Campbell uses historical documents, anthropological data, and oral interviews to provide the most complete analysis to date on the Jamaica Maroons to the end of the eighteenth century. Her concern rests not so much with the causes of maronage, which she rightly asserts we can expect under ordinary circumstances where slavery exists, but more with the “sociopolitical characteristics, the demographic and ethnic patterns, and certain ecological factors” (p. 10) which were conducive to the formation of Jamaican Maroon society.
Maroon communities experienced perhaps their greatest growth during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when much unsettled land still existed. This phenomenal growth, however, eventually placed them in conflict with whites who became alarmed at Maroon raids on the plantations and their harboring of runaway slaves, despite increasingly aggressive government campaigns during the “critical years” between 1700 and 1730. Renewed hostilities in 1795, following a 50-year truce guaranteed by treaties in 1739, resulted in the Maroons being forcibly transported to Nova Scotia.
The Maroons’ 1739 agreement to return runaway slaves to their masters represented a victory of sorts for the plantocracy. Moreover, some of the Maroons were slaveowners, and Maroons viewed as outsiders slaves who subsequently sought entry into their communities. Though a pan-African identity emerged among the Maroons, partly stimulated by the leaders’ desire to minimize ethnic cleavages, this identity had its limitations. Constraints on the Maroons after the 1739 treaties whittled away the powers of the leaders and undoubtedly increased Maroon dependence on, and interaction with, whites. That many leaders chose names of prominent slave masters by the 1770s reflected perhaps not so much a move “to negate their own cultural values . . . spawning in its wake a cadre of ‘mimic men’” (p. 254) as the growing process of creolization.
