Strategic Ties: Family, Land, and Plantation Connections in Maroon Jamaica
Date of Award
Fall 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
African American Studies
First Advisor
Rugemer, Edward
Abstract
“Strategic Ties” explores Jamaican Maroon communities’ social, political, and economic interactions with the larger colonial society across the long nineteenth century. The dissertation delves into the Maroons’ understanding of their status, especially in relation to other Black people—enslaved and free— beyond their communities. Despite traditional narratives of Maroon isolation in the wake of their 1739 treaties with the British Crown, I demonstrate that the Maroons were an integral part of a robust social matrix that included other Black Jamaicans. My research traces these social networks, emphasizing the mobility that Maroons had and how this mobility facilitated their engagement with other Afro-Jamaicans. My work demonstrates how these ties were not purely social; the Maroons enacted strategic engagement with Jamaica's different communities in the realms of politics and economics. Their survival required that their alliances be flexible in the face of a violent slaveholding society that enacted ruthless reprisals against Black people who threatened the stability of the colony. My dissertation draws on my extensive archival research in Jamaica, England, and the United States. I consulted archives created by colonial administrators, engaging with sources such as the Jamaican Assembly records, military records, Colonial Office documents, land petitions, and other sources. I “read against the grain” to center the actions and experiences of Black people in my dissertation, accentuating aspects of their lives that colonial officials missed or ignored. Through an analysis of the quotidian relationships that these communities formed, I argue that Maroons understood the tenuous nature of their freedom and made decisions to form bonds with enslaved people as they saw fit rather than purely following colonial guidelines about such matters. While most scholars only consider the history of the Maroons up to emancipation, my work reveals that the Maroons’ actions remained integral to political debates in the post-emancipation era. The Maroons were astutely aware of how colonial politics affected their lives after the abolition of slavery. As tensions developed between British officials in the metropole and local colonial officials in Jamaica over the running of the colony after 1834, my work shows how the Maroons navigated the dynamics of power as they encountered the new forced-labor society that shaped their lives in the post-emancipation period. Using correspondence between local officials, colonial officials, and Maroon leaders, as well as official surveyors' reports and Maroon petitions to the colonial state, I show how, despite efforts by the colonial state to assimilate Maroon populations into the larger Black working class, Maroons maintained their communal land throughout the nineteenth century, as they do until this day. I demonstrate how Maroons strategically deployed their understanding of the 1739 treaty to refuse efforts to tax their community and to demand access to more land. As I trace these intra-racial social networks from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century, I ask: What did the Maroons’ day-to-day life look like? How did Jamaica’s geography facilitate interactions among the island’s Black communities? How did Maroon communities’ particular needs shape their relationships with enslaved people? And, most importantly, what did it mean to these different communities to achieve self-determination and to survive? This is not just the story of a small group on a small island; Jamaican Maroons' actions shaped and expanded the meaning of freedom throughout the Atlantic World, extending it beyond notions of autonomous polity formation. They launched a practice of liberatory living that became a model for African-descended people in the Atlantic world.
Recommended Citation
Hall, Alycia, "Strategic Ties: Family, Land, and Plantation Connections in Maroon Jamaica" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1209.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1209
