24 The New York Review
proverb warned, was akin to being mur-
dered; to silence another unjustly was
a grievous crime. Just as the British
Empire was an oral creation, sustained
through spoken as well as written and
printed words, so too (and to a much
greater degree) were the spiritual, legal,
and political cultures into which most
West Indian slaves had been born, and
that they adapted in their Caribbean pur-
gatory. For all these reasons, slaveown-
ers obsessed over slave talk. They could
never control it, yet feared its power to
bind and inspire—for, as everyone knew,
oaths, whispers, and secret conversations
bred conspiracy and revolt.
The largest uprising the British Em-
pire had ever faced erupted on Jamaica
at Easter, 1760. For almost a year of
intermittent guerrilla warfare, over a
thousand slaves across the island rose
up in successive waves of violent re-
bellion, seizing guns, killing scores of
white and free black people, torching
plantations, and establishing camps
in the inaccessible, densely forested
uplands. Already within a few weeks
of fighting, so many insurgent corpses
littered the jungle that, far away on
his estate near the coast, Thistlewood
began to smell on the wind the awful
odor of “the dead Negroes in the
Woods.” It was only with difficulty
and at huge cost, after mobilizing the
combined might of the imperial navy,
battle- hardened marines, the British
army, and local Maroon forces (bound
by their treaties to assist the British
against their slaves), that the colonists
managed finally to subdue the rebels.
Many quietly gave up and slipped
back into servitude. But scores of oth-
ers killed their children and commit-
ted mass suicide rather than return to
bondage. At least five hundred rebels
were killed or executed; another six
hundred or so were permanently exiled.
Those publicly put to death often dis-
played striking defiance. They burned
alive without flinching or crying out;
one, already half- consumed by the fire,
snatched a blazing log and flung it in
the face of his executioner. Two reb-
els named Fortune and Kingston, gib-
beted in May 1760, survived for seven
and nine days respectively, surrounded
by their countrymen, treating white
onlookers with “hardened insolence”
and laughter. A few months later, an-
other condemned man, called Cardiff,
warned the colonists that “Multitudes
of Negroes had took Swear that if they
fail’d of success in this rebellion, to rise
again”: they would never capitulate.
Despite its scale, we know little
about this extraordinary episode. The
rebels left no record of their names,
aims, alliances, or planning: all their
communication was verbal. What sur-
vives is only the prejudiced speculation
of their British enemies, whose written
interpretations determined the revolt’s
subsequent history. They portrayed it
as a rising of dangerous, naturally war-
like “Coromantees” (their label for the
different peoples of the Gold Coast)
against their masters, mainly focused
around a slave named Tacky, one of the
leaders of the first outbreak.
In an inspiring feat of scholarship,
Vincent Brown’s Ta ck y’s Re volt trans-
forms our understanding of the events
o f 176 0 a n d 1761. It d o e s s o b y ex p a n d i n g
our sense of their scale and geography,
and by developing the contemporary in-
sight (expressed, for example, by Equi-
ano and before him by John Locke)
that slavery itself was always a state of
war. Instead of a doomed local rising
by desperate, enslaved victims, Brown
sees something much more consequen-
tial: the “Coromantee War,” a serious
military campaign led by experienced
African fighters, part of an ongoing,
transnational, interlocking network
of wars that stretched across Europe,
Africa, and the Americas. By tracing
the entwined journeys of its different
groups of combatants, he connects this
insurgency directly to the major West
African conflicts that fed the slave
trade and to the global imperial wars
that expanded slavery and capitalist
agriculture, as well as to the day- to-
day race war of whites against slaves,
the retaliatory insurrections of the
enslaved, and the constant struggles
among black people themselves.
Because there’s so little direct
evidence, and the scale of Brown’s
reframing is so ambitious, all this
requires a lot of scene- setting and
circumstantial analysis. We don’t
get to the revolt itself until halfway
through the book, and at every step
Brown carefully spells out how con-
tingent events and alliances in this
world always were, and how uncer-
tain our knowledge of them is. The
exact connection between the differ-
ent incidents of 1760 –1761 remains
ambiguous: perhaps there was an
island- wide conspiracy, or perhaps
each uprising simply provoked the
next. Nor can we presume solidarity
among enslaved men and women of
different backgrounds and trajecto-
ries. One of the questions the book
illuminates is why so many other
slaves, Maroons, and free blacks
passively stood aside or actively
opposed the rebels. Caught up in
empires of war on both sides of the
Atlantic, dark and light- skinned groups
and individuals alike were forced into
constant strategic calculations and ma-
neuvers while trying to survive, mini-
mize risk, or improve their lot.
Yet though this is a dense, cautious,
and eminently learned book (rich with
with digressions into everything from
the design of West African war clubs
to the details of the British navy’s code
of war), it’s also an impassioned argu-
ment about human agency, with lessons
for our own age of imperial overreach,
asymmetrical warfare, and indigenous
insurgency. Brilliantly transcending the
silence of the written archive, it manages
to present rebel and nonwhite back-
grounds, perspectives, and politics in as
rich, complex, and conflicted detail as
those of their literate opponents.
Even the ultimate military failure of
the Coromantee War, Brown suggests,
should be viewed primarily as a conse-
quence of subaltern decisions and di-
visions rather than of a stable colonial
hegemony. Nor was any defeat in bat-
tle ever final. Enslaved men, women,
and children fought not only to win
freedom (whatever that might mean
in such circumstances), or territory, or
simply a space to live their own lives,
but to uphold their human dignity: to
fight was to raise hope, to create pos-
sibilities, to refuse to be subjugated.
