translation of codes and practices taking place across different colonies, ultimately creating a number of legal norms that spanned imperial borders. Colonial legal codes functioned both as a force of institutional oppression and, with time, as an arena for pushing back against such oppression. The chapter also analyzes the practice of maritime marronage, as enslaved individuals threw off their shackles and fled across the water to freedom or greater autonomy within a different imperial jurisdiction.

Transnational social movements are social organisations and processes that reach across borders to unite social movements. They are a likely platform for civil resistance, understood as organised but non-violent resistance to injustice that steps outside the realm of accepted political discourse. This is highly contextual. The labour movement in the Global North, for example, does not regularly engage in civil resistance because it operates within liberal democratic norms, while in the Global South trade unionism often carries with it extreme risks.

Transnational social movements are potential sources of solidarity amongst the global poor. This because they generate solidarity amongst distant strangers. This is not solidarity derived from abstract political principles, but derived from the shared experience of oppression. This shared experience need not be uniform; it is necessarily diverse.

The chapter looks at two test cases, the labour movement and indigenous rights movement, as examples of just-seeking and injustice-evading resistance. It concludes by examining criticism that civil resistance does not capture the urgency of global poverty.

The location of New Orleans constitutes a paradox, for a city on this site is both inevitable and impossible, the boundaries between land and water ever changeful, and human settlement always understood as unsettled – that is, provisional and an ongoing project of problem solving. The settlers’ attitudes toward swamps in general determined their understanding of the particular city that sprang up among them. The swamps, they thought, were a source of deadly disease, an endless hiding place for smugglers and runaway slaves, and it thus carried moral, political and even racial overtones, as reflected in the writing of the first historian of New Orleans, Charles Gayarré and in other early commentary on the city.