Publishers Weekly
11/11/2019
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.)
John Thornton
The problem of understanding slave revolts is not why they were relatively few compared to the obvious difficulties of slave life, but why they happened at all. Vincent Brown has successfully worked out this rebellion by treating it as if it were a war, waged by ex-soldiers, chafing at their imprisonment, and looking for an avenue for freedom. Brown’s skillful linking of Tacky’s War to its African and Jamaican roots is an important venture in reconstructing the African Diaspora’s past.
New Yorker - Casey Cep
A sobering read for contemporary audiences in countries engaged in forever wars, reminding us how easily and arbitrarily the edges of empire, and its evils, can fade from or focus our vision. It is also a useful reminder that the distinction between victory and defeat, when it comes to insurgencies, is often fleeting: Tacky may have lost his battle, but the enslaved did eventually win the war.
Eighteenth-Century Studies - Ryan Hanley
Brown at once provides what is surely the authoritative account of the 1760–1761 Jamaican uprising and makes a compelling case for recasting this and other such conflicts as fully-realized instances of Atlantic warfare…Brown makes his case magnificently.
Journal of Early American History - Matt D. Childs
Brown has produced the most detailed and insightful account to date of Tacky’s Revolt. By framing it through the wide-angle lens of imperial, Diasporic, and Atlantic historical forces converging in Jamaica during the Seven Years’ War and the zoom lens of colonial, local, parish, and plantation dynamics, the reader gets a detailed and personalized account of how enslavement functioned as a deadly and destructive act of war, and, just as importantly, of how resistance to slavery required a creative war to imagine if a different world was (and remains) possible.
New West Indian Guide - Gad Heuman
Extraordinary…This well-written, beautifully illustrated, and incredibly well-researched book points the way forward toward a new cartography linking Europe, Africa, and the Americas and toward the future study of slave revolts and resistance.
Harper’s - Julian Lucas
Brown derives not only a story of the insurrection, but ‘a martial geography of Atlantic slavery,’ vividly demonstrating how warfare shaped every aspect of bondage…Forty years after Tacky’s defeat, new arrivals from Africa were still hearing about the daring rebels who upended the island.
Catherine Hall
In Tacky’s Revolt, Vincent Brown has mapped an innovative history and geography linking power and resistance across Africa, America, and Europe. He demonstrates that slavery was—is—a state of war.
Manuel Barcia
Tacky’s Revolt reveals a truly transatlantic eighteenth-century world of resistance and warfare. Reframing a story often told from the perspective of European colonizers and American planters, Brown successfully places African soldiers at the core of the narrative. A truly masterful piece.
H-Net Reviews - Christine Walker
A compelling account…By connecting the Jamaica insurgencies to larger intra-imperial wars, especially the War of Jenkin’s Ear and the Seven Years’ War, Tacky’s Revolt makes slavery and the violence it produced inseparable from broader military conflicts…Impressively original and painstakingly researched.
Marcus Rediker
This lively, sophisticated book proves that Vincent Brown is one of the most creative historians writing anywhere in the world today about the African Diaspora. Tacky’s Revolt is destined to become a classic work on the long, deep struggle against slavery from below.
Labour - Clifton E. Sorrell III
Innovative and insightful, introducing readers to new ways of thinking about slave revolts and the Atlantic history of slavery…His cartographic methodology successfully poses exciting and thought-provoking questions that certainly expand how we understand slave revolt as a slave war…Has far-reaching implications for scholars of slavery, empire, and resistance and will prove to be of great value to a wide range of scholars.
New Statesman - Laleh Khalili
Virtuosic…A revelation, and a true heir to The Black Jacobins and The Common Wind…Through prodigious and imaginative work with the archives, or, rather, with their absences—namely, of the voices of the enslaved—Brown shows that, although slavers tried to unmoor the enslaved from their homes and communities, language and culture, and sense of self, the connections between various African communities and the diaspora endured despite the violence of the plantation regime.
Slavery & Abolition - Christer Petley
A finely crafted account of the micro and macro politics of slave resistance that will inform work in this field for some time to come.
The Spectator - Alex Colville
[A] careful reconstruction of an understudied footnote in Jamaican history.
Black Scholar - Edward E. Baptist
This is a magnificent piece of historical scholarship. Just as the rebels found pathways up into the steep hills overlooking the plains where enslavers trembled and sugar cane burned, Tacky’s Revolt finds new perspectives on resistance, warfare, culture-making, social death—and social life-after-death.
