Vincent Brown. Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020. viii + 320 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-674-73757-0.
Reviewed by Christine Walker (Yale-NUS College)
Published on H-Diplo (March, 2021)
Commissioned by Seth Offenbach (Bronx Community College, The City University of New York)
Between 1760 and 1761, two insurgencies led by enslaved Africans living in Jamaica, Tacky’s Revolt and the Coromantee War, posed the largest threat to slaveholder hegemony in the Atlantic World prior to the Haitian Revolution. Rather than treat these rebellions as peripheral and localized events, Vincent Brown’s new book, Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War, places them at the center of Britain’s rapidly expanding eighteenth-century empire. The book is a compelling account of how insurgencies led by African captives in Jamaica were both produced by and paradigmatic of two major and interrelated historical developments: the expansion of Atlantic slavery and the rise of an aggressively militaristic British Empire. By connecting the Jamaica insurgencies to larger intra-imperial wars, especially the War of Jenkin’s Ear and the Seven Years’ War, Tacky’s Revolt makes slavery and the violence it produced inseparable from broader military conflicts. Brown traces the lasting influence of these episodes, which he treats as both agentive and emblematic, into the revolutionary era.
The book begins on the Gold Coast in West Africa, which acts as the seedbed for the events that unfold in the Caribbean. From there, Brown traces the pathways of free and enslaved subjects across the ocean to Jamaica and then broadens the narrative outward into the wider Atlantic World. At the book’s outset, the author introduces three figures: Apongo (also called Wager), John Cope, and Arthur Forrest. Brown treats them as “emblematic” of the intertwined influences of slavery, warfare, and colonialism that connected West Africa with America (p. 18). In the first chapter, Brown speculates that the Englishman Cope met Apongo on the Gold Coast, where Cope had traveled to work for the Royal African Company. While there, Cope earned a fortune aiding in the transportation of more than thirty-three thousand captive Africans to America. However, Brown uses Cope to go beyond a simplistic account of European profiteering and rapacity. Operating on the fringes of powerful African polities, Cope and other European slavers both competed with each other and “negotiated seriously” with African leaders, including men like Apongo, to transact their business in human flesh (p. 73). The author eschews relationships that were overdetermined by racial, ethnic, or nationalistic loyalties. Rather, the possible encounter between Cope and Apongo, like the dynamic between Europeans and Africans more broadly, was contingent, contextual, and fluid. Cope adapted to West African politics just as Apongo would acclimate, and then contest, his position as an enslaved man in Jamaica. They were both adept at seizing opportunities, building coalitions, and forging alliances—skills that proved crucial in fomenting and ending the African-led insurrections in Jamaica years later.
In chapters 2 and 3, the book follows the divergent life trajectories of Apongo, Cope, and Forrest to Jamaica, where their fates converge in the mid-eighteenth century. For Brown, their confluence on an island that had become the wealthiest and most politically influential colony in the British Empire epitomizes the “intimate” interconnections between individuals and broader imperial changes (p. 18). The men arrived in a place that was inhabited by the largest population of enslaved Africans in the Atlantic World. The stark dichotomy between the island’s free white minority and the captive black majority created a state of “pervasive” and racialized warfare wherein white slaveholders used terror to maintain tenuous control over the captive African populace (p. 248). Forrest, a naval officer whom the author suspects became Apongo’s enslaver when he was working aboard a ship under Forrest’s command, brought Apongo to the island in bondage in the 1740s. At the same time, Cope departed from West Africa and retired to Jamaica, where he leveraged the fortune he earned from the slave trade to establish a large sugar plantation in Westmoreland Parish—the same place where Apongo labored on one of Forrest’s vast estates. There, Apongo led an insurrection against Forrest, Cope, and the island’s other major slaveholders decades later.
