Ruma Chopra, “Almost Home: Maroons between Slavery and Freedom in Jamaica, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone” (Yale UP, 2018)

After being exiled from their native Jamaica in 1795, the Trelawney Town Maroons endured in Nova Scotia and then in Sierra Leone. In Almost Home: Maroons between Slavery and Freedom in Jamaica, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone (Yale University Press, 2018), Ruma Chopra demonstrates how the unlikely survival of this community of escaped slaves reveals the contradictions of slavery and the complexities of the British antislavery era. Encompassing three distinct regions of the British Atlantic World, and drawing on a vast array of primary source material, Chopra traces their journey and eventual transformation into refugees, empire builders—and sometimes even slave catchers and slave owners.

Ruma Chopra is Professor of History at San Jose State University, and author of Unnatural Rebellion: Loyalists in New York City during the Revolution (2011) and Choosing Sides: Loyalists in Revolutionary America (2013).

Tyler Yank is a senior doctoral candidate in History at McGill University (Montreal, Canada). Her work explores bonded women and British Empire in the western Indian Ocean World.

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