Tacky's Revolt

Across the island of Jamaica, which is today a nation, an uprising of enslaved people during the eighteenth century grew into the biggest revolt of its kind against British slavery in the Atlantic world. Its fighters waged a guerrilla campaign whose tactics look strikingly contemporary. Colonists were alarmed by the violence, yet some of them, and some observers across the Atlantic, were moved to sympathy for the lives at stake.

Historian Vincent Brown follows the combat itself, from the first clashes through the long campaign that followed, and shows how the struggle rippled outward. His account connects the island's plantations to a wider world of trade, empire and political debate, so that the rebellion becomes a story about how distant places shaped one another.

The book suits readers interested in slavery, resistance and the British Atlantic, and it is written for a general audience as well as scholars. Brown teaches history at Harvard University, and his earlier work also deals with death, power and slavery in the colonial Atlantic.