For historians of slavery, marronage has often been cited as something that distinguishes North America from Latin America and the Caribbean. While maroon communities in Brazil, Surinam and Jamaica fought long and protracted battles with colonial armies, and in the latter two instances eventually signed peace treaties securing their independent status, nothing similar happened in North America. There are several straightforward explanations for this. North America had a much larger resident white population, meaning that there were fewer remote areas where maroon communities could flourish; the geography of North America was not as conducive to marronage as the cockpit country of Jamaica or the dense jungles of southern Surinam; and the proportion of Africans in the enslaved population was never as great as elsewhere in the Americas. Sylviane Diouf's new book aims to correct the impression that marronage was absent or was a minor issue in North America.

Using a wide variety of primary materials, including newspaper reports, court records, and legislative documents, she demonstrates that marronage was a common, perhaps even constant, feature of North American slavery. North Americans themselves never referred to maroons using that terminology, preferring “outliers,” “banditti,” and simple “runaways,” and that has perhaps clouded historians' interpretations of this issue. Yet legislatures and courts made a clear distinction between those truants who were absent from plantations for just a few days and those who were absent for much longer periods.

Diouf divides maroons into two groups that she terms “borderland” and “hinterland.” The former resided in the forests and swamps between plantations, the liminal spaces described so well by S. Max Edelson in his book Plantation Enterprise (2006). Borderland maroons had comparatively easy access to support from plantation supplies and tried to maintain links with family and friends. This also, however, made them easier to recapture. Hinterland maroons went further from their place of enslavement, deeper into uninhabited swamps, woods and mountains, where they hoped to carve out lives for themselves as a group. The distinction is a useful one, and helps us to distinguish between those who sought to separate themselves entirely from the world of enslavement and those who continued to interact with it on a regular basis.

Diouf devotes a chapter to each of the three most significant maroon groups: near New Orleans in the 1780s, near Savannah also in the 1780s, and finally in the Great Dismal Swamp. Maroons in Louisiana and the South Carolina–Georgia border both had links to the Revolutionary war, with black troops having fought on the British side. These large maroon groups existed for several years in both cases and Diouf does a great job of teasing out their complex histories. Maroons were both highly mobile, shifting positions in response to white attacks, and capable of constructing significant settlements and (in the case of the Savannah maroons) sophisticated defensive structures. While both groups clashed on numerous occasions with white militias, Diouf rightly points out that the most frequent maroon tactic was flight rather than fight. The Dismal Swamp maroons were probably the largest of all the North American maroon groups, and some lived in the remote vastness of the swamp for decades.

The book is clear and easy to read. The small collection of images is gathered in the middle of the book, no doubt an editorial decision, but it does mean that images are not near the text where they would be most relevant. I would also have liked more maps depicting precisely where the largest maroon settlements were located. Geography forms an important part of this book so the absence of key maps is a little disappointing. More maps might have prevented a couple of small lapses in geography – Caesar's camp at Beech Hill (232) is reported to be three miles from Silver Bluff, near Augusta, whereas in fact it was on the fringes of Stono Swamp near Charleston; bandit Joe's range was impressive, stretching from the Atlantic coast to near Columbia, SC, but never encompassed Beaufort (248).

Diouf's book is important because for the first time it really foregrounds marronage in North America. Much of the South Carolina source material can be found in a complete form in my Maroon Communities in South Carolina (2007), but Diouf extends the range by demonstrating the ubiquity of marronage in virtually every southern state. It should be required reading for any scholar of North American slavery.