as we crossed “Red Square” and discussed questions that arose about his talk, Wood mentioned that he had a Ph.D. student who was studying the movement by sea of the ideas and news of the Haitian Revolution during and after the 1790s, the decade in which the Atlantic was in flames, from Port-au-Prince to Belfast to Paris and London.
My first words to Wood were, “how on earth can someone study that?” Bear in mind, I had recently completed a dissertation on eighteenth - century Atlantic sailors, so if anyone could have been expected to know how Scott did it, it might have been me. Even so, I was stunned by Wood’s description of the project—and more than curious to learn more. Wood put us in touch, Scott and I began to correspond, and a year or so later, after its submission and defense, I read “The Common Wind.” I was convinced then, and I am convinced now, that it is one of the most creative historical studies I have ever read.
Scott takes on an issue that long vexed slaveowners around the Atlantic—what one of them in 1791 called the “unknown mode of conveying intelligence amongst Negroes.” Intelligence is precisely the right word, for the knowledge that circulated on “the common wind” was strategic in its applications, linking news of English abolitionism, Spanish reformism, and French revolutionism to local struggles across the Caribbean. Mobile people used webs of commerce and their own autonomous mobility to form subversive networks, of which the ruling classes of the day were keenly aware even if latter-day historians, until Scott, were not.
Scott thus creates a new way to see one of history’s biggest themes, what Eric Hobsbawm famously called “the age of revolution.” He shifts our view in two directions: we see the flaming epoch from below and from the seaside. By emphasizing the men and women who connected by sea Paris, Sevilla, and London to Port-au-Prince, Santiago de Cuba, and Kingston, and who then in small vessels connected ports, plantations, islands, and colonies to each other, Scott creates a new, highly imaginative transnational geography of struggle. Instances of resistance from below in various, hitherto disconnected parts of the world now appear as constituent parts of a broad human movement. The forces—and the makers—of revolution are illuminated as never before.
The book is populated by long-forgotten figures who once upon a time inspired stories of their own. A Cap Français runaway called himself “Sans-Peur” (“Without Fear”)—truly a name with a message, both for his fellow enemies of slavery and for anyone who might try to hunt him down. Nameless African market women in Saint-Domingue called each other “sailor,” expressing through their greetings a form of solidarity that stretched back to the seventeenth-century buccaneers. John Anderson, known as “Old Blue,” was a Jamaican sailor who escaped his owner with a huge iron collar around his neck. He eluded recapture along the waterfront for fourteen years, during which time his reputation was “as long and distinctive as his graying beard” (74). The richness of the book’s narrative is extraordinary.
A key to Scott’s work is the port city, where mobile peoples from around the world came together to work. Brought into cooperative laboring relationships by transnational capital to move the commodities of the world, these workers translated their cooperation into projects of their own. Scott shows how the capitalist mode of production actually worked in port cities, not only generating massive wealth through trade, but also producing oppositional movements from below. As the miserable Lord Balcarres, governor of Jamaica, explained in 1800, “turbulent people of all nations” made up the lower class of Kingston. Characterized by “a general levelling spirit throughout” they were primed for insurrection—ready to torch the town and leave it in ashes (70). Scott shows how the waterfront became a “cauldron of insurrection” (114) and how transnational “cycles of unrest” erupted in many port cities during the 1730s, the 1760s, and the 1790s. The last of these exploded into an Atlantic-wide revolution.
Scott was doing transnational and Atlantic history long before that approach and that field had become cutting-edge forces in historical writing. To say that he was ahead of his time would be an understatement. Many of the sentences he penned more than thirty years ago read as if they were written yesterday. “Sweeping across linguistic, geographic, and imperial boundaries, the tempest created by mobile people in … slave societies would prove a major turning point in the history of the Americas” (xv). Such conclusions are based on deep archival research carried out in Spain, Britain, Jamaica, and the United States, and on published primary sources from and about Cuba, Saint Domingue, and other parts of the Caribbean. They tell a startling new story in the proud annals of “history from below.”
Scott has drawn creatively on a rich body of radical scholarship in conceptualizing the book. From Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas in the English Revolution (1972), Scott takes the notion of the “masterless,” originally used to describe the footloose, often expropriated men and women of the seventeenth century, to create something entirely new, “the masterless Caribbean,” the men and women who occupied and moved around and between the highly “mastered” spaces of the plantation system. From C. L. R. James’s Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: Herman Melville and the World We Live In (1953), Scott takes the motley, floating subjects who connected the world in the early modern era and who later came to life in Melville’s sea novels. Scott also draws on the work of Georges Lefebvre, the great historian of the French Revolution who coined the phrase “history from below” in the 1930s and who showed, in his classic work The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France (1932), how rumor drove a great social and political upheaval. Rumors of emancipation, spread by masterless motley crews, became a material force across the Caribbean and around the Atlantic during the 1790s.
The Common Wind is one of those rare works that conveys not only new evidence and new arguments, though there are plenty of both, but an entirely new vision of a historical period, in this case the age of revolution, one of the most profound moments in world history. The Haitian Revolution, Wordsworth would be happy to know, “dies not.” Julius S. Scott follows in the wake of the undefeated people he studies by telling us a new story—of exultation and agony, of love and revolution. He has given us a gift for the ages.
Preface
In the summer of 1792, just three days before the third anniversary of the storming of the Bastille in Paris, three volunteer army battalions waited anxiously at the French port of La Rochelle to ship out to the French Caribbean. Eager, loyal to the French republic, and firmly committed to the ideals of the revolution which continued to unfold around them, these soldiers nevertheless possessed only a vague notion of the complex situation which awaited them in the colonies.
Once the French Revolution began in 1789, inhabitants of France’s possessions overseas perceived the sweeping governmental and social changes in the mother country to represent an opportunity to advance their own interests. Planters and merchants pursued greater freedom from the control of colonial ministers, free people of color sought to rid the colonies of caste inequality, but the slaves, who made up the vast majority of the population in all the French territories in America, mounted the most fundamental challenge to metropolitan authority. Inspired by the ideas of “liberty, equality, and fraternity,” sporadic uprisings of slaves occurred in the French islands as early as the fall of 1789. While white colonists managed to contain these early disturbances, in August 1791 a massive rebellion of slaves erupted in Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), France’s richest and most important Caribbean slave colony. Even as these young troops massed at La Rochelle, French forces continued to fight in vain to subdue the revolution of slaves in Saint-Domingue, which had now lasted almost a full year. The volunteers faced a difficult task: to re-establish order in Saint-Domingue in the name of the French National Assembly.
Before departing, the young recruits underwent an inspection by one General La Salle, himself ready to leave for Saint-Domingue as part of the same detachment. Two of these newly raised units had, after careful democratic deliberation, adopted slogans describing their mission and their commitment, as did many of the battalions raised in the days of the French Revolution. They emblazoned the precious
