A remarkable intellectual history of the slave revolts that made the modern revolutionary era Out of the grey expanse of official records in Spanish, English and French, The Common Wind provides a gripping and colorful account of inter-continental communication networks that tied together the free and enslaved masses of the new world. A powerful «history from below,» this book follows those «rumors of emancipation» and the people who spread them, bringing to life the protagonists in the revolution against slavery. Though it's been said that The Common Wind is «the most original dissertation ever written,» and is credited for having «opened up the Black Atlantic with a rigor and a commitment to the power of written words,» the PhD project has remained unpublished for thirty-two years, since it's completion at Duke University in 1986. Now, after decades of achieving wide acclaim by leading historians of slavery and the new world, it will finally be released by Verso for the first time, with a foreword from Marcus Rediker.
Оглавление
Julius S. Scott. The Common Wind
THE. COMMON. WIND
Contents
Foreword. Marcus Rediker
Preface
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
1 “Pandora’s Box” The Masterless Caribbean at the End of the Eighteenth Century
2 “Negroes in Foreign Bottoms” Sailors, Slaves, and Communication
3 “The Suspence Is Dangerous in a Thousand Shapes” News, Rumor, and Politics on the Eve of the Haitian Revolution
4 “Ideas of Liberty Have Sunk So Deep” Communication and Revolution, 1789–93
5 “Know Your True Interests” Saint-Domingue and the Americas, 1793–1800
Epilogue
Notes. Preface
1. “Pandora’s Box”
2. “Negroes in Foreign Bottoms”
3. “The Suspence Is Dangerous in a Thousand Shapes”
4. “Ideas of Liberty Have Sunk So Deep”
5. “Know Your True Interests”
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index
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Afro-American Currents in the
Age of the Haitian Revolution
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he projected, “here is not only a place of refuge in the first instance, but in a moment the Town might be laid in ashes.”34
As Balcarres knew very well, cities had furnished places of refuge for plantation dissidents for generations. By mid-century, the larger towns attracted many runaway slaves from the surrounding countryside. In 1744, police authorities in Kingston attacked this problem by restricting the huts in outlying areas of the city, inhabited by free Negroes and the runaways they protected, to only one door, and compounds of more than four huts to one common entrance.35 The earliest runaway notices for Saint-Domingue, printed in the newly founded Gazette de Saint Domingue in 1764, show that runaway slaves in the northern parishes of the French colony sensed a greater prospect of making a successful escape in Cap Français and its environs than either in the mountains or near the beckoning border of the neighboring Spanish colony.36
