Tackys Revolt, Vincent Brown
Tackys Revolt, Vincent Brown
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Tacky's Revolt
The Story of an Atlantic Slave War

Author: Vincent Brown

Narrator: Bill Andrew Quinn

Unabridged: 11 hr 12 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 02/02/2021


Synopsis

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.

About Vincent Brown

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, 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.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Justinian on April 07, 2020

2020-03 – Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War. Vincent Brown (Author) 2020. 336 Pages. I stumbled across this book thanks to C-Span. I thought it looked interesting and recorded the author’s presentation at The Museum of The American Revolution. Ten minutes into his captivating talk I......more

Goodreads review by JRT on August 21, 2022

Slavery is perpetual warfare, and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and ensuing chattel enslavement of Africans in the Americas must be characterized as a borderless race war, spanning multiple continents, nations / empires, and racial groups. Vincent Brown’s “Tacky’s Revolt” tells the 18th Century sto......more

Goodreads review by Chad on March 17, 2020

A very thorough and detailed history offering a new perspective on the history of enslaved people's rebellion in Jamaica and throughout the Caribbean, and Americas. Offers very clear eyed analysis, and offers a range of motivations where the record is unclear. Illustrates very strongly how geographi......more

Goodreads review by Diana on August 26, 2021

Disclaimer: I’ve never studied history per se, except insofar as historical events have been germane to other subjects, such as Latin American history when I did Latin American politics, or US history vis-à-vis US foreign policy. Nor am I well read in #JamaicanHistory. So my recent reading of Island o......more

Goodreads review by John on April 06, 2022

This is a pretty dense academic history, so not for everyone, but really interesting and useful for me. I keep bringing it up in my classes (my students are probably getting sick of hearing about it) because I am teaching about the 18th century Atlantic World right now and this illuminates so many d......more