This song excerpt from the Haitian Vodou religious tradition recites a roll call for the lwa (spirits) from various African ethnic groups to gather, partake in offerings, and be recognized during a ceremony.¹ In Vodou, the lwa are divided into nanchons representing the African “nations”; however, in the song above, we see a coming together of culturally and regionally disparate spirits – the Rada (Arada) from the Bight of Benin, Mondongues and Moussondis of West Central Africa, and the Ammine (Mina), who originated from areas between the Bight of Benin and the Gold Coast. This assembly of distinct African lwa is an instructive lens through which we can interrogate the historical nature of interactions and relationships between diverse enslaved Africans of colonial Haiti, then called Saint-Domingue. Though divided by their geographic, religious, cultural, and linguistic origins, enslaved Africans in Saint-Domingue shared in the experience of forced migration and subjugation under a violent, repressive colonial regime. African captives were the majority of Saint-Domingue’s enslaved population; they retained consciousness about and historical memory of polities, economies, and social structures that existed on the African continent since many were victims or veterans of political and religious coups, civil wars, and inter-state military conflicts that were directly and indirectly connected to the trans-Atlantic slave trade (Thornton Reference Thompson1991). Africans struggled to re-create themselves and re-create home in the Americas by relying on their knowledge bases to make sense of their circumstances and build solidarity with each other to ensure survival.

Solidarity initially formed among the enslaved population during the Middle Passage, then during “seasoning” process of introducing new African captives to the plantation system. The collective need for enslaved people to survive the material conditions of plantation society required enculturation into the structure of expected norms and behaviors, while at the same time offering one another protection from retribution for small transgressions against the labor system (Casimir Reference Casimir2001, Reference Casimir and Gaffield2015). Their micro-level interactions with each other in the colony helped to cultivate, over time, an accumulated sense of collective consciousness, solidarity and relationship networks, and power to organize resistance against subjugation (Lovejoy Reference Lovejoy1997). Aradas, Mondongues, Minas, and the multitude of other African captives who survived the Middle Passage indelibly shaped the colony’s landscape economically through their involuntary labor value; socially with their network relationships, cultural productions, and sacred practices; and politically through the articulation of political expressions from the African continent that re-emerged as resistance, revolts, marronnage and fugitive slave communities, and the Haitian Revolution.

The central argument of Rituals, Runaways, and the Haitian Revolution: Collective Action in the African Diaspora is that the web of networks between African and creole runaways, those who were enslaved, and a small number of free people of color built through rituals and marronnage was a key aspect to building an emerging sense of racial solidarity that helped make the Haitian Revolution successful. Shared African ethnic identity among the “Kongo,” “Rada,” and “Nagô” insurgent bands was important for facilitating trust through common language, political ideologies, or religious orientation. However, this book also brings attention to racial solidarity – cooperation among individuals beyond their cultural, linguistic, or political boundaries – as a strategically important aspect of collective consciousness. I explicate collective consciousness, and racial solidarity, by exploring the complicated relationships between groups previously believed to be politically and socially opposed or uncooperative. False dichotomies between slaves and runaway maroons; Africans and creoles; and short-term petit and permanent grand maroons are linked to the earliest enslaved blacks present on the island. When Hispanicized black ladinos escaped slavery soon after their early sixteenth-century arrival, Spanish colonists cast them as wild beasts or cimarróns. Colonists preferred continent-born Africans, who they called bozales, and perceived them as more docile than ladinos due to the lack of exposure to European lifeways – only for African Wolofs to stage the island’s first black-led revolt in 1521. Recent scholarship suggests the Spanish colonial definition of cimarrón conceals the Taíno origins of the term simaran, which signifies the ongoing action of an arrow in flight and perhaps symbolizes “the intentionality of … enslaved or colonized people extricating themselves from conditions of oppression.”² The black ladinos and African bozales who labored alongside the Taíno in Spanish mines and on sugar plantations, and collaborated with them in marronnage and rebellions, likely would have adopted the Taíno understanding of the term cimarrón, engendering a solidarity-based tradition of resistance. Yet, colonial histories and memory of resistance in colonial Haiti continue to inform conceptions of an inherent binary between the ladino or creole versus the African bozale, the runaway maroon versus the slave, and free and unfree. These erroneous presumptions about the nature of black people’s claim-staking to freedom and the relationships between these categories deserve correction. By problematizing these dichotomized categories of human actors, this book presents a broader conceptualization of participation in resistance activity that pushes us beyond silences around and disavowals of enslaved people’s social and political agency (Trouillot Reference Trouillot1995), and centers collective actions as the source of structural transformations.

It is important to provide nuance to the process by which racial solidarity developed, especially in such a highly stratified colonial society as Saint-Domingue. Racial solidarity between enslaved creoles and Africans was largely situational, but as the 1791 uprising and war for independence unfolded, it was the liberation impulses generated from maroons and African rebels that pushed creole leadership to take a collective stance against white control of the nation. Solidarity was also constructed through the interactive processes involved in marronnage, which was considered an egregious offense because runaways’ self-defined freedom entailed a counteraction to the logic of racial slavery and disrupted plantation work gangs’ labor output. After a person or a group of people set off as fugitives, those who remained on plantations safeguarded the missing runaway by concealing their absence; conversely, runaways at times hid on plantations and took shelter in bondspeople’s housing quarters. Most maroons were continent-born Africans who often escaped with members of their ethnic group, but there were situations in which it was more beneficial to flee with others. People from various backgrounds and experiences within the plantation system could bring together a wider range of knowledge, resources, and skills that could aid in escape and rebellion. For example, there was significant ethnic diversity on southwestern Saint-Domingue plantations, including enslaved people trafficked from Jamaica, meaning there was likely a heterogeneous resistance mounted by the Platons maroon kingdom against French incursions in 1792.³ When Toussaint Louverture enacted strict labor codes that resembled slavery during his tenure as colonial leader and governor, many of the newly emancipated cultivators constantly rebelled and escaped plantations as maroons to send the message that forced labor would not be tolerated under any circumstances. Finally, it was largely continent-born Africans and maroons who led the resistance against Napoleon Bonaparte’s army in 1802, forcing mobilization toward independence.

The rebels’ resistance was not limited to military fighting, but they also resisted the prevailing Atlantic world economic order by creating what Haitian sociologist Jean Casimir (Reference Casimir2001, Reference Casimir and Gaffield2015, Reference Casimir2020) calls the “counter-plantation” system of family landownership networks, subsistence farming, and the proliferation of Vodou – all of which were the foundation of the country’s sense of popular sovereignty in the independence era. These ontological shifts and collective efforts “from below” negated white-dominated capitalist structures and demanded the reconceptualization of freedom, citizenship, property, and identity on a wider scale. Aspects of the counter-plantation logic have antecedents in the colonial era: participation in the sacred rituals that eventually coalesced into Vodou and micro-level “sociogenic” marronnage were “shaped by cognition, metaphysics, egalitarianism, hope for refuge, and the experiences of the masses” and were grounded in various African ethnic sensibilities. These practices made possible “sovereign” marronnage, the macro-level project of emancipation and nation-building during the Haitian Revolution, which was in part shaped by an emerging racial identity that was a necessary component to contesting the inherent contradictions of white supremacy and Enlightenment ideals (Roberts Reference Roberts2015: 117, chapter 3). Once the 1805 Haitian Constitution was ratified, it explicitly stated that all of the nation’s citizens would be generally regarded as black people.⁴ The Haitian revolutionaries had subverted colonial era norms and policies that enslaved and oppressed individuals according to race, birth origin, skin color, or status, and affirmed blackness as their singular national and racial identity.

