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 Ofenbach (Bronx Community College, The City University of New York)

Between 1760 and 1761, two insurgencies led The book begins on the Gold Coast in West by enslaved Africans living in Jamaica, Tacky’s Re‐ Africa, which acts as the seedbed for the events volt and the Coromantee War, posed the largest that unfold in the Caribbean. From there, Brown threat to slaveholder hegemony in the Atlantic traces the pathways of free and enslaved subjects World prior to the Haitian Revolution. Rather than across the ocean to Jamaica and then broadens the treat these rebellions as peripheral and localized narrative outward into the wider Atlantic World. events, Vincent Brown’s new book, Tacky’s Revolt: At the book’s outset, the author introduces three The Story of an Atlantic Slave War, places them at figures: Apongo (also called Wager), John Cope, the center of Britain’s rapidly expanding eight‐ and Arthur Forrest. Brown treats them as “em‐ eenth-century empire. The book is a compelling blematic” of the intertwined influences of slavery, account of how insurgencies led by African cap‐ warfare, and colonialism that connected West tives in Jamaica were both produced by and Africa with America (p. 18). In the first chapter, paradigmatic of two major and interrelated histor‐ Brown speculates that the Englishman Cope met ical developments: the expansion of Atlantic Apongo on the Gold Coast, where Cope had slavery and the rise of an aggressively militaristic traveled to work for the Royal African Company. British Empire. By connecting the Jamaica insur‐ While there, Cope earned a fortune aiding in the gencies to larger intra-imperial wars, especially transportation of more than thirty-three thousand the War of Jenkin’s Ear and the Seven Years’ War, captive Africans to America. However, Brown uses Tacky’s Revolt makes slavery and the violence it Cope to go beyond a simplistic account of produced inseparable from broader military con‐ European profiteering and rapacity. Operating on flicts. Brown traces the lasting influence of these the fringes of powerful African polities, Cope and episodes, which he treats as both agentive and em‐ other European slavers both competed with each blematic, into the revolutionary era. other and “negotiated seriously” with African H-Net Reviews leaders, including men like Apongo, to transact Before turning to the insurrection, Brown their business in human flesh (p. 73). The author uses chapter 3 to situate Apongo in the broader eschews relationships that were overdetermined community of Africans who were loosely identi‐ by racial, ethnic, or nationalistic loyalties. Rather, fied as Coromantees in Jamaica. However, the au‐ the possible encounter between Cope and Apongo, thor carefully avoids equating African ethnicity like the dynamic between Europeans and Africans with political loyalty and military action. Instead, more broadly, was contingent, contextual, and flu‐ he contends that enslaved Africans creatively ad‐ id. Cope adapted to West African politics just as apted to the new physical, political, and social geo‐ Apongo would acclimate, and then contest, his po‐ graphies of the island. While a loosely affiliated sition as an enslaved man in Jamaica. They were group of Coromantee people drew on similar lin‐ both adept at seizing opportunities, building coali‐ guistic, cultural, and religious traditions, they tions, and forging alliances—skills that proved forged coalitions out of their shared military ex‐ crucial in fomenting and ending the African-led periences and political objectives in Jamaica. insurrections in Jamaica years later. Some joined forces with the Jamaica Maroons— In chapters 2 and 3, the book follows the di‐ the descendants of escaped slaves who established vergent life trajectories of Apongo, Cope, and For‐ sovereign communities in the colony’s thickly for‐ rest to Jamaica, where their fates converge in the ested interior and rugged mountains. In the 1730s, mid-eighteenth century. For Brown, their conflu‐ the Maroons and the Coromantees waged a pro‐ ence on an island that had become the wealthiest longed war of attrition against European colonists and most politically influential colony in the Brit‐ who lived in sparsely settled regions. Their milit‐ ish Empire epitomizes the “intimate” interconnec‐ ary efforts effectively prevented further settle‐ tions between individuals and broader imperial ment of the island. A series of humiliating defeats changes (p. 18). The men arrived in a place that led the British Army, together with the colonial mi‐ was inhabited by the largest population of en‐ litia, to acknowledge the military superiority of slaved Africans in the Atlantic World. The stark di‐ the African and African-descended combatants. chotomy between the island’s free white minority Britain signed a treaty with the Maroons in 1739 and the captive black majority created a state of that recognized their political and territorial sov‐ “pervasive” and racialized warfare wherein white ereignty in exchange for their military support slaveholders used terror to maintain tenuous con‐ and assistance with policing escaped slaves. trol over the captive African populace (p. 248). Brown rightfully identifies this treaty as a major Forrest, a naval officer whom the author suspects turning point in Jamaican and British imperial his‐ became Apongo’s enslaver when he was working tory. Allying with the Maroons opened up vast ter‐ aboard a ship under Forrest’s command, brought ritories for sugar cultivation on the island and Apongo to the island in bondage in the 1740s. At foreclosed one of the most important paths to the same time, Cope departed from West Africa liberty for enslaved Africans who had previously and retired to Jamaica, where he leveraged the sought refuge and protection in Jamaica’s moun‐ fortune he earned from the slave trade to estab‐ tainous interior. lish a large sugar plantation in Westmoreland Par‐ The absence of Maroon support forced Afric‐ ish—the same place where Apongo labored on one an captives to build new coalitions and devise al‐ of Forrest’s vast estates. There, Apongo led an in‐ ternative military strategies that formed the basis surrection against Forrest, Cope, and the island’s of the insurgencies, Tacky’s Revolt and the Coro‐ other major slaveholders decades later. mantee War, launched in 1760-61. Focusing on these events, chapters 4 and 5 offer the most meth‐ odologically innovative and historiographically

