Maps for Empires, Lands of Mocambos: Maroon Territoriality across Imperial Franco-Lusophone Borderlands, 1790–1817

In 1798, the Portuguese empire put into motion a project known as o grande deserto (the great desert) project in the Lands of North Cape. Targeting the neotropical thicket of the northeastern Amazon basin, the plan signaled the culmination of an imperial politics of erasure. Portuguese governor Francisco de Souza Coutinho advocated for the transformation of the North Cape landscape into an eighty-mile-long stretch of empty land. This land never was–and never became–a desert. Years later, 1809, a Luso-British fleet invaded Cayenne, which led to the Portuguese occupation of the French colonial outpost until 1817, but without dominating North Cape's lands. Throughout this period, Maroon communities flourished with independent productivity and mobility in the Atlantic coast of the Amazon’s northernmost reaches, a remote region in halfway between the French colonial outpost of Cayenne and the Portuguese port city of Belém. There, Maroons opted for autarky and transformed imperial presence into a fragile formality, demonstrating the limits of empires' oversight. Most scholarship on French-Portuguese disputes over Amazonian territories has centered on how statesmen and high-ranking figures defined these borderlands through diplomatic accords. Yet inter-imperial contexts and cartographical discourses they generated wholly depended on the geographical knowledge of captured runaways. Indeed, imperial officials were routinely thrown into confusing by these autonomous communities they depended on for knowing the region. While French and Portuguese diplomats, governors, and soldiers struggled to define their authority over the North Cape, Maroon's developed their own territorial project that lasted among aggressive military campaigns between the European empires across the Atlantic. The defiance of imperial sovereignties was a consequence of the Maroons’ commitment to the collective strengthening of mocambos as the construction of autarkic refuges.