Slavery in Saint-Domingue was codified into law by the Code Noir, which attempted to constrain the lives of bondspeople in nearly every imaginable way. Though planters and enslaved people alike oftentimes ignored the Code Noir, it dictated that Africans and their descendants would be baptized as Christians, it prohibited the enslaved from bearing arms or buying and selling items at market, and it forbade them from participating in any civil or criminal matters. The Code Noir did not officially recognize marriages between enslaved people and determined children’s slave status according to that of the mother, meaning parents had no reproductive rights over their children or immediate familial networks. One way to mediate these social controls, or to disavow them altogether, was through marronnage. Whether they were seeking to permanently escape – grand marronnage – or needed a brief respite from the brutal plantation regime – petit marronnage – runaways relied on knowledge, tools, resources, and relationships within their immediate grasp to facilitate their escape. Marronnage afforded a flexibility of movement, familiarity with landscape, and the maintenance or construction of social ties between maroons, slaves, and free people that in some ways diminished the differences between these categories of social actors – especially in the face of increasing racial discrimination and repression. These groups were often in contact, and individuals could move between the states of being in marronnage, slavery, and freedom at different points of their lives; it was not impossible for an enslaved person to become a maroon, return to slavery, then become legally free. For example, recent research suggests Toussaint Louverture did just that, escaping temporarily on more than one occasion during his youth then eventually earning his freedom decades before the Haitian Revolution. Jean-François Papillon, and his romantic partner Charlotte, had been a fugitive at the time of the northern plain uprising for three years.⁵ We may never know whom they encountered, what they discussed, or if they were aware of events occurring in France and the implications for Saint-Domingue. But we can speculate, as this book will in later chapters, that Jean-François, Charlotte, and many others used marronnage to cultivate relationships that would help them to organize the revolt. To be clear, this book is not attempting to assert that the masses of insurrectionists were maroons, a claim that has been debated enough. However, many maroons hid in plain sight and were often indistinguishable from those who were enslaved; therefore, maroons conceivably were present and participatory in the revolution. The influence of marronnage on the Haitian revolutionaries was also exemplified when the “indigenous” army under Jean-Jacques Dessalines named the newly independent country “Haiti,” reclaiming the island’s original name Ayiti from the Taínos, who, along with enslaved Africans, were arguably the first maroons of the Atlantic world.

Marronnage itself can be considered, in general terms, as an act and process of reclamation and redirection. When enslaved people moved about, voluntarily walking or running away from plantations, they not only made internal decisions regarding their reasons for leaving, or to where and with whom they would escape; runaways were reclaiming parts of their lives that enslavers intended to wholly control and own. Enslavers extracted labor value and wealth from enslaved people, but they also looked to extract intangible aspects of enslaved people’s consciousness and identity, including their cultural connections to a homeland; time and energy; sense of self and dignity; power and self-control; social relationships; and usage of land and resources. Uncovering the ways maroons exhibited collective consciousness through acts of reclamation and redirection, especially considering they did not leave behind writings of their own, requires an inter- or multi-disciplinary approach that can help interpret archival data sources in unconventional ways. Jean Fouchard’s (Reference Fouchard1972) The Haitian Maroons, Carolyn Fick’s (Reference Fick1990) The Making of Haiti, and Michael Gomez’s (1995) Exchanging Our Country Marks provide methodological insights and models for subversively reading marronnage and runaway slave advertisements as a lens through which to understand identity and cultural dynamics, as well as collective action, among enslaved populations. The present study employs protest event content analysis (Koopmans and Rucht Reference Koopmans, Rucht, Klandermans and Staggenborg2002; Hutter Reference Hutter and della Porta2014) of the thousands of fugitive advertisements originally published in Saint-Domingue’s newspapers, primarily Les Affiches américaines, and draws on insights from Black/African Diaspora Studies⁶ and the sociology of social movements to unveil hints and clues about escapees’ innermost worlds. Rather than accept the conditions of enslavement that prescribed social death and alienation for racialized chattel laborers, maroons and their actions during flight initiated significant changes in their daily lived experiences.

This book offers a look at how, where, when, and with whom African women, men, and children collectively resisted enslavement before the Haitian Revolution, giving us a deeper knowledge of the patterns of resistance that contributed to the Revolution. Additionally, our understanding of marronnage as an anti-colonial, anti-slavery political project elevates when we study Haiti from a longue-durée perspective, since the island already had a significant population of self-liberated black people by the early seventeenth century. The onset of French colonization required the suppression and incorporation of maroons and enslaved captives alike into the sugar plantation economy; but just as the Spanish conquest of the island’s black population through sugar slavery failed, so would the French – the Haitian Revolution of 1791 being an astounding success of black resistance against empire. A significant aim of this work is to go beyond quantifying marronnage toward comprehending the relationships that it created, and the potentiality of the tangible and intangible resources shared through those connections. I analyze variables induced from Les Affiches advertisements in a temporal fashion to illuminate how structural factors shaped, or were shaped by, maroons’ and rebel slaves’ micro-level actions. Maroons’ actions reclaimed their identities, energy, and effort from behaviors that benefitted the plantocracy and redirected them toward their individual, familial, or collective interests and needs. They sought to maintain and create family ties by escaping with their children, with their countrywomen and men, or with people of other ethnic groups; and they visited or hid with free or enslaved family members and loved ones. They assumed African surnames or nicknames, or used their artisanal and language skills to forge documents and present themselves as free persons. Runaways armed themselves with guns, machetes, and other weapons to protect themselves from the maréchaussée (fugitive slave police) and to sack planters’ properties in search of needed resources like food and clothing. They carved out geographic spaces for maroon settlements within the colony, and at times fled Saint-Domingue altogether to find refuge in the neighboring Spanish colony of Santo Domingo. These indications of behavior, reclamation of social and human capital, and knowledge of the colonial landspace are embedded in the advertisements and, when aggregated over time, they can exhibit evidence of collective consciousness, patterns of collective responses to social conditions, and the seeds of what would become the Black Radical Tradition.

