num_pages: 336
description: A gripping account of the largest slave revolt in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world an uprising that laid bare the interconnectedness of Europe Africa and America shook the foundations of empire and reshaped ideas of race and popular belonging.In the second half of the 18th 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 uprisingwhich became known as Tackys Revoltfeatured 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. Tackys Revolt expands our understanding of the relationship between European African and American history as it speaks to our understanding of wars of terror today.
language: English
title: Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War
publisher: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press