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

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

Vincent Brown

1

award won

8

score

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

Tacky's Revolt won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, the Elsa Goveia Book Prize, the James A. Rawley Prize in the History of Race Relations, the P. Sterling Stuckey Book Prize, the Harriet Tubman Prize, and the Phillis Wheatley Book Award, and was a finalist for the Cundill Prize. In the second half of the eighteenth century, as European imperial conflicts extended their domain, warring African factions fed their captives to the transatlantic slave trade while masters struggled to keep their restive slaves under the yoke. In this contentious atmosphere, a movement of enslaved West Africans in Jamaica organized to throw off that yoke by violence. Their uprising—which became known as Tacky's Revolt—featured a style of fighting increasingly familiar today: scattered militias opposing great powers, with fighters hard to distinguish from noncombatants. 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, Tacky's Revolt expands our understanding of the relationship between European, African, and American history as it speaks to our understanding of wars of terror today.

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Publisher
Harvard University Press
Year
2020
ISBN-13
9780674242098
Genre
History
Topics
Slavery and slave rebellionAtlantic world historyJamaica colonial history

Awards

Other awarded books from Vincent Brown

  • The Reaper's Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery

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