Consciousness and Collective Action, Revolutions, and the Black Radical Tradition

Collective action is any activity that brings people together for a common purpose, usually to solve a social problem (Oliver Reference Oliver and Snow2013). Collective consciousness is a foundational aspect of collective action because it heightens understanding of the reasons for taking part in protest activities. Shared consciousness requires both comprehension of injustices and inequalities within a material context, and having common interests with others who share positionality. Through interactive processes, social movement actors raise consciousness and construct forms of resistance befitting their context or situation (Snow and Lessor Reference Snow, Lessor and Snow2013). Consciousness has been the subject of sociological study since early theorists examined the impact of industrialism and modernity on patterns of relations in human communities. Marx and Engels’ German Ideology ([1846] Reference Marx and Engels2001) defined shared consciousness as a world of ideas and conceptions that emerged from, and was conditioned by, proletarian workers’ common relation to capitalist modes of production. With greater inequality, class consciousness would heighten and eventually lead the working class to overthrow the bourgeoisie in a social revolution. Émile Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Reference Durkheim1912) argued that shared ritual behavior enhanced a shared sense of effervescent emotions among participants. Decades later, in The Making of the English Working Class, E. P. Thompson ([1963] Reference Thompson1980) extended Marx’s definition to show how class consciousness not only arises from tense interactive processes between groups of opposed interests, but is also embedded in workers’ traditions, values, and institutions. Subsequent cultural studies (Swidler Reference Swidler1986; Hall Reference Hall, Howard and Becker1990; Kane Reference Kane2000) and social movement studies (Fantasia Reference Fantasia1988; Steinberg Reference Steinberg1999) relied on these ‘traditional’ conceptions of consciousness; but sociology largely ignored the work of W. E. B. Du Bois and his consideration of other variables, primarily race, as the basis for Black⁷ people’s consciousness, agency, and strivings for freedom (Du Bois [1903] Reference Du Bois1994; Morris Reference Morris and Calhoun2007).

Sociological omission of theorizing about racial inequality, slavery, and legacies of colonialism date to the earliest work on consciousness and revolution. Cedric J. Robinson’s (Reference Robinson1983) Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition turned Marxist analysis of social movements on its head by re-assessing the development of industrial capitalism and working-class consciousness in Europe. Robinson asserts that Marx and Engels, and later E. P. Thompson, did not fully recognize ethnic, cultural, and political heterogeneity in early modern Europe, specifically overlooking the contributions of Irish migrant workers in English labor organizing efforts. This unification between the English and Irish did not last, however, resulting in the separation of “the races” and the rise of English nationalism. England’s colonial dominance over Ireland engendered long-standing racial chauvinism toward the Irish from English elites, which was further inflamed among the working classes by the presence of low-wage Irish workers in England. Marx’s and Thompson’s incorrect assumption that the English proletariat was a cohesive group based on class entailed a failure to acknowledge the interconnectedness of racial (or proto-racial) identity, legacies of colonization, and class-based identity within contestations to capitalist formations, laying the foundation for later theorizing about collective consciousness and social movements being ill-equipped to comprehend the complexity of black mobilizations.

The origins of the Black Radical Tradition call for bringing more attention to the fundamental significance of enslaved African labor in the development of industrial capitalism, and an understanding of the deeply transformational nature of Black mobilizations in contrast to industrial wage earners or agrarian peasants that are typically considered the vanguard in revolutionary successes against dominant-class landlords. Theda Skocpol’s Reference Skocpol1979 States & Social Revolutions focused on peasantries in France, Russia, and China, and defined peasants as agricultural cultivators alienated from claims to their production – but not necessarily alienated from claims to wages or land. Peasants paid taxes and rents, and according to Skocpol, peasant families in rentier agrarian systems who possessed and worked their own land were particularly inclined to rebel (Reference Skocpol1979: 116). On the other hand, enslaved people were alienated from their labor value and products, as well as any claim to wages, land, citizenship, and at the most basic level, ownership of themselves. In addition to the surplus labor value that enslaved African workers generated, having been bought and sold as commodities they themselves were the foremost form of capital in the Atlantic world. When enslaved people committed marronnage, they were in effect “stealing back” themselves and their labor value, rejecting the commodification and enslavement they faced and re-humanizing themselves through various forms of expression (Wynter Reference Wyntern.d.: 72–74). Marronnage and overt rebellions recovered enslaved people from a life of social death: complete isolation from one’s own social, cultural, religious, economic, and political networks (Patterson Reference Patterson1982). Maroons fled in groups, sought out family members who were free – attempting to restore linkages broken by domestic slave trades – and attempted to live life, precarious as it may have been, on their own terms.

Robinson (Reference Robinson1983: chapter 7) points out that the nature of the Black Radical Tradition, particularly African-led slave rebellions, was grounded in the worldviews that bondspeople carried with them from the continent. Enslaved people’s expression of the tradition was often articulated through spiritual, cultural, and metaphysical idioms and stood in complete opposition to their position as chattel slaves and the epistemological underpinnings of racial capitalism itself. Indeed, Africans held ideologies and conceptions about the nature and purpose of political structures, monarchal rule, and slavery and freedom before their forcible transport to the Americas. John K. Thornton’s (Reference Thompson1993b) work shows that loyalty to the King of Kongo was present among West Central Africans during the Haitian Revolution.⁸ While some black leaders of the early and post-Haitian Revolution era embraced both republican and monarchal forms of government, the notion that either political ideology “trickled down” from the French Revolution cannot fully account for the masses of African and African descendants and their political worldviews. It therefore cannot be taken for granted that Saint-Domingue’s half million African Diasporans immediately attached themselves to European political philosophies because they had none of their own. The present study argues, in part inspired by the work of Carolyn Fick, that the women and men who were forced to labor on sugar, coffee, indigo, and cotton plantations had a collective consciousness opposed to slavery and racial capitalism that shaped their forms of resistance, and urged Haitian Revolution leaders Georges Biassou, Jean-François Papillon, Toussaint Louverture, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines to continually push the envelope for general emancipation and Haitian independence. This book therefore grapples with common perceptions that the driving ideologies of the Haitian Revolution were indigenized versions of French republicanism or royalism.

The anti-monarchal revolutions in France and in North America drastically changed the social and political landscape of the Atlantic world, infusing in it ideas of liberty and independence. Yet neither country seriously engaged the question of how to extend freedom and rights to the enslaved Africans who propelled both nations’ economic prosperity and ability to leverage power against their respective monarchal rulers. As early as 1896 in his doctoral dissertation The Suppression of the African Slave Trade, W. E. B. Du Bois claimed it was the Haitian Revolution that “intensified and defined the anti-slavery movement” and was one of several major factors that led to the eventual abolition of the transAtlantic slave trade in 1807.⁹ The prohibition of the trade, and the abolition of slavery in Saint-Domingue, did not directly result from either the American or French Revolutions, both of which were hindered from fully actualizing and universalizing republican political ideals by their unwavering commitment to slavery as the primary mode of economic enterprise. This is the argument that Anna Julia Cooper and C. L. R. James put forth, placing directly on the shoulders of enslaved Africans the impetus for radical social, economic, and political changes not only in the Caribbean but in France as well. Some 13 years before James’ ([1938] Reference James1989) foundational text The Black Jacobins, Anna Julia Cooper ([1925] Reference Cooper1988) defended her doctoral dissertation L’attitude de la France à l’égard l’esclavage pendant la révolution [Slavery and the French Revolutionists, 1788–1805], arguing that France’s persistence in ignoring questions about race and enslavement in Saint-Domingue forced the black revolutionaries to pursue their own liberties and shift conceptualizations of rights and freedom in France. The analyses from Cooper and James – and later from scholars like Du Bois ([1935] Reference Du Bois1992), Herbert Aptheker ([1943] Reference Aptheker1969), and Eric Williams (Reference Williams1944) – held powerful implications for what was widely accepted about the Age of Revolutions and the modern era: that it was people of African descent, their labor value, and struggles for freedom and racial equality that were the true source of the most transformative social, economic, and political changes seen to date. Despite it being the most radical political event of the Age of Revolutions (Knight Reference Knight2000), few sociologists have studied the Haitian Revolution or the African Diaspora writ large, missing their wider implications and contributions to the development of, and disruptions to, European capital accumulation in the early modern era (Magubane Reference Magubane, Adams, Clemens and Orloff2005; Martin Reference Martin2005).

