Archipelagos of Insurrection: Slave Revolt and the Geographic Imagination

Enslaved Africans commonly called “Coromantees” or “Koromantyns” from the Gold Coast, a West African region stretching between the Komoe and Volta rivers, staged a dramatic series of conspiracies and revolts in the seventeenth and eighteenth-century Americas. The most significant occurred in Cartagena de Indias, Surinam, St. John, New York, Antigua, and Jamaica, an archipelago of insurrection stretching throughout the North Atlantic Americas. The Jamaican revolt of 1760-1761 was among the largest and most consequential.

Scholars have yet to give sustained attention to the complex patterns of alliance and antagonism over time and across vast distances that defined the contours of such revolts.  Thus these complex histories have yet to be understood as stories of displacement, belonging, and political predicament that linked the transatlantic slave trade to diasporic warfare. A new cartography is needed before we know how events in Africa reverberated through the Atlantic, thereby joining African, European, and American history. By mapping the history of the African diaspora onto an Atlantic history, we illuminate processes that transcend both.  By following people, their symbolic worlds, and their actions across space and over time, we may sketch an image of tangled pathways wherever they lead, showing how genealogies of political and military practice travel, take root, and grow in disparate environments.  By devising a “creative cartographic vision,” we may learn how empires and insurgencies created, navigated, and transformed a complex social geography spanning towns, plantations, mountain ranges, and oceans.