An Underground Sensation Arrives

Sean Proctor for The Chronicle

The manuscript was almost published a couple of times. One editor expressed enthusiasm, then abruptly passed. Oxford University Press offered the author — Julius S. Scott, a young historian who had just completed his doctorate at Duke — a contract, along with suggestions for significant revisions. Scott could have made the changes, argued with Oxford, or taken his chances with another press. Instead he set it aside.

And there it stayed for three decades. The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution, which traces networks of communication among slaves and sailors in the Caribbean and beyond, was completed in 1987, and it will be published for the first time this month by Verso.

To be clear, this is not the story of a publisher’s dusting off an obscure gem: The Common Wind has long been revered by historians. Over the years, it’s been passed around, first in photocopies and later as a PDF. In 2008 the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor held a conference inspired by The Common Wind. It’s made its way onto required-reading lists and been cited hundreds of times. Not bad for an unpublished book in need of revision.

Among The Common Wind’s boosters is Marcus Rediker, a professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh and author of The Slave Ship: A Human History (Viking, 2007). Rediker heard about The Common Wind when it was still a dissertation in progress, and he’s been thumbing through the same dog-eared copy since the 1980s.

“It is conceived in a very creative way, and there’s nothing else quite like it,” says Rediker. “He read these archival and published sources against the grain to see what they could reveal about the agency of working people and what role they played in this age of revolution.”

It was Rediker who brought The Common Wind to the attention of Verso. In 2016 an editor there casually asked him what he thought the press should publish. Rediker had a very specific suggestion: “You should publish The Common Wind,” he said. A copy of the manuscript then made it into the hands of another Verso editor, Ben Mabie. “It was surprisingly timely and relevant, and it kept up with a diverse set of academic trends over the last couple of decades,” says Mabie. “Above all, it’s just beautifully written.”

The book focuses on the way information traveled among slaves and sailors, the “mastered” and the “masterless,” and how that communication allowed them to share strategies to oppose their oppressors. Scott writes about how the “many avenues of intercolonial contact, rumors, and reports from English, Spanish, and French sources intermingled and fed upon each other, strengthening the idea that emancipation was near at hand, and finally leading to armed uprisings in both British and French colonies.” His research showed how those rumors and reports traversed national and geographic boundaries, and he makes the case for why they mattered.

“It was about smart black guys moving around and knowing how not to get in trouble, figuring out how to move information back and forth,” says Peter H. Wood, an emeritus professor of history at Duke and an adviser on Scott’s dissertation. When Scott traveled to the Caribbean to search the archives, he would send Wood letters about his progress and his setbacks.

“One of the things that made it this underground sensation is that it’s a model of careful research and clear writing,” says Wood, who considers Scott the best graduate student he ever had. “There’s no jargon. He’s not theorizing in some pedantic, postmodern way. He’s just telling what the records show.”

So how is it that such a beloved and consequential work is only just now making it into print?

One reason is that Scott, as he will admit if pressed, is a perfectionist. “People have accused me of that, and I guess I’m guilty,” he says. He always thought The Common Wind could be better, more comprehensive. He envisioned a much grander project, one that would rival the work of Fernand Braudel, the much-lauded French historian whose category-breaking book on the Mediterranean encompassed seemingly every aspect of life in that region, from economics to politics to the natural world. Scott wanted to be the Braudel of the Caribbean.

Accomplishing that goal would require learning more languages, like Dutch and Danish, and digging through many more records in the Caribbean and elsewhere. He had a vast undertaking in mind. By comparison, The Common Wind felt modest.

But there was another, more personal obstacle: Scott’s health. In 1973 he received a diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes, and not long after turning 40, he had one of his legs amputated. “Things were never really the same after that,” he says. There have been more surgeries since then, including a kidney transplant, and countless hospital stays followed by extended periods of recuperation.

“By the time I was in my 30s and 40s, it had become difficult for me to travel the globe to do the kind of research I had done,” he says. Scott had to postpone the interview for this article several times for medical emergencies, and his illness also forced him to give up lecturing at the University of Michigan nearly three years ago.

“I thought there was going to be a time when I was going to walk out of the hospital and say, ‘I’m cured now,’” he says, “but that’s not how it’s worked out.”

When he heard that Verso was interested in publishing The Common Wind, Scott was initially apprehensive. While others describe the work in near-ecstatic terms, he seizes on what he regards as its flaws.

“When I reread it, I noticed what I hadn’t finished, or what I’ve come to understand better through the years,” he says. His first impulse was to go back and try to add to the manuscript, to improve what seemed not quite right. Mabie, his Verso editor, talked him out of that.

“The book as it is, and the ground that it covers, it feels pretty exhaustive,” Mabie says. “We encouraged Julius to trust in the work he had done and bring it to press.”

There have been minor corrections along the way, but the work is essentially the same as the unofficial copies that have been passed around for years. The difference now is that Scott’s words are preserved inside a hardcover volume, with illustrations and chapters and a dust jacket. The normal trappings of a proper book. And his doubts have gradually given way to a sense of pride in what he accomplished all those years ago.

“I got reminded of why people read it and why they thought it was good,” Scott says. “I’m actually happy about it coming out now, and not quite as worried about the things that aren’t perfect.”

Tom Bartlett is a senior writer at The Chronicle.