To address the theoretical and methodological silences resulting from Eurocentric, nationally-bound, and presentist sociological scholarship, there has been a growing contingency of “third wave” historical sociologists whose work takes seriously the contributions of Cooper, James, Du Bois, Williams, and Robinson by bringing issues of racial capitalism and colonialism to the forefront of the sociology discipline (Adams, Clemens and Orloff Reference Adams, Clemens and Orloff2005; Magubane Reference Magubane, Adams, Clemens and Orloff2005; Bhambra Reference Bhambra2011, Reference Bhambra2014; Morris Reference Morris2015; Go Reference Go2016; Go and Lawson Reference Go and Lawson2017; Itzigsohn and Brown Reference Itzigsohn and Brown2020). Recent considerations in sociology and political science now accept the centrality of the Haitian Revolution in engendering alternate streams of ideals and values that would come to define the modern era for enslaved and colonized peoples. Without analysis of the Haitian Revolution, narratives about the global structuring of nation-state development – “First” and “Third Worlds,” cores and peripheries, and the “Global North” and “South” – can tend to overlook and inadvertently reify the histories of European colonialism, racialized hierarchies, and slavery that engendered economic and political inequalities between states (Shilliam Reference Shilliam2008, Reference Shilliam2017). The Haitian Revolution not only raises questions about what scholars mean by “development,” it also urges the redefinition of concepts of freedom, equality, and independence that are not grounded in the colonial, slave-holding histories of the American and French Revolutions (Bhambra Reference Bhambra2015, Reference Bhambra2016). Indeed, rather than having realized already existing revolutionary ideals from Europe, the Haitian Revolution propagated its own revolutionary ideals of individual and collective autonomy through subsistence farming and establishing a free and independent nation (Getachew Reference Getachew2016).

Theorization about the politics of colonialism, slavery, and race within dominant paradigmatic perspectives in the social sciences is needed in the sociology of revolutions and social movements field, therefore the current study contributes to the postcolonial “turn” in sociology by bringing it into already existing conversation within Black/African Diaspora Studies about the origins and nature of racial capitalism and the Black Radical Tradition. The global protest cycle of the late 1960s invigorated intellectual interests in and Marxist analyses of conflicts, collective action, social movements, and revolutions, with theorists arguing any understanding of revolutionary circumstances must engage structural realities, including the connections between international and world-historical contexts (Tilly Reference Tilly1978; Skopcol Reference Skocpol1979; Goldstone Reference Goldstone1991; Skopcol Reference Skocpol1994; Sewell Reference Sewell1996b; Beck Reference Colin J., Lichbach, Stohl and Grabosky2017; Lawson Reference Lawson, Go and Lawson2017). Such a macro-level approach is indeed highly appropriate for understanding events in Saint-Domingue given the rapidly changing social, economic, and political dynamics of the Atlantic world. Change and transformation were commonplace due to both European and African states’ consolidation of resources and power, and because of the increasingly tenuous economic and political relationship between the Caribbean colonies and the French metropole. Yet, preeminent studies of revolutions overlooked the Haitian Revolution – an event widely silenced throughout historical and philosophical considerations of the Age of Revolutions. For example, few if any sociological studies of the French Revolution acknowledge that the capital generated from slave labor and the slave trade contributed a substantial portion of the French bourgeoisie’s wealth and therefore “were the economic basis of the French Revolution,” as C. L. R. James observed.¹⁰ Without theoretical consideration of the Haitian Revolution, the sociology of revolutions misses the integrated nature of slavery, racial capitalism, and colonialism in producing structures against which Black people and others of the formerly colonized world have fought. Comparative analysis of twentieth-century Latin American revolutions combines analyses of race, class, and gender, but the framework does not fully account for the long-term legacies of Spanish colonialism in producing inequalities in places like Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua (Foran Reference Foran2001). Later studies (Foran Reference Foran2009) broadened the number of cases beyond France, Russia, and China to include revolutions of the “Third World,” but little attention is paid to racialized power dynamics that shape domestic and international relations.

Structural approaches to revolutions also tend to marginalize analysis of mobilizers’ motivations or actions “from below,” to which a fourth wave of revolution studies have responded by highlighting culture, agency, and identity in ways that are similar to approaches social movement scholars use (Foran Reference Foran1993; Selbin Reference Selbin and Foran1997; Foran Reference Foran2001; Sohrabi Reference Sohrabi, Adams, Clemens and Orloff2005; Selbin Reference Selbin2010; Beck Reference Colin J., Lichbach, Stohl and Grabosky2017). Lines between revolutions and social movements have increasingly blurred theoretically, and in cases where insurgents respond to similarly weakened economic and political conditions with similar forms of protest and resistance. Yet, the study of collective actions of the past that cannot be neatly defined as classical “social movements,” such as enslaved people’s rebellions, tends not to be as popular (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly Reference McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly1996; Gould Reference Gould, Adams, Clemens and Orloff2005; Peterson Reference Peterson and Snow2013; Goldstone and Ritter Reference Goldstone, Ritter, Snow, Soule, Kriesi and McCammon2019). Marronnage was not a social movement in the most classically defined sense, but an aggregate look at micro-level patterns of resistance actions against enslavement, particularly in the years leading to a revolutionary upheaval, could be considered tantamount to protracted struggle that ideas from the social movements field can help explain. Though specific concepts from the field related to collective consciousness and the temporality of tactics are helpful and are utilized in this study, there are certain limitations to relying on social movement theories in their entirety.

