Robert Wedderburn's Black Marketplace of Ideas: Maroons, Higglers, and Afro-British Authorship

Abstract: Author and orator Robert Wedderburn attributes his ideals of collective resistance to his grandmother, a Kingston higgler; his rebellious enslaved mother; and his Maroon-identified half-sister. Challenging the institutions of slavery and print culture, Wedderburn's The Axe Laid to the Root, The Horrors of Slavery , and "An Address to Lord Brougham and Vaux" register the intersections of higglering, marronage, and Afro-British authorship, advancing a gendered and vernacular vision of Black agency. This essay conceptualizes Wedderburn's "Black marketplace of ideas" to interrogate so-called free-market values, invoking both the unrespectability of informal economies and the anarchic vitality of the Jamaican street market.