tacky's revolt the story of an atlantic slave war

It was also part of a more extended borderless conflict that spread from Africa to the Americas and across the island. Their uprising-which became known as Tacky’s Revolt-featured a style of fighting increasingly familiar today: scattered militias opposing great powers, with fighters hard to distinguish from noncombatants. In this contentious atmosphere, a movement of enslaved West Africans in Jamaica (then called Coromantees) organized to throw off that yoke by violence.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, as European imperial conflicts extended the domain of capitalist agriculture, warring African factions fed their captives to the transatlantic slave trade while masters struggled continuously to keep their restive slaves under the yoke. “A sobering read for contemporary audiences in countries engaged in forever wars… It is also a useful reminder that the distinction between victory and defeat, when it comes to insurgencies, is often fleeting: Tacky may have lost his battle, but the enslaved did eventually win the war.”- The New Yorker “Not only a story of the insurrection, but ‘a martial geography of Atlantic slavery,’ vividly demonstrating how warfare shaped every aspect of bondage… Forty years after Tacky’s defeat, new arrivals from Africa were still hearing about the daring rebels who upended the island.”- Harper’s “Brilliant…groundbreaking… Brown’s profound analysis and revolutionary vision of the Age of Slave War-from the too-often overlooked Tacky’s Revolt to the better-known Haitian Revolution-gives us an original view of the birth of modern freedom in the New World.”-Cornel West On WNUR (Chicago)’s This Is Hell!, listen to Vincent Brown discuss the entrenched legacies of racism in the United States, and how American education about slavery misses the fundamentally international nature of the systems involved:

Tacky's revolt the story of an atlantic slave war