Tacky's Revolt

The Seven Years’ War was a pivotal event in the formation of the British Empire, but histories of the conflict often omit a crucial battleground: Jamaica.

Starting in 1760, enslaved West Africans in Jamaica organized to throw off their captivity. Tacky’s Revolt, as the uprising became known, was the greatest slave rebellion the Atlantic world had yet seen. It was also linked to other, global struggles, both in Africa and between European empires.

In Tacky’s Revolt, Vincent Brown links these hyper-local and imperial stories. I found it particularly useful for understanding the complexities of race and ethnicity in the eighteenth-century… show more.

Vincent Brown offers a harrowing account of Tacky’s Revolt, a slave uprising in Jamaica during the Seven Years War.

It wasn’t just a struggle of the enslaved against their masters. It was also, in Brown’s interpretation, a continuation of wars from Africa, a war-within-a-war of the larger inter-imperial conflict, and a war fought among enslaved people.

His sophisticated view of this single revolt reveals larger truths about bondage in Africa and the Americas.

In this well-written and well-researched book, Vincent Brown forces us to reconsider one of the largest slave rebellions in Jamaican history and how it was connected to warfare in the Atlantic world.

Rather than situating these events in 1760 as one major slave uprising isolated on the island, Brown teaches us how rebels were part of the Seven Years War and demonstrates their connections throughout the Atlantic world.

This is a must-read for anyone who has an interest in slavery, slave resistance, colonial Jamaica, the Seven Years War, the Atlantic world, and the African diaspora.

Tacky’s Revolt, a slave uprising in Jamaica in 1760-1, is not widely known outside the Caribbean, but Brown’s book should change that situation. Written with great attention to the significance of physical spaces as well as historical sources, Tacky’s Revolt provides insights into the lived experiences of enslaved people, and in particular how some drew upon their experiences as warriors in west African societies to stage a rebellion that aimed to overthrow plantation society. It depicts both the terrifying power and the surprising fragility of white authority in an island in which at this time 9 of 10 residents… show more.

This book is based on impeccable empirical research, is beautifully and elegantly written, and places an event that should be better known as both a major slave revolt and a significant event in the Seven Years War into a Jamaican and global context.