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The 2018 publication of Julius S. Scott's The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution inspired a renewed focus on the reverberations of the Haitian Revolution. Here, six scholars of the Atlantic World and the Age of Revolutions consider the historiographical implications of The Common Wind and remind us how the Haitian upheaval belongs at the very center of the ripples of modernity that spread across the globe from the revolutionary Atlantic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship on free people of color in the Caribbean during the Age of Revolutions has focused on themes of mobility and resilience, with emphasis on the few remarkable individuals who pursued their freedom and respectability in imperially visible registers. These themes sometimes mask as much as they reveal. Mobility ignores those individuals who remain in place in families and communities, and resilience elides efforts by some free people of color to secure the benefits of the slave economy for themselves and their descendants. Often figures are assigned subversive motives or subaltern potential they perhaps would not recognize, when in fact their actions sometimes served to legitimate colonial order and strengthen racial divides by distancing themselves from more marginalized groups. Possible displays of respectability complicated revolutionary-era negotiations among the long free, the enslaved, and recently freed. Free people of color frequently defined margins from the enslaved rather than subvert them, including through largely unconsidered realms of taste or conspicuous consumption. This examination raises questions regarding extant conceptions of how Caribbean free people of color acquired and wielded social, cultural, and symbolic capitals. Perhaps more often than operating on socially progressive or latent revolutionary positions they evinced concern for systemic continuity. This essay, which introduces the following research that explores this topic, suggests new avenues of investigating these overlooked complexities in motivations and actions by free people of color, a population of disproportionate importance in the cultural politics of the revolutionary Caribbean. Without this recalibration, we risk underappreciating the legacy of late Caribbean colonialism, minimizing the context of revolutionary change and state formation, and misunderstanding the ambitions and centrality of free communities of color to these processes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper investigates the relationship between West Africa social and political movements in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth centuries, especially the Sudanese jihad, and the processes of Western global transformation during the same period. It opens a dialogue with the work of Eric Hobsbawn and Eugene Genovese, critically analyzing their approach of the influence of Western Africa's societies on the events taking place in the Atlantic world through the so-called "age of revolutions." The article also questions the perspective adopted in studies of slave rebellions in the Americas, which barely consider the African context, and highlight only the influence of Western Europe's revolutionary changes. In that sense, the paper also questions the historiography of the "Black Atlantic" emergence, which does not attribute due importance to determining factors originating within Africa, crucial in that process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]