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manuscript remained unpublished for thirty-two years.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.