Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War.

• Author: Long, Creston

Vincent Brown. Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press or Harvard University Press, 2020. viii + 320 pages.

In April 1760, enslaved people in St. Mary's parish, Jamaica rose up in insurrection under the leadership of Tacky, a man from the Gold Coast captured and forced into the world of Atlantic slavery years earlier. Within weeks, Jamaica's White government suppressed the rebellion and exacted brutal punishments on its leaders. By the end of May, a rebellion began in another parish, signifying a period of prolonged insurrection that would forever change the political landscape of slavery on the island and beyond.

Vincent Brown, professor of American History and African and African American Studies and acting director of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard, has produced an excellent, detailed account of the events of that year in Jamaica's slave history, placing the rebellion initially known as Tacky's Revolt in its broader Atlantic world context. Brown effectively argues the revolt of 1760 was part of a much larger war that encompassed political and military conflict in western African nations, an ongoing race war between enslaved Black peoples and white slaveholders, internal divisions among the enslaved populations of the Caribbean, and imperial struggles between European nations. Placing the revolt in this trans-Atlantic setting underscores the complexities of slave revolt and emphasizes the interconnections between war, empire, and slavery. It also illuminates the political intentions and goals of those who rebelled.

At the center of Brown's narrative are several insurrection leaders identified as Coromantee, an identity formed by people who shared the common experiences of resisting enslavement on the Gold Coast, fighting in slave wars, and carrying out regimented labor. On the one hand, Jamaican slaveholders sought Coromantees because of their purported attributes of strength, endurance, intelligence, and tenacity. At the same, plantation owners feared that these same characteristics made Coromantees formidable figures prone to rebellion. By the mid-1700s, Jamaica's enslaved population included a large percentage of Coromantees. Brown argues that understanding the Coromantee identity of many of the rebels helps us interpret the leadership of the revolt, which Brown calls the Coromantee War, as well as the political goals of the enslaved. Rebel leaders such...