Tacky's Revolt

The Story of an Atlantic Slave War

Bibliographic Data

ID4901693
AuthorsMatthew Mason (0000-0003-3749-8677, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume108
Issue1
Pages145-146
Publication date2021-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of American History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/jahist/jaab087
OpenAlexW3174157246
LanguageEN
Citations received16

This volume, in which Vincent Brown both compellingly narrates a Jamaican slave revolt and offers scholars a bracing new analytical frame for all slave revolts, is a major achievement. Brown makes a strong case that Tacky's Revolt, which began in April 1760 and lasted eighteen months, was “only one conflict within a larger war” against the Jamaican regime (p. 163). Moreover, Brown invites historians to analyze this and other slave insurrections as military history. Tacky's Revolt, he argues, was a product of the West African wars that fueled the transatlantic slave trade, and of the daily warfare of slavery that made Jamaica “a militarized society from top to bottom” (p. 44). Furthermore, the revolt took place so thoroughly in the context of the Seven Years' War that he classifies it as “one of the hardest-fought battles of that titanic global conflict” (p. 7). Brown's broad interpretive assertions raise questions. One

Archaeology · Context (archaeology · Economic history · Product (mathematics · Spanish Civil War · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History

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