Henry Louis Gates
Brown’s brilliant analysis reveals how slave rebellions across the Americas depended upon experienced combatants captured in African conflicts and then sold to Europeans, refuting the canard that slave traders gathered their victims randomly. While tracing the relationships between African warfare and uprisings in the Americas, Brown offers beautifully written portraits of those who survived the crushing forces of colonial imperialism and fought for freedom. Above all else, this astute and comprehensive book is about agency.
H-Net Reviews - Rebecca Shumway
Adds a new dimension to the study of Atlantic history that centers African people and forces readers to reckon with the primacy of violence in the creation and sustenance of Atlantic networks of trade, migration, and empire. It will surely be widely used by scholars and students of the history of the Caribbean, Atlantic world, and African diaspora.
Boston Review - Steve Hahn
Outstanding…Brown has produced one of the best treatments of slavery ever written.
Literary Review of Canada - Christopher Moore
Intricately mapping each of the linked but local uprisings across Jamaica and relating them to tides in the global struggle, Brown demonstrates how the rebels applied strategic concepts mastered in wars an ocean away…He shows how they acted on motives and opportunities as global and complex as those of the military officers and planter militias who moved to contain and kill them…A tour de force of research, theory, and historical imagination that transforms anonymous laboring slaves into actors of tragic majesty in an intricate conflict.
Los Angeles Review of Books - Brad Evans
A phenomenally insightful and compelling book on both the brutality of British colonialism and the desire for freedom.
Protest - Fouad M. Mami
Unbiased and first-rate scholarship.
Verene A. Shepherd
A masterful interpretation of the roots and routes of revolutionary action and of the inevitable response of African-Jamaican men and women to the violence of the racist and brutal British imperial project which rendered slavery a perpetual state of war.
Cornel West
Brilliant…groundbreaking…Brown’s profound analysis and revolutionary vision of the Age of Slave War—from the too-often overlooked Tacky’s Revolt to the better-known Haitian Revolution—gives us an original view of the birth of modern freedom in the New World.
Public Books - Julia Gaffield
Brown’s reframing of slavery as war allows us to better understand enslaved people as soldiers, diplomats, sailors, and community leaders dedicated to Black freedom (both then and now). Specifically, Brown’s book shows how—within the broader war—enslaved men, women, and children defended themselves and even counterattacked…Will undoubtedly shape generations of scholarship to come.
H-Net Reviews - Seth Whitty
Groundbreaking and will undoubtedly affect several different fields of study…Brown’s argument for viewing the insurrections of 1760–61 as acts of war is extraordinary, transforming our thinking on violence within bondage from isolated events to a connected series of battles and engagements in this centuries-long transatlantic war against human bondage.
Diana Paton
The men and women who took up arms to fight against their enslavement across Jamaica in 1760 have long needed a historian. In Vincent Brown’s Tacky’s Revolt they have received their due. Combining precision with attention to the big picture, Brown weaves together stories of alliances, solidarities, and divisions, from St. Mary’s parish in the North of Jamaica, to the ships of the Atlantic ocean, to the forests of the Gold Coast. Brown’s superb archival work and sensitive historical reconstruction enable us to rethink the participants in the revolt as soldiers engaged in a war; a war against the unending, pervasive everyday violence that was slavery itself.
North Carolina HIstorical Review - Jarvis L. Hargrove
A must read for scholars and students. While this work focuses on Tacky’s Revolt, the larger scope of the work connects and highlights the warfare that spread across the British Empire during the eighteenth century.
Atlantic Studies - Aline Helg
Fascinating…A pathbreaking Atlantic analysis of the tricontinental wars that devastated West Africa and extended all the way to Jamaica. Its brilliant reconstruction of West African societies and their importance in the making of the prerevolutionary Greater Caribbean represents a historiographical turning point.
The Guardian
A powerful account of the slave rebellion that took place in Jamaica in 1760 situates it in the context of an era of conflict and argues that slavery was itself a ‘state of war.’
Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Brown’s brilliant analysis reveals how slave rebellions across the Americas depended upon experienced combatants captured in African conflicts and then sold to Europeans, refuting the canard that slave traders gathered their victims randomly. While tracing the relationships between African warfare and uprisings in the Americas, Brown offers beautifully written portraits of those who survived the crushing forces of colonial imperialism and fought for freedom. Above all else, this astute and comprehensive book is about agency.
