Along with the popularity of the subaltern school in South Asian history, recent peasant studies in Latin American history, and James C. Scott’s much-cited works on the “weapons of the weak” and the everyday politics of the oppressed, The Common Wind redefined for many historians how we write “history from below.” Drawing on Georges Lefebvre’s study of the role of rumor in the French Revolution, Scott brought Lefebvre’s techniques into the world of black revolutionaries. Tracking the currents of the ocean and the well-traversed routes of trade, war, and rebellion, Scott showed how ideas of black resistance flowed among the slave colonies of various European nations and helped inspire new visions of freedom among the enslaved.
All of this revolutionary unrest came to a head with the Haitian Revolution. News of the rebellion could not be contained by anxious slaveholders and local authorities, and it inspired urgent demands for emancipation among the enslaved throughout the so-called New World. “Sweeping across linguistic, geographic, and imperial boundaries,” Scott writes, “the tempest created by the black revolutionaries of Saint-Domingue and communicated by mobile people in other slave societies would prove to be a major turning point in the history of the Americas.” The title of his study was taken, appropriately, from Wordsworth’s ode to Toussaint Louverture: “There’s not a breathing of the common wind / That will forget thee.”
Reading The Common Wind today, one is struck by how Scott’s arguments have remained at the cutting edge of historical scholarship even after all these years. He uncovered a world of masterless men, free and enslaved, and helped map what he terms a “complex (and largely invisible) underground” of mariners, rebels, and runaways. Using concepts developed by Christopher Hill and C.L.R. James, Scott committed himself to years of painstaking research in the archives of various former slave colonies in order to chart the routes of black resistance in the late 18th century. Runaway slaves—especially those who created Maroon communities on the outskirts of plantation slavery—shared an ideological and political “common space,” he argues, and it was there that new visions of resistance, freedom, and political literacy arose.