In this lean, elegant, and lively narrative history of the exile of the Trelawney Town Maroons of Jamaica, and their travels from Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone, Ruma Chopra argues that “loyalism” is crucial to understanding the Maroons’ place within both the racial hierarchies of British colonial slavery and the politics of the wider British Empire. Marronage was a feature of virtually every slave society in the Americas, but a series of unusual and fragile formal agreements between the colonial assembly and Maroon leaders have made the Jamaican Maroons the object of particular attention for historians. Chopra argues that most of these histories have focused on the complicated relationships between Maroons, enslaved people, free people of color and slave owners in Jamaica. In contrast, Chopra suggests, by following the Trelawney exiles, the Maroons can be placed into a wider British world during a tumultuous era of imperial expansion and burgeoning antislavery activism. Crucially, Chopra places Britain's wars with France in the foreground, showing how Maroon leaders, antislavery activists and slave owners invoked plans for conquest and colonial defense to persuade imperial officials of their positions.
The Jamaican Maroons, descendants of enslaved people who escaped to freedom from Spanish plantations before and during the English conquest of Jamaica in 1655, preserved their independence in the 1730s by making an agreement with slave owners. In exchange for recognition their freedom, the Maroons agreed to abjure sugar planting, to capture enslaved people fleeing plantations and to fight alongside British forces in case of invasion. Chopra, whose previous work has focused on Loyalist refugees and emigrants displaced by the American Revolution, emphasizes the thread of “loyalty” to parts of white society in the history of the Maroons. She frames the Maroons’ particular version of loyalism (distinct from post-Revolutionary Loyalism) as a willingness to compromise with slave owners and colonial officials in order to preserve their community's freedom and traditions. Many historians have observed the threads of rhetorical royalism and loyalty to the crown in the political appeals that enslaved people in British colonies made to imperial officials in defiance of planter society; Chopra shows that for Jamaican Maroons, oath making and military service were a way of using loyalty to claim status and protection within the British Empire.
Chopra does excellent work illuminating the complexities of the British world in the age of revolutions. As she follows the traces of the Maroons in archives from Jamaica to Sierra Leone, she evokes the tangled textures of imperial administration, and the often entrepreneurial character of colonial governance. In 1795, the truce between the Maroons and white colonial society broke down, and a two-year period of guerrilla warfare began. Other Maroon communities gave up their insurrection, but the Trelawney Town Maroons struck the Earl of Balcarres, the newly appointed governor of Jamaica, as especially recalcitrant. At tremendous expense, Balcarres sent more than five hundred Trelawney Town Maroons into exile in Nova Scotia in 1797. In Nova Scotia, “civilizing” the Maroons became a pet project for the ambitious lieutenant-governor, John Wentworth. By 1799, the Colonial Office had grown impatient with the lieutenant-governor's habit of demanding that the Jamaican Assembly reimburse him for the cost of his civilizing mission. In concert with the antislavery activists, politicians, and financiers who managed the Sierra Leone Company from London, the Maroons were shipped across the Atlantic to Freetown. When they arrived in 1800, they were immediately employed to track down and capture a group of the colony's “Black Loyalist” settlers—self-emancipated African Americans who had joined British lines in the American War of Independence—who had taken up arms against colonial officials. Everywhere they went, Chopra shows, the Maroons captured the imagination of colonial and military officials, who projected their own fantasies onto the exiles. Colonial governors imagined the Maroons as vicious and incorrigible rebels or as noble warrior-settlers and pioneer farmers; military officers saw them as a powerful fighting force already “seasoned” for making war in the tropics; antislavery activists supported their claims to freedom but worried about their vaunted propensity for violence.
Almost Home draws inspiration from histories of the British world written through the lens of individual geographies, including David Lambert and Alan Lester's edited volume Colonial Lives Across the British Empire (2006) and Miles Ogborn's Global Lives (2008), as well as Maya Jasanoff's Liberty's Exiles (2011), Kirsten McKenzie's A Swindler's Progress (2010) and Linda Colley's Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh (2007), among others. As she follows the Maroons, Chopra limns the political and social life of three very different British colonies, drawing out connections and disjunctures in Britain's Atlantic world. And yet, although the Maroons’ progress through the empire produced correspondence among the colonial officials who took an interest in them, the Maroons produced few written traces themselves. Their petitions in the archives—which, as Chopra adroitly shows, can be understood as a symbol of their particular version of loyalism—were usually crafted in collaboration with officials who took an interest in their case. In consequence, the Maroons in Almost Home can sometimes appear as ciphers; canvases for the ambitions of white officials. Moreover, the Maroons who most fascinated colonial officials were adult men, particularly war leaders and soldiers. This is an impressive work of archival reconstruction, but Chopra might have profitably given herself license to read against the grain or to draw on anthropological or folkloric work on the Maroons or on the transnational history of marronage in the Americas to add depth to her reflection on the internal politics of the exiled Maroon community.
The exile of the Maroons, Chopra writes, “occurs within the framework of slavery and emancipation, on the one hand, and British expansionism and consolidation, on the other” (193). She shows very clearly how the ambitions of colonial officials eager to end the slave trade, or to advance the cause of antislavery more generally, overlapped with the desire to consolidate British power over imperial frontiers like Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone. This book will be read with great interest by historians of slavery and emancipation, historians of the Atlantic world, and by a wider public interested in the political and military ferment of the age of Atlantic revolutions.
