My dissertation seeks to connect the 17th-century maroon community of Palmares in colonial Brazil to the people, structures, and institutions of the Atlantic world in order to trace how the agency of former slaves intersected with and shaped the institutions of slavery, the state, and religion in a highly-connected Atlantic world from 1624 to the middle of the eighteenth century. By presupposing that Palmares was part of the extensive networks of exchange that crossed the seventeenth-century Atlantic, my dissertation seeks to fill a gap in the historiography of Palmares by examining the polity’s impacts outside of Brazil. I argue that Palmares shaped the institutions of slavery, the state, and religion within the Portuguese empire and beyond in significant ways that have not yet been explored. In addition to Palmares, I am interested in the wider impacts of slavery across intersections of race, class, and power in the Atlantic world.