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The Jamaican Maroons
Maroon comes from the Spanish cimarrón, “wild”, and denotes enslaved people who escaped and built their own communities beyond the colonial power's reach. Maroon communities existed across the Americas — Palmares in Brazil, Suriname, Florida — but Jamaica is the clearest case of a colonial power having to negotiate as with a state. The treaty of 1739 carried a price still debated: the Maroons undertook to return new escapees. The communities persist today with a measure of self-government, and their campaign in the Cockpit Country is an early and well-documented guerrilla war.
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