Brown also reveals how the uprising formed part of a transatlantic world of slave resistance that stretched across the Americas and the Caribbean. Yet, this book is much more than microhistory. Brown provides a vivid account, akin to war corresponce, of the guerrilla warfare: the ambushes, counterattacks, and incessant pursuit for supplies and allies. Many have seen it as one more battleground of the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), a curious side-note to the global struggle between England and France. They recognize its intensity and ferocity, its impact across Jamaica and beyond. Historians have long understood Tacky’s Revolt as a major slave uprising. Similar measures would prompt quite different reactions in England’s North American possessions. Jamaica’s elite by and large accepted the new arrangement, considering it a necessary concession for the security it offered and going so far as to express their gratitude to King George. In addition, they asserted greater control of the management or governance of the island. Immersed in the Seven Years’ War, the English took measures to prevent further unrest, tightening social control in plantations and urban centers and restricting all Blacks’ mobility. The violence unnerved slaveowners, who understand the fragility of their system of domination in a Caribbean island where slaves constituted the majority of the population. The rebellion, at least its first stage, was over. Surrounded, many insurgents took their own lives. At some point in late July or August 1761, militia forces executed rebel leader Wager, also called Apongo. Slaves took advantage of the dense Hanover Mountains and other forests, descending to ransack estates and then to retreat and regroup, employing classic guerrilla tactics. Tensions smoldered, however, and in May the uprising resurrected in the west of the island. Within a week, a maroon marksman, Lieutenant Davy, had killed Tacky authorities displayed his head in Spanish Town. English colonial forces employed militias, maroons, and the Army and Navy to counter them. Many of the rebels, including the leader of the first stage of the rebellion, Tacky, had military experience in Africa.
They moved quickly, recruiting allies and seizing weapons and food. The uprising began when slaves, most of them West African or “Coramantees,” plundered sugar plantations in the eastern part of the island. Tacky’s Revolt is a tour-de-force that excels on all fronts and offers numerous new lines of inquiry for historians of slavery. Brown also establishes a new cartography of slave resistance, revealing the connections between this and other uprisings across the Americas and the Caribbean and their deep roots in Africa. But his contributions move far beyond an insightful analysis of the rebellion itself. Vincent Brown has written an extraordinary history of what came to known as “Tacky’s Rebellion,” providing a fine-grained account of the conflict, with special attention to geography. Petrified slaveowners and their dependents feared for their lives and for the demise of the brutal system that enriched them. In 17, slaves rose up in Jamaica, killing dozens of people, burning estates, and raising questions about the durability of English domination and the institution of slavery on the island.
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