Episode 72 – Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War with author Vincent Brown

[0:00:07 Speaker 0] Welcome to Race and democracy, a podcast on the intersection between race, democracy, public policy, Social justice and citizenship. Mhm Today I am talking with my good friend and homeboy, the brilliant scholar, Vincent Brown from Harvard University about his new book taxis revolt, The story of an atlantic slave war. Vincent is the author of the Reaper’s Garden, which won multiple book awards. He’s received Guggenheim and melon New Direction fellowships and his online interactive map slave revolt in Jamaica 17 60 to 17 61 A cartographic cartographic narrative has been viewed by 87,000 viewers in 184 countries. In his documentary Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness, broadcast nationally on PBS, won the john e O Connor Film Award and was chosen as Best documentary at the Hollywood Black Film Festival. There’s so much more and I’m so excited to talk to you events.

[0:01:14 Speaker 1] Hey, pineal, great to be with you. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. And good to be back with you man. We’ve got a lot to catch up on.

[0:01:21 Speaker 0] You know, I think taxis revolt is one of the best books I’ve ever read.

[0:01:24 Speaker 1] Hey,

[0:01:25 Speaker 0] so we

[0:01:26 Speaker 1] can stop right there.

[0:01:27 Speaker 0] Cut, this is one of the best books I’ve ever read. And I tell you know, I’ve had a lot of authors here but vince, I mean one of the blurbs that Vince is a creative historian. It’s really more than that. This is really prodigious work. The subtitle is the story of an atlantic slave war, but I learned so much about wars within wars. This is a book that puts Jamaican and sort of transatlantic slave rebellion on par with what we usually think of as the white heroes of the british empire and the uh you know, western european empires. And it’s so, so interesting. So I wanna start by saying, you know what inspired you to do taxis revolt. This has so many. This book really maps a new grammar of political and intellectual discourse across both sides of the atlantic. It’s really a stunning achievement.

[0:02:22 Speaker 1] Well, thank you, I appreciate that very much, very much appreciate that, especially coming from you because you’re a historian who I admire a lot, especially your narrative and analytical skill and your ability to reframe histories in ways that allow them to see, allow us to see them in in a new light. And that’s really what I was trying to do with this history of slavery bubble, as you alluded to. Like, we often think of the history of the atlantic world, in the history of european empires, in the history of revolution as something that it has its kind of european core and maybe it’s black periphery, right? We still think in those terms that were laid out to us by the philosopher G W. F. Hegel, the early 19th century, that, you know, africa forms no historical part of the world. And as it turns out, you know, the discipline of history didn’t really consider African history to be a significant subject until the mid 20th century, frankly. So one of the things I’m trying to do here is show how this slave revolt in Jamaica in 17 60 17 61 which was the largest slave revolt in the 18th century british empire should actually be seen on a geopolitical transatlantic scale, not just seen as something that happens between slaves and masters on a plantation or even something that happens within one colony, but something that one can see in these geopolitical terms, as, as you said, a war within a war. Now, this is something that you’ve done with your histories of black power and the civil rights movement. Whereas many people think of the black power movement and civil rights is something that happens strictly within a national context and strictly as being something that has to do with racial relations. I think in your work, you’ve always seen the African american freedom struggle as part of a global black struggle, right? That you know, we can’t achieve our freedom here and lesson until we achieve our freedom everywhere. That’s the basic perspective I was applying to slave revolt in this book.

[0:04:19 Speaker 0] I want to read you something from Chapter One Wars Empire beginning the story of american slave revolt with West Africa’s entanglement with european empire allows a shift in perspective, taking in the wider geography that shaped the course of the insurgency and the political imagination of its participants. I want us to talk about this because I think that

[0:04:42 Speaker 1] you

[0:04:43 Speaker 0] show us tacky, you show us wager, um you show us all these different actors who have agency, but you also show them within the context. It’s almost like this huge concentric circle where there are these these these outer events like the Seven Years war and sort of british empire and imperialism happening. And then there’s this inner core and you really tell it in a different way because you focus uh including these uh, you know, for everybody listening this book, um, maps a new terrain in multiple ways. Because there are there are dozens of maps that show us in detail the different uprisings in the different wars, plural plural, that insurgent enslaved people in Jamaica carried out. But you also show us the wars that were happening in Africa and the empires that were being built in Africa and how uh the interface would sort of African empire and european empire uh, thrust these different

[0:05:49 Speaker 1] gold

[0:05:50 Speaker 0] coast, uh, Cora monty, uh, enslaved Africans into sort of new geography ease. And they had to map and you talk about the contested loyalties, the terrain they mapped. Uh you show us the maroon societies and maroni a cheer, I mean, and you also show us the way in which the british to Jamaican uh, Imperialists were um, the british imperialist in Jamaica. We’re trying to narrate this and you you really forge a counter narrative to all of this that provides a voice for the voiceless. So, I want to start with there in terms of, you know, talk to us about Africa and sort of the research, I’ve never read a book where I could feel myself understanding um, the African story, parts of this story, and not just the european parts of the story and it’s blended so seamlessly

