Colonial authorities legitimized maroon communities via negotiated treaties.

Evidence

In 1785 the colonial administrations of both the Spanish and French colonies signed a treaty with a group of more than 100 maroons living in frontier region of Bahoruco. The treaty granted them amnesty and liberty in return for their promise to pursue any new runaways in the area and hand them over to the authorities. Many whites decried such agreements, believing that the only way to deal with rebel slave communities was to destroy them. But in pursuing this policy Saint- Domingue’s administrators were simply following the lead of those in Jamaica and Suriname who had signed such treaties with maroon groups in the 1730s as a way of ending long wars and creating a buffer against continuing escapes. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 196

Categorization

• XREF: Treaties co-opting maroons as escape-buffers echo the reputation-enforcement logic of community governance institutions.
• SEED: Essay angle: recognition of rebel communities as statecraft — the amnesty-and-instrumentalize pattern recurring from Bahoruco to imperial frontier deals.