Tacky's revolt The story of an Atlantic slave war

Brown (Harvard Univ.) situates Tacky's Revolt as a single episode within a larger uprising of Coromantee (enslaved people in the Caribbean), a struggle that shook the very foundations of 18th-century Jamaica's slave society. The book aims to contextualize the African and Jamaican basis of the Coromantee war, identify slave leaders' backgrounds and aims, and describe the brutal suppression of the war while explicating how it shaped Atlantic and global history. The now-forgotten war perversely generated anti-slavery arguments, steered the British to centralize their Atlantic possessions (leading the American colonies to revolt), and set a model for revolutionaries in St. Domingue. Brown's arguments problematize conventional assumptions about slave resistance and merit deeper reflection, foremost that shared African ethnicity did not create a homogenous people or slave solidarity. Rather, a collective consciousness had to be forged through military coordination and masculine experiences, nurtured through spiritual oaths, and sustained through tortuous circumstances. Further, slaveholders' effective suppression of slave revolts was not inevitable. It involved armed troops; the punishing, policing force of the British Navy; and slaveholders' ability to draw from trustworthy black militants. Last, black military intellectual history is essential to the study of slave resistance. Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Ruma Chopra, San Jose State University

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 enslaved men and women that occurred in Jamaica between April 1760 and October 1761. Commonly known as "Tacky's Revolt," the linked uprisings, which were planned and directed by enslaved Gold Coast chieftains and military leaders, constituted a full-scale guerrilla war, Brown argues, and should be viewed not as an isolated event, but in the context of the global conflicts (including the Seven Years' War, aka the French and Indian War in the New World) sparked by the transatlantic slave trade and the colonial ambitions of Europe's leading powers. Brown reads "against the grain" of British government and military documents and the letters and diaries of plantation owners to document the motivations, strategies, internal rivalries, and competing political agendas of the African rebels, and to explore how their leaders drew on the lessons of West African warfare to kill 60 white settlers and destroy "tens of thousands of pounds worth of property" before British Army reinforcements arrived to extinguish the revolt. Brown augments his dense account with images and maps that help readers to envision the conflict's cultural and physical terrain. Readers interested in the era will find much of value in this exhaustive portrait of the rebellion's origins and ramifications. (Jan.)