Haitian independence reverberated among Africans across the Atlantic world, and Barima traces one channel of that influence: Jamaica in the decades on either side of the revolution.

The starting condition matters to the argument. Maroon polities in Jamaica had signed treaties with the colonial establishment in 1739 and 1740, a serious setback for the fight against slavery there. Events in Haiti revived that fight, Barima contends, feeding marronage, conspiracies, and open revolt through the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The study examines how Jamaica's Africans and Afro-Creoles mirrored what was happening in Haiti while carrying forward West and Central African culture and spirituality as part of the campaign for freedom. Revisiting this political and religious terrain, Barima argues, brings into view earlier answers to the same summons the captives had raised.