The royalist maroons of Jamaica in the British Atlantic world, 1740-1800

Abstract

This paper explores how one community of ex-slaves, the Trelawney Town Maroons of northern Jamaica, survived slavery and exile by siding with the interests of the British Empire. Jamaica, like other New World slave societies, produced runaways; when these runaway slaves established separate and autonomous long-lasting communities, they were called Maroons. Isolation protected Jamaica’s Maroons from slavery but also prevented them from partaking in the prosperity of the growing British Empire. In 1740, after years of guerilla warfare with the colonial elite, the island’s six Maroon groups signed treaties in which they accepted the planter regime. They chose to use their guerilla experience on behalf of the planter class, not against it. In exchange for their own autonomy, they became slavecatchers, and prevented other slaves from establishing new Maroon communities. But decades of loyalty did not safeguard the largest group of Maroons, the Trelawney Town Maroons, from banishment. In 1796, after a violent war, the colonial government summarily deported them to British Nova Scotia. After four years in Nova Scotia, the 550 Trelawney Town Maroons relocated to Sierra Leone. Despite their deportation, the Maroons continued to view themselves as a privileged group in Nova Scotia and in Sierra Leone, and they did everything possible to revitalize their loyalty to the king, to show themselves as “useful friends” of empire. Their actions show that eighteenth-century popular royalism was sufficiently elastic to function under drastically changed conditions.