Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War

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.)