2 H-Net Reviews significant material in the book. Brown uses eight‐ the wake of the insurgencies, Jamaican officials eenth-century accounts and maps to painstakingly passed a series of laws that sought to enforce track the rebels’ paths across Jamaica’s varied white solidarity and curtail possibilities for people landscape. By tracing the insurgents’ movements of African descent to advance in free society. through dense forests and swampland, and their While the island’s elite used memories of the con‐ locations on mountains and coasts, he determines flicts to generate fear and build a race-based coali‐ how African combatants exploited divisions tion, the events spurred imperial leaders to test among colonists, military officials, and imperial out reform policies, such as a stamp act in Ja‐ rulers and evaded the colonial militia, the British maica, that would later spark the American Re‐ Army, and the Maroons. The author’s meticulous volution. By the end of the eighteenth century, in‐ attention to physical and social geography enables tensifying concerns about the dangers and the him to infer the military strategies and political brutality of slavery, fed in part by the legacies of objectives of people whom colonial and imperial the Jamaica insurrections, aided in galvanizing the officials sought to silence. Doing so broadens the antislavery movement. geopolitical significance of the conflict beyond the The author’s crystalline prose vivifies the dra‐ series of attacks in one parish that are typically matic yet largely neglected insurgencies of labeled as Tacky’s Revolt. Instead, Brown positions 1760-61 in Jamaica, and he convincingly reveals Tacky’s Revolt within what he terms the Coro‐ their centrality to far more well-studied events mantee War—a series of African-led insurrections like the American and the Haitian Revolutions and that persisted for a year. the antislavery movement. Few scholars possess Widening the frame from a singular slave re‐ Brown’s ability to craft a narrative that is tragic volt to an African war connects the insurrection to yet uplifting and instructive without being overly military conflicts in West Africa, while also linking moralizing. Rather than relying on the truisms events in Jamaica to the Seven Years’ War. In 1760, about emancipation and liberty that pervaded ab‐ Apongo resurfaces in the narrative as the military olitionist rhetoric drawn from nineteenth-century leader of the Coromantee War. He launches a ma‐ liberalism, Tacky’s Revolt returns the war against jor military offensive against the largest planta‐ slavery to the African and African-descended tions in Westmoreland Parish, including an estate peoples who waged it a century earlier. As Brown under the control of Cope’s son. The war was only points out throughout the book, the captives re‐ ended by a combination of accidents, internal con‐ belled for historically specific aims that we do not flicts among the insurgents, and the widespread fully comprehend; they fought to “develop their terror inspired by slaveholder retaliations. own notions of belonging, status, and fairness” Apongo, for instance, was captured and burned beyond the power of their enslavers. Tacky’s Re‐ alive as punishment for his leadership role in the volt and the Coromantee War produced a “coun‐ insurrection. The insurgents may have been tor‐ termapping” or a “geography” of “possibilities” tured and executed but their actions had a lasting that endured well beyond the conflicts (p. 246). influence, as Brown contends in chapter 6. Tacky’s Brown’s own effort to countermap these events by Revolt and the Coromantee War posed the gravest tracing the maneuvers of the insurgents on a gran‐ challenge to slaveholder hegemony in Britain’s ular level, inferring their political and military most valuable colony, exposing the dangers of strategies, and recognizing the enduring legacy of chattel slavery and the limitations of European their actions is the book’s greatest achievement. imperial authority decades before the Haitian Re‐ The cast of characters in this impressively ori‐ volution. The reverberations of these African in‐ ginal and painstakingly researched work is, how‐ surrections were wide ranging and long lasting. In