Prevailing social movement frameworks deal with questions surrounding the timing and emergence of collective action, but have not fully incorporated analyses that account for racist principles that structure society and intentionally exclude Black people from having access to power and resources. Doug McAdam’s ([1982] Reference McAdam1999) analysis of the US Civil Rights Movement developed the political process model, but it has been critiqued for lack of engagement with issues of race and racial oppression, and Black mobilizers’ comprehension of their racialized social conditions (Bracey Reference Bracey and Glenn2016). The model is based on a conception of power and wealth that is concentrated in the hands of a few (McAdam [1982] Reference McAdam1999: 36), but it does not acknowledge that those minority stakeholders are, and historically have been, white people. Like the structuralist models used in studies of revolutions, the political process model focuses on movements’ long-term development until they can exploit social, economic, and political cleavages at the macro-level. McAdam argues that political opportunities and social movement organizations help facilitate the development of “cognitive liberation,” or collective consciousness; however, this book reverses this assertion and assumes collective consciousness grew primarily due to the shared social conditions under slavery and guided group interactions and insurgent activity.

The resource mobilization model foregrounds organizations, networks, institutions, and resources that social movement actors galvanize to organize a movement. Part of the difficulty with this framework, in the case of colonial Haiti and many, though not all, early modern slave societies, is that those held in bondage did not have access to, nor were they allowed to create, formal organizations or institutions that could provide the fundamental basis for mobilizing and generating resources to support a movement. This does not preclude, however, the relevance of non-tangible, social psychological resources such as collective consciousness and identity, solidarity, or cultural tools that mobilizers can employ in rallying participants toward an action or series of actions. The present study is equally as concerned with aspects of the social psychological realm as with its outward manifestations in the form of marronnage. Micromobilization theories focus on the socially constructed process of collective action by locating actors, and those whom they influence and recruit, within their structural realities (Morris Reference Morris, Morris and Mueller1992; Morris and Mueller Reference Morris, Morris and Mueller1992; Ward Reference Ward2015, Reference Ward2016). To understand mobilization from this perspective, I draw on the work of Aldon Morris, which advances theorizing about indigenous resources among dominated groups – Black communities in particular – their oppositional consciousness, and social spaces that situate mobilizers’ efforts within their localized identities and struggles against interlocking systems of racial, economic, and gendered oppression (Morris Reference Morris1984, Reference Morris, Morris and Mueller1992; Morris and Braine Reference Morris, Braine, Mansbridge and Morris2001).

Theoretical Framework

As Gurminder Bhambra and Adom Getachew have suggested, new meanings of revolution are needed to suit the Haitian Revolution’s distinctiveness, and the breadth of its post-1804 reverberations in slave rebellions, abolition movements, anti-colonial struggles, and revolutionary ideals. The Haitian Revolution and its wider implications in the Atlantic world were products of and challenges to the context in “which modernity has been constituted and developed” (Bhambra Reference Bhambra2016: 3); that is, anti-Black racism, colonial expansion, and capitalist extraction.“Three sites of domination – the plantation, race, and imperialism – constituted the political grounds from which the [Haitian] revolution emerged … and they were also the terrain on which alternative visions of the universal were formulated” (Getachew Reference Getachew2016: 10), thus, in its success, the Haitian Revolution de-commodified humans and their labor, abolished racial barriers to political participation, retreated from the global capitalist order, and symbolically restored land to original inhabitants (Bhambra Reference Bhambra2015, Reference Bhambra2016). In that case, I propose that an alternative definition of modern revolution could be: mass collective actions that undermine, transform, and reverse conditions of concentrated power and widespread powerlessness; capitalist-driven commodification of humans, labor, land and natural resources; and racial dispossession and hierarchy upheld by white supremacist ideology and violence. Enslaved people experimented with these revolutionary ideals of freedom during the colonial era by “rejecting a plantation economy in which their labor was directed toward the production of cash crops (Bhambra Reference Bhambra2016: 12).” This book offers marronnage as the most fundamental and historically grounded individual and collective action that advanced this rejection, aligned with Jean Fouchard’s assertion that “marooning is the dominant feature of all Haitian history.”¹¹ Not only does this book attempt to account for the relationship between marronnage and the Haitian Revolution, I also build on the work of John Gaventa (Reference Gaventa1980) to propose a causal model for collective action among people who live under severe repression. To keep people enslaved and to maintain the appearance of quiescence to bondage, enslavers of Saint-Domingue employed multiple dimensions of power that included violence and force, economic and political apparatuses that actively served the powerful, as well as cultural and ideological structures of power. To transcend and dismantle these layers of extreme economic and power inequities, it is important for potential mobilizers to first develop counterhegemonic collective consciousness.

This book pairs insights from Black/African Diaspora Studies with scholarship in the sociology of social movements and revolutions, but departs from previous sociological studies in several ways. First, it draws on constructionist/interactionist approaches to understand how people who share structural positionality and patterns of interaction develop a collective consciousness. Politicized consciousness can also be expressed through dynamics of collective action, solidarity work, organization, institutional arrangements, and the values and attitudes that emerge from within those formations (Fantasia Reference Fantasia1988). While any group that shares material conditions can develop a political consciousness that advances their interests, systemic oppression produces consciousness that specifically addresses the unequal nature of their social conditions. Individuals’ and groups’ identities are lodged within the racial, gendered, and economic structures of their historical moment – interrelated domains rooted in the colonial matrix of power (Mignolo Reference Mignolo2011). These systems of domination, the “constellation of institutions, ideas, and practices that successfully enables a group to achieve and maintain power and privilege through the control and exploitation of another group” (Morris Reference Morris, Morris and Mueller1992: 362–363) shape the social, economic, and political realities that marginalize certain groups rather than others. Awareness of this marginalization creates a counterhegemonic consciousness that transforms political consciousness to one that is oppositional to oppressive social forces. As such, oppositional consciousness constitutes the foundation from which oppressed groups attempt to resist and dismantle systems of domination. Within the context of European conquest, oppositional consciousness might also seek to replace dominating structures with macro-level polities that address the needs of masses and are based on their historical memory of, and historical experiences with, states and political forces (Stern Reference Stern1987). As members of an involuntary diaspora, it becomes important to engage the worldviews, cultural and religious practices, and modes of thought about social, economic, and political relations that enslaved Africans carried with them from the continent and re-assembled in Saint-Domingue (Cohen Reference Cohen1992; Vertovec Reference Vertovec1997; Shuval Reference Shuval2000; Brubaker Reference Brubaker2005; Cohen Reference Cohen2008; Dufoix Reference Dufoix and Rodarmor2008; Sheffer Reference Sheffer, Gold and Nawyn2012). Sociologist Ruth Simms Hamilton (Reference Hamilton1988: 18; Reference Hamilton2007: 29–31) argues that oppositional consciousness and the cultural and ideological tools to organize liberation struggles are cultivated within networks of African Diaspora communities. This provides an inroad to deeper engagement with forced migrant diasporans’ mobilization potential – particularly African Diasporans in the Americas – using a paradigm that can account for race, stratification, and oppression (Bracey Reference Bracey and Glenn2016) in the early modern period.

