On the first of March, 1739, in the mountains of the Cockpit Country in western Jamaica, a British colonial official and a Maroon leader named Cudjoe signed a treaty. It was witnessed by Maroon community members and by British military officers. It was subsequently confirmed by the Jamaican colonial legislature and by the British Crown. It was a bilateral treaty between the British colonial government of Jamaica and the Leeward Maroon community — a community of people who, under every legal instrument that the Architecture of Control had produced, were classified as fugitive slaves, as property without legal standing, as persons whose very existence outside the plantation system was a criminal offense.

The treaty acknowledged their freedom. It acknowledged their right to the territory they occupied. It acknowledged their right to govern themselves by their own laws within that territory. It acknowledged their right to trade, to hunt and to travel freely within specified areas. And it bound the British Crown — one of the most powerful states on earth — to respect these rights in perpetuity. In exchange, the Leeward Maroons agreed to stop fighting the British, to return escaped slaves who sought refuge with them, and to assist the British in suppressing future slave rebellions.

The Cudjoe Treaty of 1739 was the first formal treaty between a colonial European power and a community of formerly enslaved Africans in the Americas. It was not the last. The Windward Maroon Treaty of 1740, the Suriname Ndyuka Treaty of 1760, the Saramaka Treaty of 1762 — these documents together constitute the most significant body of Maroon legal achievement in history. This chapter examines them in detail, analyzes their legal standing under contemporary international law, and traces their ongoing significance for Maroon communities asserting their rights today.

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The Jamaica Treaties — A Close Legal Reading

Read collectively, the fifteen articles constitute a recognition of Maroon sovereignty in everything but name. A people with territory, governance, judicial authority, economic rights and freedom from colonial interference, protected by a bilateral treaty with the Crown, is a sovereign entity by any reasonable legal definition. The British did not use the word “sovereign.” The legal content of what they acknowledged makes the word unavoidable.

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The Suriname Treaties — The Dutch Acknowledge What Rome Had Denied

The Ndyuka Treaty of 1760 and the Saramaka Treaty of 1762 were negotiated by the Dutch colonial government of Suriname with two distinct Maroon communities — the Ndyuka and the Saramaka — following decades of warfare that the Dutch could not win. Like the Jamaica treaties, they acknowledged Maroon freedom, territorial rights and self-governance. Like the Jamaica treaties, they contained provisions requiring the Maroon communities to return future escaped slaves in exchange for these recognitions.

The Saramaka Treaty of 1762 became the subject of the most significant Maroon legal victory in the twenty-first century. In 2007, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights decided Saramaka People v. Suriname — a case in which the Saramaka community challenged the government of Suriname’s granting of logging and mining concessions on Saramaka traditional territory without their consent.

The Court’s judgment was far-reaching. It held that the Saramaka people are a tribal people with collective rights to their traditional territory under the American Convention on Human Rights. It held that their 1762 treaty rights survived the independence of Suriname from the Netherlands — that Suriname, as the successor state, was bound by the treaty obligations its colonial predecessor had undertaken. It held that the government was required to obtain free, prior and informed consent from the Saramaka before approving any development projects affecting their territory. And it held that the Saramaka were entitled to a share of the benefits from any projects conducted on their land.

The Saramaka decision is, in legal terms, a direct continuation of the treaty of 1762. The Maroon community that signed that treaty more than two and a half centuries ago is still asserting the rights it contains. The court that decided the 2007 case is still enforcing them. The Architecture of Control has been forced, by the legal persistence of a Maroon community in the Surinamese rainforest, to acknowledge what it spent centuries denying.

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The Treaties in Contemporary International Law

The legal standing of Maroon treaties under contemporary international law rests on several interlocking frameworks.

The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties of 1969 codified the principle of pacta sunt servanda — agreements must be kept — as a fundamental rule of international law. It also codified the principle of state succession: when a new state comes into existence on the territory of a predecessor state, it inherits the treaty obligations of that predecessor. When Jamaica became independent in 1962, it inherited the treaty obligations of British colonial Jamaica — including the 1739 and 1740 Maroon treaties. The Jamaican government’s acknowledgment of this principle was confirmed by a 2018 court ruling that the Accompong Treaty of 1739 is a valid and legally binding treaty.

The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) of 2007, which Jamaica voted to adopt, provides additional legal framework. Article 37 of UNDRIP specifically addresses treaty rights: “Indigenous peoples have the right to the recognition, observance and enforcement of treaties, agreements and other constructive arrangements concluded with States or their successors and to have States honour and respect such treaties, agreements and other constructive arrangements.” The Maroon treaties are precisely the agreements UNDRIP Article 37 was designed to protect.

The Inter-American system provides a third framework, demonstrated by the Saramaka decision. The American Convention on Human Rights, interpreted by the Inter-American Court, protects the territorial and cultural rights of tribal peoples on the basis of their historical connection to their traditional territories — regardless of whether those rights were originally established by treaty or by uninterrupted occupation.

The practical implication of all three frameworks is the same: the Maroon treaties are not historical artifacts. They are living legal documents, enforceable under contemporary international law, binding on the governments that succeeded the colonial powers that signed them. The legal work of the Maroon communities of the eighteenth century is still being done by their descendants in the twenty-first.