The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution - Hardcover

Scott, Julius S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1788732472 ISBN 13: 9781788732475

Publisher: Verso, 2018

Synopsis

Winner of the 2019 Stone Book Award, Museum of African American History

A remarkable intellectual history of the slave revolts that made the modern revolutionary era

The Common Wind is a gripping and colorful account of the intercontinental networks that tied together the free and enslaved masses of the New World. Having delved deep into the gray obscurity of official eighteenth-century records in Spanish, English, and French, Julius S. Scott has written a powerful “history from below.” Scott follows the spread of “rumors of emancipation” and the people behind them, bringing to life the protagonists in the slave revolution.

By tracking the colliding worlds of buccaneers, military deserters, and maroon communards from Venezuela to Virginia, Scott records the transmission of contagious mutinies and insurrections in unparalleled detail, providing readers with an intellectual history of the enslaved.

Though The Common Wind is credited with having “opened up the Black Atlantic with a rigor and a commitment to the power of written words,” the manuscript remained unpublished for thirty-two years. Now, after receiving wide acclaim from leading historians of slavery and the New World, it has been published by Verso for the first time, with a foreword by the academic and author Marcus Rediker.

About this title

About the Author

Julius S. Scott is a lecturer of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan.

Marcus Rediker is Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh and Senior Research Fellow at the Collège d’études mondiales in Paris. He is the author of numerous prize-winning books, including The Many-Headed Hydra (with Peter Linebaugh), The Slave Ship, and The Amistad Rebellion. He produced the award-winning documentary film Ghosts of Amistad, about how the Amistad Mutiny of 1839 lives on today in popular memory among the people of Sierra Leone.

Review

Winner of the 2019 Stone Book Award, Museum of African American History

“An important part of the tradition of scholarship that puts the end of modern slavery in a global perspective. As W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, Eugene Genovese, and more recently Eric Foner, Robin Blackburn, Rebecca Scott, Thomas Holt, and Frederick Cooper have demonstrated, the transition from chattel slavery to freedom was a global process, in which the struggle over the reconstruction of the labor force had enormous implications for capitalism, democracy, liberal thought, and racial ideology.”
—Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams and Race Rebels

“Julius S. Scott’s The Common Wind is a tour de force. Rigorously researched and beautifully written, it has profoundly shaped our understanding of Black Atlantic history. Indeed, Scott’s study of the movement of people, ideas, words, papers, and even feelings among people of African descent in the eighteenth century is a stunning model for any kind of history.”
—Ada Ferrer, author of Insurgent Cuba and Freedom Now

“Over the past three decades, scholarship on the Black Atlantic and black internationalism has flourished. The Common Wind deserves a great deal of credit for this development ... Julius Scott offers an inspiring history about the subaltern production, transformative power, and global circulation of ideas.”
—Brandon Byrd, African American Intellectual History Society

“A captivating odyssey across the age of Revolution.”
—Times Literary Supplement

“This is meticulous and wide ranging social history, which provides a vivid and illuminating account of the ways these societies worked, whether under British, French or Spanish colonial rule.”
—Counterfire

About this edition

• Publisher: Verso
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1788732472
• ISBN 13: 9781788732475
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272