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

It always strikes me how diluted (if not altogether absent) our common education is on the rebellion and resistance of slaves across the American continent. What Julius Scott uncovers in his scholarship is nothing short of remarkable. What it does is give increased agency to enslaved Africans and a......more

One of the unfortunate facts about being interested in nearly everything is that the depth of your knowledge is bound to remain inversely proportional to its range; the more you know en masse, the less you tend to know about a particular, narrow topic. The geopolitical interplay between the slave co......more

A seriously impressive work of scholarship. The depth and breadth of research that went into this is staggering. Julius S. Scott's "The Common Wind" is a fascinating examination of the mobility of ideas, rumours, and news during the age of revolution in the late 1700s. The Atlantic World, and especi......more

A longer review will come with a second reading. The Common Wind covers the phenomena of the growing Atlantic World and the belief in the connections between countries and people in this region. Scott adds the growing histography (and honestly, if this had been published earlier, he would have been T......more

Atlantic history is one of the most fruitful and rich subfields around, and books like this are the reason why. Scott looks through the famously fragmented archive of the pre-emancipation Caribbean to unearth the “masterless” sea and the networks that spread news and thoughts of revolution. A brilli......more