And it always inspired others. Well into
the next century, when newly captured
Africans arrived in Jamaica, their fel-
low plantation slaves would instruct
them in the history of Tacky’s Revolt.
Slavery was always violently contested
from within: even if every individualbattle was lost, the struggles of the en-
slaved did at least as much to hasten its
collapse as the efforts of abolitionists.In the decades following the Coroman-
tee War, Jamaican slavery expanded and
flourished as never before. In 1760 there
had been about 150,000 slaves on the is-
land; by 1808 there were over 350,000.
To safeguard its white inhabitants, the
colony became ever more heavily mil-
itarized. In the aftermath of rebellion,
new laws severely curtailed the rights
and movements not only of slaves but
also of all other nonwhites: white soli-
darity was increasingly seen as crucial to
security. Meanwhile, the widely noticed
writings of the planters’ leading apolo-gist, Edward Long, who’d lived through
the rebellion, helped develop new, “sci-
entific” theories of black inferiority and
racial danger that had a lasting impact
on European and American thought.
Yet the end of the war did not bring
peace but only a return to the jittery
status quo of plots, uprisings, and white
anxieties about black power. Across
the Americas, many passionate defend-
ers of slavery, including Long, came to
believe that the future lay in breeding
an entirely native- born population of
slaves, purged of militant Africans. In
Virginia and Pennsylvania during the
1760s and 1770s, the specter of what
had happened in Jamaica spurred slave-
holders to restrict slave importation—
even as, on both sides of the Atlantic, it
also inspired early abolitionists.
The British finally outlawed the
transatlantic trade in 1807 (the same
year the United States did). But the
fantasy of an acquiescent, native slave
class, governed by benevolent mas-
ters, never materialized, nor did the
gradual withering away of slavery that
abolitionists had hoped for. On the
contrary, as Tom Zoellner argues in Is-
land on Fire, it was another Jamaican
insurrection that finally precipitated
the end of British slavery in the West
Indies. Shortly after Christmas 1831,
between 30,000 and 60,000 men and
women rose up and ran away, refusing
to work any longer as slaves. Hundreds
of plantations were set on fire, but with
conspicuously little personal violence:
probably only two whites lost their lives
in direct attacks. In reprisal, more than
a thousand black people were lynched,shot on sight, or summarily executed.
A year and a half later, the newly re-
formed British Parliament, lobbied by
abolitionists and fearful that the con-
tinuation of slavery would only lead to
further revolts, risking the loss of the
Caribbean colonies, passed the Slavery
Abolition Act of 1833.
Island on Fire, which tells both parts
of this story, focuses especially on the
uprising’s best- known leader, a char-
ismatic, educated, Creole house slave
named Samuel Sharpe. Zoellner’s vivid,
fast- paced book stresses Sharpe’s Bap-
tist theology, his message of nonviolent
passive resistance, and the rebels’ mis-
guided belief that the British king had,
in fact, already emancipated them. Yet
just as striking are the many continuities
with previous uprisings: the sophis-
ticated planning, the importance of
oaths and spiritual rituals, the rebels’
geographical knowledge and tactics,
and the critical participation of the
Maroons in deciding the outcome.
Equally resonant is the perpetual
question of the meaning of freedom
in a racialized world. The Slavery
Abolition Act didn’t apply to India
or Ceylon, and though it technically
liberated over 800,000 British slaves
in the Caribbean and Africa, all of
them (excepting only small children)
were forced to continue to labor as
unpaid “apprentices” for a further
six years, on pain of punishment.
Under the terms of the act, they
were protected against overwork
and direct violence from employers,
but remained their “transferable
property,” subject to punishment
for “indolence,” “insolence,” or “in-
subordination.” So many black West
Indians were jailed for resisting these
outrageous terms that full emancipa-
tion was eventually brought forward
to August 1, 1838. That moment pro-
vides the dramatic climax of Zoellner’s
account, but it, too, didn’t much change
colonial attitudes or practices. In 1865,
largely unarmed protests over the con-
tinued blatant suppression of black eco-
nomic, legal, and voting rights were met
with renewed, murderous white rage:
hundreds of nonwhite men and women
were indiscriminately shot or executed.
A century on, the independence of
most Caribbean colonies in the 1960s
was followed by decades of racist Brit-
ish immigration policies that not only
sought to prevent black West Indians
from coming to the UK but eventually,
under the Conservative governments of
the past decade, ended up deliberately
destroying the lives of thousands of
lifelong legal residents by treating them
as “illegal migrants.”^6 In the meantime,
for almost two hundred years, British
taxpayers funded the largest slavery-
related reparations ever paid out. Under
the provisions of the 1833 act, the gov-
ernment borrowed and then disbursed
the staggering sum of £20 million (equal
to 40 percent of its annual budget—the
equivalent of £300 billion in today’s
value). Not until 2015 was that debt
finally paid off. This unprecedented
compensation for injustice went not to
those whose lives had been spent in slav-
ery, nor even to those descended from
the millions who had died in captivity.
It was all given to British slaveowners,
as restitution for the loss of their human
property. Black lives, white rights. QThe Jamaican scholar and poet Francis Williams;
portrait by an unknown artist, circa 1745©Victoria^ andAlbert^ Museum,^ London(^6) See Amelia Gentleman, The Wind-
rush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile
Environment (Guardian Faber, 2019).