Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

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

2021; Oxford University Press; Volume: 108; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jahist/jaab087

1945-2314

Matthew Mason,

Global Maritime and Colonial Histories

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...