Haitian maroon communities were smaller than Jamaica’s because coffee planting filled the mountains

Evidence

During the eighteenth century the maroon communities of Saint- Domingue maintained open, armed conflict with the plantation society that surrounded them, claiming and defending their liberty. As a result some consider them the precursors—and the ancestors—of those who rose up in the slave revolt of 1791. (During the reign of François Duvalier, a statue to the “Unknown Maroon” was erected across from the National Palace in Port-au-Prince to celebrate these nameless rebels as the founders of the nation.) Others express skepticism about the relationship between marronage and revolution in Saint-Domingue. The maroon communities of the colony were much smaller than those in Jamaica and Suriname, in part because many of the mountainous regions where maroons might have sought refuge had been invaded by coffee plantations. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 197

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s trees/settlement reading: coffee plantation expansion physically foreclosing maroon refuge parallels how land-use change alters infrastructure and escape routes.