Second, this text posits that interaction processes not only indicated and helped form a collective oppositional consciousness, but contributed to an emerging sense of racial solidarity among enslaved African and African descended people of various ethnic and geographic backgrounds. Solidarity is an important aspect of how groups from disparate political, economic, cultural, or religious identities come together for a shared purpose. European colonial societies in the Americas relied on a “many-headed hydra” of widely diverse pools of laborers (Linebaugh and Rediker Reference Linebaugh and Rediker2000), including Africans from vast regions spanning western lands referred to as Senegambia, down to Angola, then around the southern tip and up to the eastern shores of Mozambique. These groups were largely foreign to one another until they collided in the colonial context, where in work gangs, housing quarters, sacred ritual gatherings, and in maroon bands they interacted, grappled with each other, and came to common understandings of their common situation. While respecting linguistic, cultural, and religious differences, enslaved people forged political and cultural solidarities that became useful for perceiving exploitative social conditions and interpreting the salience of race and racial inequality in Saint Domingue as the basis for leveraging power during their collective actions (Skocpol Reference Skocpol1979: 115; Melucci Reference Melucci1989; Taylor and Whittier Reference Taylor, Whittier, Morris and Mueller1992; Gomez Reference Gomez1998; Kane Reference Kane2011). The book’s assertion that racial solidarity was forming as people took part in sacred rituals and marronnage has an important implication for understanding post-independence Haitian national identity, which by 1805 was equated with blackness. Racial identity in the early modern era cannot be taken for granted as a social category; policies like the Code Noir and the 1805 Haitian Constitution concretized race, but it also developed through social norms and interactional processes.

Any study of oppositional consciousness leading to the Haitian Revolution must also begin with theorizing the ways in which racial and economically exploitative social structures shaped the conditions for Africans and African descendants’ collective action. Race was a social construct to delineate the boundaries of who would be considered human (Wynter 2003), and it “has been a constitutive element, an organizational principle … that has constructed and reconstructed world society since the emergence of modernity,” signaled by the rise of European imperial expansion and enslavement of Africans (Winant Reference Winant2001: 19). Saint-Domingue represented the height of racial oppression and exploitation as what can be described as a slave society: one in which many if not all social institutions are shaped by the deliberate denial of enslaved people to be self-determining (Stinchcombe Reference Stinchcombe1995). Political, economic, and social relations in Saint-Domingue established and maintained powerlessness among enslaved Africans and African descendants as the status quo. The enslaved were regarded as non-human chattel and were forced to work for little to no compensation. Social structures of the wider Atlantic world organized skin color, phenotypes, and national birth origin into near impenetrable racial hierarchies with white Europeans representing the pinnacle of humanity and ownership, and black Africans associated with slave status. The Code Noir of 1685 outlined racial boundaries for French colonies, including Saint-Domingue, and in effect produced a stratified society where color, race, and ethnicity were inextricably linked to social class, status, citizenship, freedom, and power (Trouillot Reference Trouillot1982; Garrigus Reference Garrigus1993; King Reference King2001; Garrigus Reference Garrigus2006; Midy Reference Midy2006). The masses of the enslaved population were black people born on the African continent and their progeny; while many – though not all – members of the small mixed-race population were free, amassed wealth, and attained social prominence. This work locates the impetus for the Haitian revolutionary insurgency with enslaved Africans and African descendants, in contrast to others that give primary importance to the attempts of mixed-race individuals to achieve French citizenship.

The fourth major intervention this book makes in the body of work about revolutions is a long-term approach to resistance and action before the actual event itself. A selection of long-term time frames is important to fully understand changes in resistance patterns as an explanatory tool. Social actors, during both peaceful and eventful times, ongoingly engage in politicized behaviors whether they are initiating new actions or adapting to new social forces (Stern Reference Stern1987). Oppressive conditions notwithstanding, Africans in bondage found ways to be continuous initiators of politicized actions, or “weapons of the weak” (Scott Reference Scott1985), through everyday challenges to the enslavement system, such as work tool sabotage, feigning illness, suicide, poison, or temporary escapes. These individualized tactics, along with collective, group-based behaviors, made up a repertoire of contention – a collection of distinctive resistance tactics that become culturally grounded; routine actions that are born from previous struggle and are temporally convenient – learned, adapted, and performed at participants’ choosing (Traugott Reference Traugott1995; Taylor and Van Dyke Reference Taylor, Van Dyke, Snow, Soule and Kriesi2004; Tilly Reference Tilly2006; della Porta Reference della Porta and Snow2013). According to Carolyn Fick, “of the many and diverse forms of resistance, marronnage proved in the end to be the most viable and certainly the most consistent” (Reference Fick1990: 49), and it represented a rupture in a social system predicated on black subservience. “Ruptures” are surprising breaks from routine practices that are typically neutralized or absorbed into the structure, disavowed or denied. But when accumulated, collective ruptures can lead to transformational historical events (Sewell Reference Sewell1996b) such as the Haitian Revolution. Therefore, revolutions can emerge through consciousness, solidarity, and long-term struggle.

Historiography

Part of the difficulty of writing about Haiti, the Haitian Revolution, and the country’s colonial history involves the politicized nature of writing history itself. Even as the Revolution was unfolding, white Saint-Dominguans seemed to disregard its occurrence, evidenced by the fact that the August 21–22, 1791 revolt in the north was not mentioned in the Gazette de Saint Domingue newspaper until almost two weeks later.¹² Since that time, the Haitian Revolution has haunted social and political thought (Buck-Morss Reference Buck-Morss2009) but was not given full treatment in several areas of scholarship until fairly recently. For example, historical literature on the Age of Revolutions has increasingly accepted that the Haitian Revolution holds a central place and influence in an era of monumental societal changes (Scott [1986] Reference Scott2018; Klooster [2009] Reference Klooster2018; West, Martin, and Wilkins Reference West, Martin, West, Martin and Wilkins2009; Landers Reference Laguerre2010; Scott and Hebrard Reference Scott and Hebrard2012). But, since Carolyn Fick’s The Making of Haiti (Reference Fick1990), few historians have attempted to re-construct a narrative about the masses of enslaved people who participated in the Haitian Revolution. Part of this difficulty is due to a lack of primary source data left behind by the insurgents themselves.¹³ This dearth of information has motivated others to attempt to identify forms of pre-revolutionary resistance (Girard Reference Girard and Donnadieu2013). Yet, the effort to uncover a tradition of rebellion in Saint-Domingue proves difficult for two reasons. First, ongoing slave revolts or maroon wars seem to not have been as common in Saint-Domingue as they were in other Caribbean locations (Turner Reference Turner, Eltis and Engerman2011). Second, historical archives offer little evidence of formal organizations such as confrères – Catholic brotherhoods and sisterhoods that were often the centers of diasporic Africans’ collective actions and identity formation in Spanish and Portuguese colonies of the Americas (Berlin Reference Berlin1996; Peabody Reference Peabody2002; Dewulf Reference Dewulf2015). Therefore, several historians have probed the significance of marronnage as a contributing factor to the emergence of the Haitian Revolution.

