This chapter examines the twin threats of invasion and insurrection that most English tropical colonies faced because of dwindling white migration and the English reliance on bondage and forced migration to populate and build the tropical empire. It focuses on the period between 1675 and 1720, when a series of large-scale slave insurrection plots began to rock English settlements in the Atlantic. It shows how the very real threats of invasion and insurrection shaped these colonies and how the English navigated these twin threats. Ultimately, English settlers and governors in the Caribbean turned to brutal and draconian policies of slave management to maintain their colonies, while English agents in Asia and Africa were forced to rely on others to help them control the enslaved and defend their factories and settlements. Yet, by the end of the seventeenth century, the English in both the East and West Indies had begun to tentatively explore arming the enslaved, turning to their non-European bondsmen to build, populate, and even help defend the empire. Armed slaves became agents of empire.

This chapter examines the effort against the establishment of the West India Regiments in the 1790s. The spectre of insurrection in Saint-Domingue was a constant presence and critics of the regiments frequently likened them to Haitian soldiers, formerly enslaved insurgents, Maroons and other ‘brigands’ that opposed the British across the Caribbean in this period. Yet, White West Indians were not opposed to the arming of African men per se but favoured the use of irregular ‘black shot’, a form of military service that remained constrained by the bonds of slavery. In this way, the chapter not only explores the deeply held prejudices and phobias that made the West India Regiments so feared but also the contradictions in White West Indian and broader pro-slavery thought revealed by attitudes to military service.

Saint-Domingue was at the center of the Age of Atlantic Revolutions, because people enslaved in this French Caribbean colony launched the Haitian Revolution, which ended slavery, defeated French colonialism, and created Haiti, the second independent nation-state in the Americas. Beyond this extraordinary achievement, the factors that helped bring about the Haitian Revolution were also important in other aspects of the Atlantic revolutionary age. Saint-Domingue had the largest enslaved population in the Caribbean and developed a white superiority ideology that was unique in the region. It had an unusually large free population of color, with leaders who tried to claim their civil rights. The colony’s planters had a unique preoccupation with slave poisoning, which they traced to an escaped slave named Macandal. The colony experienced unique environmental stresses, including an anthrax outbreak that killed thousands of people. Saint-Domingue’s sugar and molasses tempted North Americans to break British colonial trade laws, which helped produce the American Revolution. The colony also led the Caribbean in the capitalistic production of sugar and coffee, which were at the heart of Europe’s consumer revolution. Saint-Domingue’s indigo dye and cotton helped launch industrial textile manufacturing.

An examination of Maroon cultural, festive and political practices, their victorious militarized Black masculinity and their wider transimperial significance as figures of resistance or reconciliation, as images of the the red-coated Maroon circulated across imperial networks

The first chapter examines the changing landscape of slavery and freedom that developed in North America in the revolutionary era. It explores how and why opportunities for enslaved people to permanently escape bondage expanded significantly between the colonial era and the early nineteenth century. The chapter begins with a discussion of how slave flight was characterized during the colonial period, underscoring the informal nature of sancturary spaces and the lack of any spaces of "formal freedom" throughout the continent, as slavery was legally sanctioned everywhere. It then delves into the major transitions that occurred in the Age of Revolutions, with the abolition of slavery in the Northern United States, British Canada, and Mexico; as well as the wave of manumissions in the southern states that greatly bolstered urban free black communities. By the mid-1830s, enslaved people who found themselves trapped in the second slavery of the American South saw potential "spaces of freedom" in every direction: informal freedom within urban areas in the South itself; semi-formal (contested) freedom in the Northern United States; and formal freedom beyond the borders of the United States.

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 examines the vexed history of Trelawney Town, Jamaica, from its grant by treaty in 1738 to Jamaica’s self-emancipated Maroons until its expropriation by the colonial state after the so-called Second Maroon War (1795–6).Maps provide evidence of the different ways Maroons and their colonial enemies understood territory and their relationship to it.As an imperial practice, cartography both determines state-sanctioned boundaries and distributes the ideological beliefs that enforce them.But it sometimes also records evidence of the way Maroons inhabited their territory. Close examination of pencil notations on maps produced to establish the boundaries of Trelawney Town and its environs reveal the refusal of Maroons to acknowledge their territory as a bounded space. With the inevitable encroachment of patented estates, they rebelled to assert their right to inhabit their territory as they saw fit. Through guile and terror, the colonial state prevailed against them, expropriating their territory and transporting the Trelawney Town Maroons to Nova Scotia. Later maps show the parcelling of their territory into 300-acre plots secured by a central military barracks. So prevails the proprietary space of capital: by force.

This chapter breaks from standard views on the right of free movement to argue that illegal migration is a form of impure infrapolitical resistance to global poverty. The argument hinges on a comparison with fugitive slaves. If these people did nothing wrong by escaping from slavery, then illegal socioeconomic migrants cannot be said to be acting wrongly. Both cases are characterised by individuals being subjected to extreme domination that they have no reasonable chance of overturning.

It then considers objections: that this is a case of someone acting on the right of necessity, but this is not convincing because it fails to consider the relationship between poverty and unjust social institutions; this does not describe the actual thought process of migrants, but this is not an ethnography of illegal immigrants so the objection is irrelevant and, moreover, it does describe the thoughts of some illegal immigrants; finally, there is an objection that the state must have the right to exclude illegal migrants otherwise institutions that people have reason to value would be jeopardised. This privileges the desires of the perpetrators and beneficiaries of injustice over the victims.