3 H-Net Reviews ever, decidedly masculine. Enslaved men, soldiers, ism and slavery. It treats Africans and African-des‐ sailors, male planters, and merchants drive the ac‐ cended peoples as powerful agents, rather than as tion in West Africa and then Jamaica: a colony that mere victims of European command. In Tacky’s the author portrays as dominated by “armed men” Revolt, they are politically sophisticated and “slaveholding patriarchs” (p. 121). The limited strategists, as evidenced by the Coromantee War, attention paid to women and gender is a blind which displayed “black military intellect” (p. 205). spot in Tacky’s Revolt. Drawing on male-authored Yet the author admirably resists romanticizing or texts from the late eighteenth century, the author treating the rebels as a monolithic group. Instead, correlates free and enslaved women with their re‐ he attends to fractures and tensions within differ‐ productive capacities. While he is careful to ac‐ ent polities of Africans, colonists, and British milit‐ knowledge the sexual predations of male en‐ ary officials in Jamaica who, like Apongo, Forrest, slavers, Brown accepts the gendered assumption and Cope, forged nebulous and contingent alli‐ that men committed acts of sexual violence in or‐ ances. Likewise, Brown cautions against interpret‐ der to confirm their own masculinity. While it is ing slave revolts as either continuations of African true that white men controlled the reins of power warfare or simple reactions to enslavement. in Jamaica, free and enslaved women of Rather, the conflicts in Jamaica displayed the cre‐ European, Euro-African, and African descent also ative adaptability of people in the face of pro‐ played crucial roles on the island. The book con‐ found oppression. tains numerous instances of women’s involvement Christine Walker is an assistant professor of in the colony’s chronic violence. Rebels recognized history at Yale-NUS College. She specializes in the that female enslavers were equally complicit in history of colonialism, gender, and slavery in the their exploitation and treated them as legitimate Atlantic World. Her book, Jamaica Ladies: Female military targets. Enslaved women readily served Slaveholders and the Creation of Britain’s Atlantic as combatants in nearly every insurgency the Empire (2020), examines the crucial roles played book details (for instance, see pp. 118-19, 139, 162, by women of European and African descent in 174). Indeed, 40 percent of the rebels in one of the transforming Jamaica into the wealthiest and the groups that was captured were women and the largest slaveholding colony in Anglo-America. 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 de‐ veloping Brown’s robust and compelling portrait of the entangled histories of imperialism, Atlantic slavery, and African warfare. Tacky’s Revolt moves beyond existential ac‐ counts of the dynamic between the enslaved-en‐ slaver 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 colonial‐

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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: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55127

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