Besides Palmares, there were thousands of fugitive settlements in the Americas, the Indian Ocean and even Africa itself. They and their people were known by different names in different places: marrons, palenques, cumbes, mainels, cimarrones, mussitos, aringas and so on (Amantino and Florentino, 2012; Capela, 2006). Communal living among escaped slaves, regardless of the duration of such community, is a major example of how Africans and their descendants resisted colonialism and enslavement. In sum, in Africa, Brazil, Haiti, the United States and Madagascar, on Indian Ocean islands and in the Arab world, among other places, the fugitive settlements established by the enslaved in defiance of the enslavers triggered major transformations in those societies and across colonial and national boundaries. ${ }^{1}$  
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[^0]:    1 The Zanj Revolt, considered one of the most extraordinary events in the Afro-Arabic world, is an exception. The year 869 was the beginning of one of the longest slave rebellions in the history of the Abbasid caliphate. The Zanj, who originated in East Africa, worked under harsh conditions on plantations and in salt mines in Basra (southern Iraq), receiving only food in exchange for their labour. Freed and runaway slaves participated in the protest against Arab slave-masters (McLeod, 2016, p. 80). Some historians suggest that the Zanj included not only enslaved Africans, but also people from ethnic groups outside Africa (Talhami, 1977). This revolt, much like others, was an act of rebellion against the tyranny of the slave-masters and part of a struggle for autonomy.  
The chapter by Rafaël Thiébaut examines aspects of resistance to enslavement in the Indian Ocean in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His analysis covers inland individual flights, collective rebellions, shipboard revolts and cases of marronage on the islands of Madagascar, on the Mascarene Islands, in Cape Town, in India and in the Malay Archipelago.