Marronage, Commodification, and Racial Capitalism in the 17th-Century Atlantic World

In the late seventeenth century, a fledging colonial Jamaican state instituted several measures to prevent the growth of marronage. Previous efforts to stem the tide of this phenomenon through diplomatic overtures had largely failed. This paper examines these measures-- laws, declarations, and codes-- to show the broad capitalist investment in maroons’ bodies and the spaces they called home. Looking at comparative cases in the Spanish Atlantic, it situates the women and men who challenged slavery with their feet in conversations on race, gender, commodification, and slavery. It contends that while we must continue to investigate the operations of power that were created and embedded in the fixed environments of Atlantic slavery, turning our gaze to uncharted maroon territories illuminates how the logics of racial capitalism shaped black insurgency and the counterinsurgency movement against such resistance.