Almost Home: Maroons between Slavery and Freedom in Jamaica, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone, by Ruma Chopra
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Almost Home is one of the latest books to attempt to tackle the Jamaican Maroon saga-an oft-told story that continues to excite academic and popular debate across generations.It is distinguished from previous histories of the Maroons in two ways.First, it focuses almost exclusively on a single group, the Trelawney Maroons, following their trajectory from the Second Maroon War of 1795-96 through their deportation to Nova Scotia and eventual resettlement in Sierra Leone in 1800.Secondly, it treats this particular history as an example of a broader phenomenon within British imperial history, which might be characterized as "subaltern loyalism."One of its primary goals is "situating the Maroons within a history of loyalism as well as the history of slavery" (p.9).The book offers a well-documented account of the remarkable transatlantic journey of the Trelawneys, making it particularly useful for readers interested in viewing the Maroons in relation to the geopolitics of empire and the forces that buffeted them in one direction or another following the Second Maroon War.For those intent on accessing the local world of meaning in which the Maroons operated in daily life-or those hoping to understand how the Maroons' own culturally conditioned perceptions might have affected their responses to such large-scale politics and forces-the book is more problematic.Inevitably, given its author's professional interests (as a specialist in "loyalists" among colonized peoples in various parts of the world), Almost Home dances around an ongoing polemic that has dogged the historiography of the Jamaican Maroons for many years.Were the Maroons heroes who resisted slavery or traitors who opted instead for "loyalty" to the British oppressors?Ruma Chopra tries for a more nuanced picture, appearing to eschew such simplistic binaries.She admits, for instance, that although the posttreaty Maroons at times allied themselves with British planters, they "never acquiesced to full subordination" (p.30).Elsewhere she points out that, after being transferred to Sierra Leone, "the Maroons were far from subservient and their loyalty was far from blind" (p.167).Speaking more generally, she cautions that they "held multiple and contradictory views and expressed a range of loyalties to the empire" (p.264 n. 37).Such occasional disclaimers aside, the book gives the overall impression that the Maroons felt "intense loyalty" toward their posttreaty British allies (p.194).Chopra repeatedly represents them in unflattering terms that contradict present-day Maroons' understandings of their ancestors as proudly autonomous actors.For example, she asserts that the Maroons "gave up" dur-
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".