Abstracts

Panel 3: Military Organization and Violence (Day 1)

Chair: Ed Rugemer (Yale)

Ruma Chopra, San Jose State University (USA), “The Loyal Maroons”

In 1800, about 550 maroons from the community of Trelawney Town in northern Jamaica relocated to Sierra Leone after a forced four-year stay in Nova Scotia. My paper examines how these maroons found meaning and purpose in an imagined relationship with a powerful British monarch. Authority within the maroon community had long depended on inheritance, custom, and military toughness; the maroons naturally stretched these assumptions to the next levels and encompassed the king within their own framework.

Claudia Guarisco, El Colegio Mexiquense (Mexico), “Indians, Royalism, and War in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions: New Spain, 1810 – 1821”

My paper reflects on the royalist forces that defended colonial order in the rural areas of central New Spain, Mexico, a region where the Indians fought against the insurgents between 1810 and 1816. The abolition of Tribute and Personal Services, and the autonomy granted by the Constitution of Cadiz played, undoubtedly, an important role in obtaining and securing the Indian’s loyalty. Nevertheless, it was the urgency of defending a way of life rooted in communal lands and local councils from the violent raids of the rebels what drove Indians to participate in local militias. (more)

Maria Alessandra Bollettino, Framingham State University (USA), “‘I am willing to fight for his Majesty King George’: Black Royalism in the Mid-Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World”

Scholars of both slave resistance and royalism in the eighteenth century have noted the royalism expressed by enslaved people of African descent. Such scholars have tended to focus their attention upon those enslaved people who made royalism central to their acts of resistance during the American and Haitian Revolutions. Few scholars, however, have studied those enslaved and free blacks whose royalism led them to work in concert with rather than against slaveholders. This paper examines those enslaved and free blacks who, in alliance with slaveholders, seized upon moments of mid-eighteenth-century slave insurrection or imperial war to champion the British monarch and the imperial order he embodied. It contends that the loyalty of these enslaved and free blacks convinced British imperial officials they were valuable allies upon whom they could rely to secure and expand the Empire in the Atlantic – a conviction that led British officials to bypass slaveholders and instead make direct appeals to enslaved and free blacks for aid during the War for American Independence. An investigation of black royalism in the mid-eighteenth century thus provides an important prehistory of the revolutionary era.  It also offers an opportunity to consider the full range of social and political affiliations of people of African descent and, therefore, to reframe our understanding of the loyalties of those enslaved and free blacks whom historians have tended to marginalize as “collaborators.”