The Militarization of the Jamaican Landscape During the First Maroon War

abstract: In the third and fourth decades of the eighteenth century, English colonists fought an intense and bloody war against runaway enslaved people and freeborn Maroons in the Jamaican hinterland. The Black resisters challenged English attempts to re-enslave them and to make the island a slave society. The First Maroon War, a conflict that involved disparate groups of Black fighters, gradually intensified in the early eighteenth century and ended with formal peace treaties in 1739 with Maroon cooperation with English settlement plans. The war also resulted in substantial changes to the Jamaican landscape. In this war about slave resistance, English colonists developed plans to build militarized infrastructure in the Jamaican landscape to control the Maroons and to offer launch pads for future assaults against Maroon strongholds. During the war, Maroons forced English colonists to develop a series of new policies that permanently altered the Jamaican landscape. Maroon control of vast tracts of land in Jamaica inhibited English settlement, trade, cultivation, and travel on the island. Thus, in coordination with militia assaults on Maroon towns throughout Jamaica, colonial legislators also ordered the building of roads, forts, and barracks throughout the island’s interior to possess the terrain and change the Jamaican landscape into a militarized environment in which English soldiers and planters could establish a slave society.