The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution
Julius Scott
Paperback: 272 pages
Publisher: Verso (November 27, 2018)
ISBN-13: 9781788732475

Out of the grey expanse of official records in Spanish, English and French, The Common Wind provides a gripping and colorful account of inter-continental communication networks that tied together the free and enslaved masses of the new world. A powerful "history from below," this book follows those "rumors of emancipation" and the people who spread them, bringing to life the protagonists in the revolution against slavery.

Though it's been said that The Common Wind is "the most original dissertation ever written," and is credited for having "opened up the Black Atlantic with a rigor and a commitment to the power of written words," the PhD project has remained unpublished for thirty-two years, since it's completion at Duke University in 1986. Now, after decades of achieving wide acclaim by leading historians of slavery and the new world, it will finally be released by Verso for the first time, with a foreword from Marcus Rediker.

Author:

Julius Scott III is a professor of AfroAmerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan.

Marcus Rediker is Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh and Senior Research Fellow at the Collège d'études mondiales in Paris. He is the author of numerous prize-winning books, including The Many-Headed Hydra (with Peter Linebaugh), The Slave Ship, and The Amistad Rebellion. He produced the award-winning documentary film Ghosts of Amistad, about the popular memory of the Amistad rebellion of 1839 in contemporary Sierra Leone.

Reviews

“An important part of the tradition of scholarship that puts the end of modern slavery in a global perspective.”
—Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams and Race Rebels

“Julius S. Scott’s The Common Wind is a tour de force. Rigorously researched and beautifully written, it has profoundly shaped our understanding of Black Atlantic history. Indeed, Scott’s study of the movement of people, ideas, words, papers, and even feelings among people of African descent in the eighteenth century is a stunning model for any kind of history.”
—Ada Ferrer, author of Insurgent Cuba and Freedom Now

Article

"...this is not the story of a publisher’s dusting off an obscure gem: The Common Wind has long been revered by historians. Over the years, it’s been passed around, first in photocopies and later as a PDF. In 2008 the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor held a conference inspired by The Common Wind. It’s made its way onto required-reading lists and been cited hundreds of times. Not bad for an unpublished book in need of revision...."

https://www.chronicle.com/article/An-Underground-Sensation/245000/