Before turning to the insurrection, Brown uses chapter 3 to situate Apongo in the broader community of Africans who were loosely identified as Coromantees in Jamaica. However, the author carefully avoids equating African ethnicity with political loyalty and military action. Instead, he contends that enslaved Africans creatively adapted to the new physical, political, and social geographies of the island. While a loosely affiliated group of Coromantee people drew on similar linguistic, cultural, and religious traditions, they forged coalitions out of their shared military experiences and political objectives in Jamaica. Some joined forces with the Jamaica Maroons—the descendants of escaped slaves who established sovereign communities in the colony’s thickly forested interior and rugged mountains. In the 1730s, the Maroons and the Coromantees waged a prolonged war of attrition against European colonists who lived in sparsely settled regions. Their military efforts effectively prevented further settlement of the island. A series of humiliating defeats led the British Army, together with the colonial militia, to acknowledge the military superiority of the African and African-descended combatants. Britain signed a treaty with the Maroons in 1739 that recognized their political and territorial sovereignty in exchange for their military support and assistance with policing escaped slaves. Brown rightfully identifies this treaty as a major turning point in Jamaican and British imperial history. Allying with the Maroons opened up vast territories for sugar cultivation on the island and foreclosed one of the most important paths to liberty for enslaved Africans who had previously sought refuge and protection in Jamaica’s mountainous interior.
The absence of Maroon support forced African captives to build new coalitions and devise alternative military strategies that formed the basis of the insurgencies, Tacky’s Revolt and the Coromantee War, launched in 1760-61. Focusing on these events, chapters 4 and 5 offer the most methodologically innovative and historiographically significant material in the book. Brown uses eighteenth-century accounts and maps to painstakingly track the rebels’ paths across Jamaica’s varied landscape. By tracing the insurgents’ movements through dense forests and swampland, and their locations on mountains and coasts, he determines how African combatants exploited divisions among colonists, military officials, and imperial rulers and evaded the colonial militia, the British Army, and the Maroons. The author’s meticulous attention to physical and social geography enables him to infer the military strategies and political objectives of people whom colonial and imperial officials sought to silence. Doing so broadens the geopolitical significance of the conflict beyond the series of attacks in one parish that are typically labeled as Tacky’s Revolt. Instead, Brown positions Tacky’s Revolt within what he terms the Coromantee War—a series of African-led insurrections that persisted for a year.
Widening the frame from a singular slave revolt to an African war connects the insurrection to military conflicts in West Africa, while also linking events in Jamaica to the Seven Years’ War. In 1760, Apongo resurfaces in the narrative as the military leader of the Coromantee War. He launches a major military offensive against the largest plantations in Westmoreland Parish, including an estate under the control of Cope’s son. The war was only ended by a combination of accidents, internal conflicts among the insurgents, and the widespread terror inspired by slaveholder retaliations. Apongo, for instance, was captured and burned alive as punishment for his leadership role in the insurrection. The insurgents may have been tortured and executed but their actions had a lasting influence, as Brown contends in chapter 6. Tacky’s Revolt and the Coromantee War posed the gravest challenge to slaveholder hegemony in Britain’s most valuable colony, exposing the dangers of chattel slavery and the limitations of European imperial authority decades before the Haitian Revolution. The reverberations of these African insurrections were wide ranging and long lasting. In the wake of the insurgencies, Jamaican officials passed a series of laws that sought to enforce white solidarity and curtail possibilities for people of African descent to advance in free society. While the island’s elite used memories of the conflicts to generate fear and build a race-based coalition, the events spurred imperial leaders to test out reform policies, such as a stamp act in Jamaica, that would later spark the American Revolution. By the end of the eighteenth century, intensifying concerns about the dangers and the brutality of slavery, fed in part by the legacies of the Jamaica insurrections, aided in galvanizing the antislavery movement.
