The Maroons of Santo Domingo in the Age of Revolutions: Adaptation and Evasion, 1783–1800. Issue 1 (2nd April 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Yingling, Charlton W.
• Is Part Of: History workshop journal. Volume 79:Issue 1(2015)
• Page Start: 25
• Page End: 51
• Publication Date: 2015-04-02
• Subjects: History -- Periodicals; Social history -- Periodicals; 905
• DOI: 10.1093/hwj/dbv010
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1363-3554

Abstract

Abstract : In the 1780s a large, longstanding community of maroons (runaway slaves) subsisting in the mountainous borderlands dividing Spanish Santo Domingo and French Saint-Domingue on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola began peace negotiations that ultimately both flummoxed colonial officials and extracted favourable terms. On the surface the maroons' eventual acceptance of Spanish rule and Catholic tutelage to avoid re-enslavement seemed to reintegrate them structurally and curtail their liberties. However, this deal expediently provided the maroons a guise of compliant conversion and protected subjecthood that allowed them to pursue material well-being, mediated mobility, and socio-political openings. By the 1790s the Haitian Revolution rocked the island and challenged slave-holding paradigms of the Americas as the intertwined French Revolution presented alternatives ideas of citizenship and equality. This, combined with Spanish reaction, offered these pragmatic maroons new leverage to elude state power rather than approach it, just as maroons across the Americas did to pursue their own non-state guarantees of freedom. By the early 1800s the maroons had largely regained their non-state space to much imperial distress. These suspicions of state power even compelled them to baulk at later affiliation with Haiti, the world's first black republic. Their savvy navigations of the transformative schisms between royalism and republicanism, religiosity and secularism, and slavery and freedom demonstrate an evasive strategy common to maroons across the Americas. From social and imperial margins these maroons confounded European constraints and geopolitics, illuminating alternative paths of polity and autonomy that influenced historical trajectories in the Caribbean.