Description
Book SynopsisIn a tumultuous era of Atlantic revolutions, a remarkable group of African-born and African-descended individuals transformed themselves from slaves into active agents of their lives and times. Through prodigious archival research, Landers alters our vision of the breadth and extent of the Age of Revolution, and our understanding of its actors.
Trade ReviewFrom thousands of gossamer, broken threads of narrative, Jane Landers has rewoven the whole tapestry of life along the Atlantic seaboard for Native Americans, imported slaves, Creoles and free blacks. Excellently researched, and eminently readable, it is an illuminating, groundbreaking work. -- Madison Smartt Bell, author of
Toussaint Louverture: A BiographyLanders follows the extraordinary odysseys of black royalists, counter-revolutionaries, and maroons, whose daring movements through a treacherous political landscape traced a hidden history of freedom in the shadow of slavery. -- Vincent Brown, author of
The Reaper's Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic SlaveryThis fascinating study shows how individuals responded to bondage and attempted to find a niche in the slave societies of the Americas, a process that Landers calls becoming Atlantic Creole. -- Paul E. Lovejoy, Director, The Harriet Tubman Institute
Landers delineates in fascinating detail the crucial leadership African Creoles exercised in revolutionary movements throughout the circum-Caribbean region. -- Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Silver Professor of History, New York University
Landers has assembled admirable accounts of some extraordinarily agile Africans and African-Americans, in and out of slavery, in and around the Caribbean at the end of the eighteenth century. -- Joseph Miller, T. Cary Johnson, Jr., Professor in the Department of History at the University of Virginia
Above all else, Atlantic creoles sought freedom. Landers has done an excellent job in excavating their lives and highlighting their significance in the Age of Revolutions. -- Gad Heuman * Times Literary Supplement *
Table of Contents* Introduction *1. African Choices in the Revolutionary South: Becoming Atlantic Creoles *2. Slave Rebels and Defenders of Kings: The Counter-Revolution in Saint Domingue *3. Maroons, Loyalist Intrigues, and Ephemeral States in the Contested Lower South *4. Atlantic Creoles, African Rebels, and Spain's Liberal Constitution of 1812 in Havana *5. Atlantic Creoles among the Seminoles: A Nation Besieged *6. Atlantic Creoles in Matanzas: Becoming Black * Epilogue: Failed Promises of the Atlantic Revolutions * Appendix 1: Chronology * Appendix 2: Prince's Black Company * Notes * Index
