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

The publication of The Common Wind makes readily available Julius S. Scott's pathbreaking and enormously influential 1986 dissertation. Readers should be aware that Scott has not revised his dissertation for this book. It does not incorporate the vast scholarship on these topics from the past several decades, nor does it fold in new primary sources. But, the absence of such updates presents little hindrance to our appreciation of The Common Wind, for the contributions of this study are as innovative and impressive now as they were thirty years ago. Scott's work has been deservedly lauded for its demonstration of how people of African descent spread word about revolution, especially the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). They did so through information networks that often intersected with a multiracial world of sailors, smugglers, market women, and other members of the “lower sort” (p. 29). Scott recovers this largely oral culture and traces its circulation across empires and language barriers, revealing how enslaved individuals and freedpeople learned about revolutionary change and were inspired to pursue it for themselves. The archival detective work demanded by this type of history is remarkable, and Scott uses English, French, and Spanish sources to piece together the social channels of communication and show them in action.