Jamaican Maroons descend from 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.
Africans who were enslaved during Spanish rule over Jamaica β may have been the first to develop such refugee communities. The English, who invaded the island in , continued the importation of enslaved Africans to work on the island's sugar-cane plantations. Africans in Jamaica continually resisted enslavement, with many who freed themselves becoming 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 and the Windward Maroons in , which required them to support the institution of slavery.
The importance of the Maroons to the colonial authorities declined after slavery was abolished in Although the governor promised leniency if the maroons surrendered, he later betrayed them and, supported by the Assembly , insisted on deporting just under 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 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.
This word usually referred to runaways, castaways, or the shipwrecked; those marooned probably would never return. When the English invaded Jamaica in , most Spanish colonists fled. There was possibly a third group that was active in the region of Porus , in modern Manchester Parish ; and a fourth in the Blue Mountains. But, as it became increasingly obvious that the British would hold their conquest, the group run by de Bolas changed its position.
