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A review by bahareads
Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War by Vincent Brown
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
informative
reflective
sad
tense
fast-paced
5.0
The work Vincent Brown does with Tacky's Revolt is a LOT. Tacky's revolt combined itineraries of many people who were all engaged in life-and-death struggles to accumulate wealth, power, freedom or survival. Brown's main point is enslavement was a constant low-intensity war and revolt was just open warfare. It is about shifting warfare from beyond a western lens. War was a principal conduit and facilitator of Atlantic commerce. Tacky's Revolt was derived from an entanglement of empire trade and war across the Atlantic, and a small part in the larger series of slave wars. Generally in Western history war is treated as an interruption while slave war was truly never-ending.
Vincent Brown covers so many skirmishes and major fights from 1760-1761, that it is really hard to wrap your head around it. He has a website where you can follow along as it is a multi-layered interactive map. It follows along a timeline and you can chart each group's movements (the formerly enslaved, the maroons, the navy, the militia)
Brown starts off in Africa (the Gold Coast), setting the stage for readers to understand that many enslaved people already have experience with European expansion and a lot of African men who came over to Jamaica in the 18th century had military experience. He says Jamaica was militarized society with a tense symbiosis of war and business, and that slavery encouraged it to be as such."The seeds of insurrection surely germinated in Africa, but they sprouted in the fertile soil of American slavery's brutal violence. And they flowered in the light of imperial warfare..."
From there, the readers go to Jamaica and the groundwork is laid for Tacky's Revolt, Tacky's Revolt and the Coromantee War is covered. Brown says the Coromantee War is an extension of the African conflicts that fed the slave trade. While insurrections such as Tacky's revolt were suppressed they resounded culturally in meaning, narration, and memory. Older Jamaicans would tell newly arrived people about old revolts. Black people in the age of revolution drew from their historical political landscape to navigate the Atlantic World.
"You turn Negroe out of the Path now but soon Negroe will turn you out" - Montezuma (enslaved man, property holder, Jamaica 1792)
Brown ends his narrative with this - "As long as enslaved Africans and their descendants continued to fight, they would never be defeated."
Vincent Brown covers so many skirmishes and major fights from 1760-1761, that it is really hard to wrap your head around it. He has a website where you can follow along as it is a multi-layered interactive map. It follows along a timeline and you can chart each group's movements (the formerly enslaved, the maroons, the navy, the militia)
Brown starts off in Africa (the Gold Coast), setting the stage for readers to understand that many enslaved people already have experience with European expansion and a lot of African men who came over to Jamaica in the 18th century had military experience. He says Jamaica was militarized society with a tense symbiosis of war and business, and that slavery encouraged it to be as such."The seeds of insurrection surely germinated in Africa, but they sprouted in the fertile soil of American slavery's brutal violence. And they flowered in the light of imperial warfare..."
From there, the readers go to Jamaica and the groundwork is laid for Tacky's Revolt, Tacky's Revolt and the Coromantee War is covered. Brown says the Coromantee War is an extension of the African conflicts that fed the slave trade. While insurrections such as Tacky's revolt were suppressed they resounded culturally in meaning, narration, and memory. Older Jamaicans would tell newly arrived people about old revolts. Black people in the age of revolution drew from their historical political landscape to navigate the Atlantic World.
"You turn Negroe out of the Path now but soon Negroe will turn you out" - Montezuma (enslaved man, property holder, Jamaica 1792)
Brown ends his narrative with this - "As long as enslaved Africans and their descendants continued to fight, they would never be defeated."