Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions

Over the last 20 years, Atlantic historiography has come to dominate the study of slavery in the colonial Americas. The central goal of the Atlantic paradigm is to push against national and imperial boundaries to demonstrate that most histories of the African diaspora need to be situated in multiple historical sources and contexts. While most scholars tend to endorse the approach, most only pay lip service and remain restricted to the primary sources particular to national and imperial archives. Jane Landers’s Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions is a welcome exception and deserves to be read widely. Through diligent and skillful mining of national, regional, and local archives in the United States, Spain, and Cuba, Landers provides an engaging model of how to recover and insert individuals into the overlapping histories of the Atlantic world during the Age of Revolutions.As the title of the book indicates clearly, Landers builds upon and extends Ira Berlin’s definition of “Atlantic Creoles” from Many Thousands Gone (1998). Berlin focused on Africans who deftly navigated the worlds of early Anglo-American slavery as they straddled a cultural matrix of African origins and American enslavement. In contrast to Berlin, and with much-needed refinement, however, Landers is not simply interested in charting how slave culture moved in a sequential process from African to an African American creole culture. Rather, she examines Africans in depth and detail who were polyglots and polycultural and adept in dealing with imperial rivalries in the greater Caribbean during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Following individuals who became ensnared in the American, Haitian, and French revolutions, border disputes and maroon wars in Florida, and conspiracies and rebellions in nineteenth-century Cuba, this book artfully forces scholars of all these topics to reassess how events often considered specific to a single locality were shaped by wider Atlantic currents. Moreover, by focusing on individuals who moved through the Caribbean during the Age of Revolutions, Landers paints for the reader a fresh and far more revealing portrait of how everyday individuals of the most humble backgrounds as slaves and free people of color could become instrumental in shaping imperial conflicts.Whereas Landers’s earlier book Black Society in Spanish Florida provided a detailed social history analysis of slave and free people of color in Saint Augustine as a product of economic, political, and cultural forces from the Atlantic world, this latest book employs a cultural history approach to provide biographies of individuals of African descent who were shaped by and (just as crucially) shaped the social, political, and cultural forces of the Atlantic world. In order to achieve this task, Landers examines a fascinating cast of characters that she describes as the “Forrest Gump” of their days, “present at almost all of their major turning points” during the Age of Revolution (p. 15).For example, Landers analyzes the fascinating story of Prince Whitten, who spent the first 15 years of his long life in Upper Guinea, the next 10 in South Carolina, another 35 in Spanish Florida, and the final years in Cuba. Whitten’s Atlantic itinerancy was first the product of enslavement, but then he took matters into his own hands by joining the Loyalists during the American Revolution and moving to Florida, and then finally exile and a new life in Cuba once Florida became a US territory. Moving in an opposite geographic direction but propelled by the similar geopolitical forces was George Biassou, an early leader of the Haitian Revolution. Once the slave revolt broke out in 1791, Biassou aligned himself and his troops with the Spanish in exchange for his freedom, received recognition for his military exploits, and became a salaried and pensioned officer. As Toussaint Louverture directed the political tide of the Haitian Revolution toward an alignment with the French Revolution, Biassou remained loyal to the Spanish Empire and took up residence in Spanish Florida. Landers demonstrates how Florida throughout the period of her study functioned as an imperial borderland, with Spanish, British, and American forces vying for control of the peninsula. Individuals who could negotiate and navigate these worlds emerged as leaders, such as William Bowles, who headed the Muskogee State and created a trading network that extended to the Caribbean.These biographic portraits are fascinating in their own right and also serve to illustrate Landers’s overarching argument about the strength, relevance, and ultimate decline of royalism as a political option for slaves and free people of color during the Age of Revolution. Spain had a policy that extended back for centuries of incorporating the population of African descent into colonial societies through militia service and Catholicism. During moments of imperial crisis the Spanish Crown would provide opportunities, often born out of military expediency, for people of African descent to earn their freedom by demonstrating their loyalty to the Spanish Empire. However, as the Age of Revolution came to a close, with America asserting its dominion over the Florida Peninsula and the rise of Cuba as a plantation colony of sugar, tobacco, and coffee exports, racial regimes based upon slavery no longer allowed the same degree of social mobility that royalism had previously allowed. Chapters that examine conspiracies and rebellion in Havana and Matanzas, Cuba, demonstrate both the vitality and increasing limitations of royalism as an ideology to campaign for better treatment of slaves and free people of color. Whether in the new republic of the United States, ever rigidly polarized by race and slavery, or the booming economy of Spain’s ever-faithful isle of Cuba in the nineteenth century, slaves and free people of color were increasingly treated like domestic enemies despite years of loyal service.This elegantly written study testifies to the rewards of exhaustive research into the lives and experiences of individuals who moved through the worlds of slavery and revolution in the Greater Caribbean. It will be mandatory reading for scholars and students of Atlantic history, Caribbean history, American history, Latin American cultural history, and, more broadly, scholars of the African diaspora

Ancient history · Archaeology · Atlantic slave trade · Atlantic World · Colonialism · Creole language · Creolization · Diaspora · Ethnology · Genealogy · Historiography · Linguistics · Sociology · Anthropology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Cuban History and Society · Gender Studies · History