![]() “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.”- Harper’s “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.”-Cornel West 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.On the podcast Empire, listen to Vincent Brown describe to hosts William Dalrymple and Anita Anand how the Atlantic slave trade worked in both western Africa and the Caribbean-and the horrific circumstances endured by enslaved people on the plantations: The book is 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. (The domestic slave trade was another matter: by the time the Civil War began, there were roughly four million enslaved people living in the United States.) ![]() By contrast, four hundred thousand were sent to all of North America. Of the more than ten million Africans who survived the journey across the Atlantic, six hundred thousand went to work in Jamaica, an island roughly the size of Connecticut. Beginning in the seventeenth century, European traders prowled Africa’s Gold Coast looking to exchange guns, textiles, or even a bottle of brandy for able bodies by the middle of the eighteenth century, slaves constituted ninety per cent of Europe’s trade with Africa. ![]() ![]() Understood as a military struggle, slavery was a conflict staggering in its scale, even just in the Caribbean. Both the philosopher John Locke and the self-emancipated Igbo writer Olaudah Equiano defined slavery as a state of war, but Brown goes further, describing the transatlantic slave trade as “a borderless slave war: war to enslave, war to expand slavery, and war against slaves, answered on the side of the enslaved by war against slaveholders, and also war among slaves themselves.” Brown’s most interesting claim is that Tacky and his comrades were not undertaking a discrete act of rebellion but, rather, fighting one of many battles in a long war between slavers and the enslaved. “Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War” (Belknap) focusses on one of the largest slave uprisings of the eighteenth century, when a thousand enslaved men and women in Jamaica, led by a man named Tacky, rebelled, causing tens of thousands of pounds of property damage, leaving sixty whites dead, and leading to the deaths of five hundred of those who had participated or were accused of having done so. In a new book, the historian Vincent Brown argues that these rebellions did more to end the slave trade than any actions taken by white abolitionists like Johnson. ![]() The New Yorker has an interesting review by Casey Cep of a new book on a slave revolt in Jamaica called Tacky’s Revolt. ![]()
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