The author’s crystalline prose vivifies the dramatic yet largely neglected insurgencies of 1760-61 in Jamaica, and he convincingly reveals their centrality to far more well-studied events like the American and the Haitian Revolutions and the antislavery movement. Few scholars possess Brown’s ability to craft a narrative that is tragic yet uplifting and instructive without being overly moralizing. Rather than relying on the truisms about emancipation and liberty that pervaded abolitionist rhetoric drawn from nineteenth-century liberalism, Tacky’s Revolt returns the war against slavery to the African and African-descended peoples who waged it a century earlier. As Brown points out throughout the book, the captives rebelled for historically specific aims that we do not fully comprehend; they fought to “develop their own notions of belonging, status, and fairness” beyond the power of their enslavers. Tacky’s Revolt and the Coromantee War produced a “countermapping” or a “geography” of “possibilities” that endured well beyond the conflicts (p. 246). Brown’s own effort to countermap these events by tracing the maneuvers of the insurgents on a granular level, inferring their political and military strategies, and recognizing the enduring legacy of their actions is the book’s greatest achievement.
The cast of characters in this impressively original and painstakingly researched work is, however, decidedly masculine. Enslaved men, soldiers, sailors, male planters, and merchants drive the action in West Africa and then Jamaica: a colony that the author portrays as dominated by “armed men” and “slaveholding patriarchs” (p. 121). The limited attention paid to women and gender is a blind spot in Tacky’s Revolt. Drawing on male-authored texts from the late eighteenth century, the author correlates free and enslaved women with their reproductive capacities. While he is careful to acknowledge the sexual predations of male enslavers, Brown accepts the gendered assumption that men committed acts of sexual violence in order to confirm their own masculinity. While it is true that white men controlled the reins of power in Jamaica, free and enslaved women of European, Euro-African, and African descent also played crucial roles on the island. The book contains numerous instances of women’s involvement in the colony’s chronic violence. Rebels recognized that female enslavers were equally complicit in their exploitation and treated them as legitimate military targets. Enslaved women readily served as combatants in nearly every insurgency the book details (for instance, see pp. 118-19, 139, 162, 174). Indeed, 40 percent of the rebels in one of the groups that was captured were women and the author observes that they “must certainly have been part of the core community of insurgents” (p. 151). This type of evidence is ripe for further analysis. Such research would aid in further developing Brown’s robust and compelling portrait of the entangled histories of imperialism, Atlantic slavery, and African warfare.
Tacky’s Revolt moves beyond existential accounts of the dynamic between the enslaved-enslaver to engage the reader in the visceral lived experiences of the people who fought each other in hand-to-hand combat atop craggy peaks and on sandy shores. By placing different iterations of eighteenth-century warfare, imperial conflicts, and slave rebellions in the same frame, the book offers a more comprehensive recognition of and reckoning with the violence triggered by colonialism and slavery. It treats Africans and African-descended peoples as powerful agents, rather than as mere victims of European command. In Tacky’s Revolt, they are politically sophisticated strategists, as evidenced by the Coromantee War, which displayed “black military intellect” (p. 205). Yet the author admirably resists romanticizing or treating the rebels as a monolithic group. Instead, he attends to fractures and tensions within different polities of Africans, colonists, and British military officials in Jamaica who, like Apongo, Forrest, and Cope, forged nebulous and contingent alliances. Likewise, Brown cautions against interpreting slave revolts as either continuations of African warfare or simple reactions to enslavement. Rather, the conflicts in Jamaica displayed the creative adaptability of people in the face of profound oppression.
Christine Walker is an assistant professor of history at Yale-NUS College. She specializes in the history of colonialism, gender, and slavery in the Atlantic World. Her book, Jamaica Ladies: Female Slaveholders and the Creation of Britain’s Atlantic Empire (2020), examines the crucial roles played by women of European and African descent in transforming Jamaica into the wealthiest and the largest slaveholding colony in Anglo-America.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-diplo.
Citation:
Christine Walker. Review of Brown, Vincent, Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War.
H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews.
March, 2021.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55127
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. |