Jamaican Maroons

Jamaican Maroons are a group descended from the indigenous Arawakan peoples of the Caribbean who mixed with Africans who freed themselves from slavery in the Colony of Jamaica and established communities of free black people in the island's mountainous interior, primarily in the eastern parishes. Arawaks fleeing the encomienda system and Africans who were already in Jamaica during Spanish rule over Jamaica (1493–1655) may have been the first to develop such refugee communities.

The English, who invaded the island in 1655, continued the importation of enslaved Africans to work on the island's sugar-cane plantations. Africans in Jamaica continually resisted slavery with many fleeing the plantations to join the indigenous communities, who were the first Maroons. The revolts disrupted the sugar economy in Jamaica and made it less profitable. The uprisings decreased after the British colonial authorities signed treaties with the Leeward Maroons in 1738 and the Windward Maroons in 1739. The importance of the Maroons to the colonial authorities declined after slavery was abolished in 1838.

The Windward Maroons and those from the Cockpit Country resisted conquest in the First Maroon War (c. 1728 to 1740), which the colonial government ended in 1739–1740 by making treaties, to grant lands and to respect maroon autonomy, in exchange for peace and aiding the colonial militia if needed against external enemies. The tension between Governor Alexander Lindsay and the majority of the Leeward Maroons resulted in the Second Maroon War from 1795 to 1796. Although the governor promised leniency if the maroons surrendered, he later betrayed them and, supported by the Assembly, insisted on deporting just under 600 Maroons to British settlements in Nova Scotia, where enslaved African Americans who escaped from the United States were also resettled. The deported Maroons were unhappy with conditions in Nova Scotia, and in 1800 a majority left, having obtained passage to Freetown eight years after the Sierra Leone Company established it in West Africa (in present-day Sierra Leone) as a British colony, where they formed the Sierra Leone Creole ethnic identity.