The debate surrounding the role, or lack thereof, of runaway bands in the Haitian Revolution seems to have reached a stalemate. As some (Manigat Reference Manigat1977, Reference Manigat2007; Daniels Reference Daniels2012; Joseph Reference Joseph2012; Girard Reference Girard and Donnadieu2013) observe, the intellectual conflict has tended to fall along national lines. Members of the “Haitian school” view marronnage as an ongoing socio-political movement linked to the revolution (Fouchard Reference Fouchard1972; Laguerre Reference Laguerre1989). In the “French school,” others (Debach [1973] Reference Debbasch and Price1996; Debien [1973] Reference Debien and Price1996; Geggus Reference Geggus and Heuman1986) argue that marronnage was a passive form of resistance devoid of any collective consciousness toward freedom. Jacques Cauna (Reference Cauna1996) also argues that marronnage and Africa-inspired rituals provided the organizational tools to develop a growing consciousness of resistance that preceded the Haitian Revolution, yet he denies that the enslaved population held any ideas of liberty or revolution. Rather than revive these intellectual contentions, the present book attempts to understand the dynamics of marronnage not yet fully explored by previous scholarship. Haitian scholar and politician Leslie Manigat (Reference Manigat1977, Reference Manigat2007) affirms marronnage embodied an independence-oriented, “ethno-nationalist” consciousness, and suggests an integrated micro- and macro-level approach is necessary to studying marronnage over time to discern this consciousness. Manigat, and later Fick (Reference Fick1990), theorized that the propensity of some runaways, particularly women, to temporarily leave and return to the plantation repeatedly (petit marronnage) may have been a tactic to develop relationships and create an informal, loosely organized mobilization structure of enslaved individuals and self-liberated communities (grand marronnage) who shared and circulated ideas, resources, and strategies for escape and overthrowing enslavement. These insights by Manigat and Fick, as well as other works on marronnage that give new advances in the comprehension of maroon consciousness, help guide the methodology of this book.

Neil Roberts’ (Reference Roberts2015) Freedom as Marronage theoretically frames marronnage as a liminal space between slavery and freedom where there is mobility, further deconstructing the boundaries between maroon and slave, and potentiality for agency. Roberts offers four pillars of marronnage that help inform dynamic conceptions of marronnage and its utility as an organizing tool: (1) it involves distance, the separation of individuals between a physical place or a condition of being; (2) there is a movement that gives people the ability to be agents over their most immediate actions and the direction of their motions – this flight is not only physical but can be cognitive or metaphysical; (3) it is dependent on property; and (4) it has a purpose or a goal of an act as determined by an individual or collective. Moreover, Roberts gives new conceptual categories of marronnage – sovereign and sociogenic – to give primacy to the overarching socio-political aims of maroon communities and the emerging Haitian nation-state itself. One of the most important sovereign maroon communities was Le Maniel of the Baoruco mountains, most recently studied by Charlton Yingling (Reference Yingling2015). Le Maniel maintained an independent community throughout the eighteenth century, bringing needed attention to their socio-political consciousness to leverage inter-imperial fights over the French Saint-Domingue–Spanish Santo Domingo border for their formal recognition as a free community.

Methodology and Outline of Study

The issues of lacking primary sources, a contentious historiography, and the role of Haitian cultural imagination – historical memory embedded in oral history, religious, cultural, and literary traditions – have signaled the challenges to historical paradigms and methodology that face scholars of Saint-Domingue-Haiti (Dayan Reference Dayan1995; Daut Reference Daut2015). However, questions about the politics of writing history are not isolated to colonial Saint-Domingue, especially when attempting to understand the perspective of people who were deliberately written out of history, such as captured Africans dispersed across the Atlantic Ocean. Reconstructing narratives of their lives is an arduous task that requires knowledge of the African continent itself, the transAtlantic slave trade, and the colonial contexts of the Americas into which European traders transported captives (Lovejoy Reference Lovejoy1997; Palmer Reference Palmer2000; Mann Reference Mann2001). Scholars have rightly pointed out that in doing such research, it is important not to treat the African continent as a monolithic place frozen in its pre-colonial time (Palmer Reference Palmer2000). Transformations in African histories, polities, economies, and cultures shaped social structures locally and globally, and influenced the progress and outcomes of the European slave trade (Thornton Reference Thompson1992). Therefore, framing the African continent as not just a historically stagnant source of captives to the Americas, but as a stream of ongoing history happening in the Americas is a critical challenge of this work and any other study focused on African descendant peoples during enslavement. A critical issue in linking Africa to its diaspora is attempting to identify captives from a multitude of ethnic, religious, political, or geographic groups whose true self-designations were either unknown or misrepresented in European slave trading and plantation records (Morgan Reference Morgan1997; Hall Reference Hall2005). To add to this existing data on slavery, I use content analysis of over 10,000 runaway advertisements from colonial newspapers that often describe African ethnonyms to examine micromobilization patterns through shared liberation consciousness, identity work, and solidarity building. I interpret each reported incident of marronnage as a form of protest that can be analyzed across time and space (Koopmans and Rucht Reference Koopmans, Rucht, Klandermans and Staggenborg2002; Hutter Reference Hutter and della Porta2014).

The advertisements contain qualitative information that lend to wider understandings of how enslaved runaways exhibited oppositional consciousness, and conceptualized and enacted freedom on their terms. I identified several behaviors described in the advertisements that help give insight to the runaway’s mindset – of course bearing in mind that plantation owners or managers wrote these advertisements, which therefore reflect their point of view. However, because enslaved people themselves were the singularly important form of capital in Saint-Domingue, enslavers had a financial incentive to provide as much accurate detail as possible to aid in identifying, locating, and recovering absconders whom enslavers considered valuable “lost property.” Thus, the speculative information provided in the advertisements about the runaways and their actions can carry some legitimacy despite enslavers’ implicit and explicit biases. Though the original intent of these advertisements was to surveil, track, and re-enslave black people, I aim to subvert the texts by discerning the ways in which runaways created or used previously existing social ties, and forms of their African-Atlantic human capital, to facilitate their escape and respond to structural conditions. Examination of how those patterns changed over time gives a sense of African Diasporic oppositional consciousness.

This book is an interdisciplinary case study that draws on theoretical concepts and perspectives from historical sociology and social movements scholarship and uses comparative and quantitative methods of analysis to identify collective consciousness in ways that highlight agency and self-determination. Though the voices of the masses of enslaved have yet to be unearthed, an aggregate quantitative study of their micro-level social marronnage actions might reveal temporal and geographic patterns that indicate a liberation orientation before the Haitian Revolution began. This goal aligns with historian Vincent Brown’s (Reference Brown2016) idea of “going against the grain” of using quantitative work in slavery studies during the age of databases. Rather than reduce human processes to a “numbers game,” Brown points out that quantitative analysis can support the socio-cultural interpretive tradition of Black/African Diaspora Studies and explain intentionality in ways the sources were never meant to convey. The present “database age” in which we live has provided me a unique advantage to employ tools created by digital humanists to aggregate pieces of archival data that likely would have taken previous generations of scholars a considerably longer period of time to access, collect, and analyze. The Marronnage dans le Monde Atlantique (Marronnage in the Atlantic World) database not only allows me to look at fugitive advertisements from eighteenth-century Saint Domingue individually, but I cross-referenced findings from those advertisements with other sources to hopefully create a fuller picture of marronnage. Similarly, the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute’s Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database contains what historians consider to be a strong representation of nearly all known French slave trade voyages. These two searchable, open-source tools provide users with access to materials that have taken decades for researchers, archivists, and coders to congregate; and they are critical to understanding enslavement and resistance in the Americas from both micro- and macro-levels.

