The Reaper's Garden

I was on the Guggenheim committee that awarded The Reaper’s Garden the prize for the best book on the eighteenth century in 2010.

The eighteenth century marked the climax of the slave trade and the plantation system in European colonies in the Americas and elsewhere. Brown’s book brings the plantation world of eighteenth-century Jamaica alive like no other that I have read.

This was a world filled with death, not only the mortality of the African slaves but just as commonly of the white plantation owners and their families who seldom lasted two years before dying of tropical diseases. Funerals… show more.

A gripping and inventive study of death’s impact on social life in Britain’s largest, most profitable, and deadliest Caribbean slave colony: Jamaica. Brown shows how staggering mortality rates on the island, where the prospect of an early death awaited enslaved and free alike, profoundly shaped colonial culture, social relations, and spiritual practices. In Jamaica, the vital hub of Britain’s Atlantic slave empire, death was at once destructive and generative; it claimed countless lives sacrificed in the pursuit of British profits and inspired new, politically charged commemorative rituals and forms of enslaved resistance.

The Reaper’s Garden uncovers the interplay between death,… show more.