Geographies of Freedom: Marronage, Slavery, and Black Cosmopolitanism in the Early North American Borderlands

This thesis reconceptualizes the colonial U.S. South through the lens of the Atlantic World, revealing the mobility, and influence of Black actors. It emphasizes the role of Black people who, rooted in Africa and dispersed across the American colonies, developed and used a cosmopolitan understanding of the Atlantic to negotiate their freedoms. Focusing on Spanish Florida, Georgia borderlands, and French New Orleans, it unveils how enslaved Africans and their descendants navigated and exploited imperial conflicts between British, Spanish, French, and Native Americans. By uncovering the linkages between the colonial Southeast and contextualizing them with the greater Caribbean, this study reframes the history of the US South as an integrated part of the circum-Atlantic world, where Black mobility and political influence shaped the course of early colonial and national histories.