Roadblock Politics: The Origins of Violence in Central Africa by Peer Schouten

escapes and the geographical location of the maroons involved. The last section of the books consists of two chapters that discuss the arms, acts of sabotage, and networks with which the maroons countered the effects of the repressive policies of the government. The colonial authorities’ policy of allowing slave owners to re-incorporate re-captured rebels and runaways back into their workforces enabled former fugitives to share their radical outlook with recently arrived bozales. Such was the context in which the slave rebellion of August 1791 ignited. Eddins’ research methodology alleviates some of the problems that researchers have typically encountered when trying to reconstruct the undocumented experiences of enslaved Africans in the Americas. It contributes new insights to studies by James, Geggus, and Dubois, and especially by Fick and Blackburn, who investigated the role that maroons played prior to the slave rebellion on Saint Domingue. Her study, however, might have benefited from some attention to the plantation studies of Foubert, whose work details the nature and composition of a number of fugitive slave communities. She might also have compared the dynamics of marronage on the French colonies Guadeloupe and Martinique with that on Saint Dominque to complete her picture. Nonetheless, Eddins’ important study will greatly benefit students and scholars of the Caribbean and the African Diaspora.