This book is organizationally and theoretically arranged to connect the interplay between structures, social action, and historical change – particularly concerning how collective consciousness (1) is shaped by history, culture, and other social forces; (2) is reinforced by shared social conditions, common experiences, and processes of interaction; and (3) informs and guides collective action. The first of these three parts explores the social forces that prompted forced diaspora migrations to Saint-Domingue and the social, political, and religious institutions with which enslaved Africans were familiar prior to their dispersals. Chapter 1 begins with African histories as the headspring of cultural and political expressions in Saint-Domingue, with the hopes of uncovering Africans and African descendants’ epistemological and ontological core. There were local conceptions of slavery and the slave trade and a legacy of resistance to it. From the Upper Guinea region to Angola, captive Africans being funneled from the hinterland to the coasts – as well as those who were bonded by domestic forms of enslavement – escaped their owners, staged revolts and raids, and formed self-protective communities in geographically isolated zones. Slave ship revolts also occurred regularly and with greater intensity after 1750 when the French trade escalated. The survivors of African revolts, civil wars, and inter-state conflicts were sold into slavery in the Americas, where maroon community formations and open rebellion may have been an extension of the defensive and offensive strategies that were employed on the African continent to resist the slave trade. Chapter 2 establishes the nature of the “host society” that enslaved Africans encountered when they arrived at Saint-Domingue and provides a historical background of the French colony within the wider context of European colonization of the Caribbean. This chapter frames the island originally known to the Taíno as Ayiti as a space of human commodification, death, and slave resistance since the first Africans arrived in 1503. In less than 20 years, enslaved Africans were consistently escaping, taking up residence with remaining Taínos in the mountains, and participating in organized revolts. These rebellions occurred within the context of the divisions of labor during slavery, the development of the sugar and coffee economies, and the exorbitant death rates of enslaved people. In examining enslaved people’s immediate social world, I look at their social lives and recreation, particularly cultural and spiritual creations, considering them as processes of enculturation that introduced new Africans to local idioms and modes of survival.

The second part of the book, Chapters 3–6, is interested in enslaved Africans’ patterns of interaction with each other and their immediate environment and how these interactions gave rise to or indicated collective consciousness. To detect evidence of “movement-like” activities, these chapters focus on networks, significant protest events, key individuals, and cultural artifacts (Clemens and Hughes Reference Clemens, Hughes, Klandermans and Staggenborg2002). Chapter 3 looks at the relationship between ritual free spaces and resistance, and argues that enslaved people infused the spiritual world and ritual practices with politicized consciousness and resistance. Key primary sources by late eighteenth-century writers such as Moreau de Saint-Méry and Michel Descourtilz portrayed Africa-inspired rituals as dangerous because of the perceived association with rebelliousness. Writers and enslavers alike perceived ritualists as haughty, unruly, and having undue influence over other enslaved people who adhered to African belief systems, took part in ritual gatherings, and used or carried sacred objects to demonstrate allegiance with leadership and non-human sources of power. One of the most well-known cases of a ritualist operating as a campaigner for rebellion is Mackandal, who, in 1758, stood accused of organizing a plot to poison the whites in northern Saint-Domingue. The central argument is that by participating in ritual actions, Africans and African descendants summoned the cultural heritage(s) that they brought to Saint-Domingue with them as captives in the transAtlantic slave trade. Though the enslaved population was culturally and geographically diverse, they interacted with each other and exchanged sacred forms of power, developing social relationships in ritual gatherings that enhanced and politicized their collective consciousness. The gatherings and related activities were tools to affirm humanity and re-connect with spirit beings that could influence everyday life situations. Moreover, maroons used these opportunities to recruit potential insurgents and to preach for liberation. As such, ritual spaces functioned as zones that fostered opposition to the enslavement that was foundational to the social order.

Chapter 4 uses content analysis of over 10,000 runaway slave advertisements in an in-depth look at marronnage through the lens of network building, identity formation, and race and solidarity work. Since diaspora communities tend to create networks based on some shared identity from their host societies, I draw on diaspora studies and social movements studies by quantitatively analyzing runaway slave advertisement data from Les Affiches américaines colonial newspaper. Nearly half of the thousands of runaways described in the Les Affiches advertisements fled within a small group of two or more people. Many were racially or ethnically homogeneous maroon groups that rallied around their collective identity, while groups composed of diverse ethnic backgrounds bridged their differences to forge pan-African identity at a minimum, or at most an emerging racial solidarity that lingered and later solidified during particular moments of the Haitian Revolution. The chapter also explores the complex relationships between enslaved people, maroons and free people of color, since absconders often had previous relationships with and sought refuge with people beyond their immediate plantation, highlighting the importance of social capital in finding success at marronnage. Chapter 5 similarly relies on the Les Affiches advertisements to examine the ways maroons reclaimed themselves, their identities, their time, and other tangible and intangible resources. Runaways exhibited more oppositional behaviors such as passing for free, appropriating material goods, bearing arms, and escaping for longer durations of time – leading to escalating grand marronnage before the Haitian Revolution. Chapter 6 explores the geographic and spatial dimensions of marronnage. Enslaved people and maroons had intimate knowledge of their immediate locales and geopolitical borders that they sought as places of refuge. Planters constantly worried about the presence of runaways in the mountains as well as those who crossed the border into Spanish territory, and the colony’s local topography contained several cave systems that provided spaces for runaways and enslaved people to establish linkages and plan rebellion. Not only were maroons spatially pervasive throughout Saint-Domingue, their presence had a significant impact on the landscape and on the Santo Domingo border itself.

Part III of the book then turns to the ways collective consciousness influenced social actions and impacted social structures. Chapter 7 contextualizes the rates and nature of marronnage within changing social, economic, political, and environmental factors. I frame marronnage as a part of enslaved people’s repertoire of contention, a collection of organic forms of resistance tactics that are sustained over time, yet adapted for new contextual circumstances (Traugott Reference Traugott1995; Taylor and Van Dyke Reference Taylor, Van Dyke, Snow, Soule and Kriesi2004; Tilly Reference Tilly2006; della Porta Reference della Porta and Snow2013). Here it is important to identify the structural contexts, especially the political developments, plantation production, policing and repression, and natural environment that shaped marronnage. Chapter 8 traces the continuation of oppositional consciousness into the revolutionary period. Over time, more connections developed between runaways and plantation slaves, and small-scale uprisings occurred increasingly before the Haitian Revolution began, feeding into the solidarity that eventually formed around a shared racial identity.