A war of words: speech, script and print in the Maroon War of 1795-6

What is the power of a spoken agreement, a printed declaration or a private letter? Early modern empires worked through historical geographies of oral and written communication that were rooted in particular localised spaces of production, consumption and distribution and also extended out across networks which spanned large spaces. These forms of communication have to be understood in terms of the ways in which the meanings and uses of speech, script and print were differentiated from each other while these varied ways of communicating were also combined in practice. This paper explores the power relations of imperial communication through the story of the conduct and aftermath of the Jamaican Maroon War of 1795-6. It details the historical geographies of speech that legitimated Britain’s empire, the uses of printing that shaped relationships between the imperial state and its subjects, and the forms of manuscript communication through which imperial administration was organised. The paper argues that these deployments of speech, script and print - particularly by Jamaica’s governor, the earl of Balcarres - aimed to win a war of words. This was, however, simultaneously undercut by the varied meanings and uses of speech, script and print, by his adversaries’ deployment of them and by the transatlantic geography of imperial communication.