Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War

Vincent Brown

Harvard University Press, 2020 - History - 336 pages

A gripping account of the largest slave revolt in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world, an uprising that laid bare the interconnectedness of Europe, Africa, and America, shook the foundations of empire, and reshaped ideas of race and popular belonging.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, as European imperial conflicts extended the domain of capitalist agriculture, warring African factions fed their captives to the transatlantic slave trade while masters struggled continuously to keep their restive slaves under the yoke. In this contentious atmosphere, a movement of enslaved West Africans in Jamaica (then called Coromantees) organized to throw off that yoke by violence. Their uprising--which became known as Tacky's Revolt--featured a style of fighting increasingly familiar today: scattered militias opposing great powers, with fighters hard to distinguish from noncombatants. It was also part of a more extended borderless conflict that spread from Africa to the Americas and across the island. Even after it was put down, the insurgency rumbled throughout the British Empire at a time when slavery seemed the dependable bedrock of its dominion. That certitude would never be the same, nor would the views of black lives, which came to inspire both more fear and more sympathy than before.

Tracing the roots, routes, and reverberations of this event across disparate parts of the Atlantic world, Vincent Brown offers us a superb geopolitical thriller. Tacky's Revolt expands our understanding of the relationship between European, African, and American history, as it speaks to our understanding of wars of terror today.

What people are saying

Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War

User Review  - Publishers Weekly

Harvard historian Brown (The Reaper’s Garden) revisits the largest slave rebellion in the 18th-century British Empire in this revealing history of the series of insurrections involving more than 1,000 ...

Contents

• The Path to Rebels Barricade: 1
• 1 Wars Empire: 17
• 2 The Jamaica Garrison: 44
• 3 Coromantee Territory: 85
• 4 Tackys Revolt: 129
• 5 The Coromantee War: 164
• 6 Routes of Reverberation: 208
• The Age of Slave War: 237
• Notes: 251
• Acknowledgments: 309
• Index: 313

About the author

Vincent Brown is the Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University and the author of The Reaper's Garden (Harvard), which won the James A. Rawley Prize, the Louis Gottschalk Prize, and the Merle Curti Award. He has received Guggenheim and Mellon New Directions fellowships. His online interactive map Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761: A Cartographic Narrative has been viewed by 87,000 users in 184 countries, and his documentary Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness, broadcast nationally on PBS, won the John E. O'Connor Film Award and was chosen as Best Documentary at the Hollywood Black Film Festival.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War
• Author: Vincent Brown
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2020
• ISBN: 0674737571, 9780674737570
• Length: 336 pages
• Subjects: History / Caribbean & West Indies / General; History / Revolutionary; Social Science / Slavery