[0:06:45 Speaker 1] Well. First of all, again, thanks, it’s nice to be understood and you really, you really do understand what I was trying to do, which I appreciate. I think what you’re, what you’re recognizing is that there are a lot of moving parts to the story, right? And these moving parts, you know, transcend the spaces that we usually think of as being distinct. Right? So this story includes europe West Africa, the caribbean, even north America toward the end. Because what I was trying to do was show how the system out of which this slave of alta Rose right, was interconnected and show how all of these moving parts were interrelated. So I guess to kind of start where you started there with Africa, oftentimes we think about slave revolt, we think, okay, so there’s the middle passage and then our history starts over again, right in the territory where we wound up whether it be somewhere in the Caribbean or South America or north America. But of course the Middle passage was, you know, several horrifying, terrifying, excruciating, traumatizing weeks of a much longer journey. And what I wanted to do was to situate these people who ended up in Jamaica involved in the slave revolt in a larger history that that went back before the Middle Passage. Because it’s really only, you know, we we understand how African history is working during the era of the slave trade, that we understand how all of these people turn up in the Americas as well, right? Because what’s happening as european empires are expanding throughout the Americas and fighting each other for territory, They are also shipping weapons into West Africa in order to trade for slaves. It’s not only weapons, but guns, firearms or one of the principal objects of trade that they’re trading to these West African polities who have their own conflicts going on. And as these european firearms flood into West Africa, the scale of these conflicts in West Africa increases, the lethality of these conflicts increases, but also the number of captives, war captives for sale to the Europeans on the coast end up in the Americas. Right? So that process of guns going into Africa, the scale of warfare increasing in West Africa, the scale of the slave trade increasing. West Africa, feeding these plantations that are the most profitable territories in european empires, right, is all symbiotic, and I needed to show how all those pieces fit together so that I could show you how these potential rebels end up in Jamaica 17 16 and 17 61. So with that the story of these warring african polities becomes crucial to the other story that I’m trying to tell in Jamaica. Unless you really introduce readers to the rise of a shanty on the Gold Coast, right? The roughly the area that’s now Ghana their conflicts with the smaller polities. Um, or like with the fonte confederacy on the coast or with a Qualm. Ooh, which is another kind of big important polity on the Gold Coast. Unless you understand those conflicts, you don’t really understand the experiences that people from the Gold Coast who led this slave revolt in Jamaica bring with them to the Americas. And that’s what I was trying to really get across to readers. We have now kind of building tradition of scholarship that makes these connections between africa and the Americas. But I don’t think we had fully understand slave revolt in those terms.

[0:10:18 Speaker 0] And to sum up what you just said in terms of your own, your own writing, you say, um such predatory slaving states and you’re talking about Oyo Dahomey and Asante, inland from the Golden Slave Coast proliferated and gathered strength in the 18th century and the privations and chaos attending their local wars, made ever more refugees available for capture and sale abroad.

[0:10:45 Speaker 1] Um you

[0:10:47 Speaker 0] know, I want to ask you about the Koran monte, but I want to ask you about the core monty uh, building on what you just said, because I thought what’s extraordinary about the first two chapters and we’ll talk about ah the subsequent chapters as well. But it’s the way in which you sketch out for the reader, all these moving parts. Um, and then you’re gonna, you reassemble them into sort of this really gripping narrative. But I was fascinated by the number of different african um basically african captives to use your language captive who are forced to reinvent themselves on the fly. But I was also impressed by their intelligence, their resilience, uh their survival skills, their strategies. Uh let’s talk about that in the creation of of the core monty.

[0:11:43 Speaker 1] Yeah, okay, so that’s great. Let’s go back to the middle passage that I alluded to just a minute ago, which is, you know, there is a tradition of scholarship that sees the middle passages, so traumatizing that essentially the people who found themselves enslaved in the Americas were completely remade as people that may be none of their experience in africa actually mattered to them when they got to the americans, right? Uh that they were essentially socially dead as the common term comes as slaves and had to reinvent themselves completely in slavery. Now, the idea there is that, you know, slavery, um, it’s basically the process of trying to um, make the enslaved person merely a subject of the slaveholders will, right, they’re not supposed to have any independent will and volition. Now, if you take that idea seriously as an accomplished fact that a slave was in fact nothing but an extension of the slaveholders will, then you’re going to miss all of that personal history that really matters to someone who finds themselves in the predicament of enslavement, right that they may not be a slave in the ideal type sense, as I just laid out, but they happen to find themselves enslaved. And once we make that shift from thinking of slaves as kind of an accomplished fact to thinking of these people caught in this predicament of enslavement. Suddenly, there prior previous histories, matters a lot to thinking about their behaviour. That, as I said, leads me back to their experiences in Africa. Now, the slave revolt in Jamaica in 17 62 7 61 was led as far as we know, by a con speakers to modern. A gun in language of twee is a con is an icon language roughly Akane, speakers from the Gold Coast from modern Ghana. And people who, who were con speakers became notorious for staging rebellions through the late 17th and the first three quarters of the 18th century, they were called in the Americas. Cora Montes called Amina’s in some territories, but cora Montes in the anglophone territories of the Americas. And this stage revolts that we know about from Suriname all way up to new york city from the late 17th century through the first record of the 18th century, with one of the largest of them being this revolt in Jamaica in 17 60. So what I had to understand was the process of making a core Amanti identity in the Americas. Because cora monte itself, the term was not an identity that really obtained in West Africa. People had all kinds of other identifications. There were more important to them with the policies that they had with the language groups that they had with the religions um that they had in West Africa. But the term core monty came from was a derivation from the term Corman sha, which was an early uh West African fort on the Gold Coast. It became a principal slave trading for the 17th century. And ever after, many people who came from the Gold Coast were just labeled cora Montes right after the name of that fort. But that then became, let’s call it a category of identification um in the Americas that people then, you know, organized around right became something they came to closely identify with. And they could use that category of identification. That identity if you want to use the term um, in order to stage revolts in order to decide, you know who they were allied with, who they would be in fellowship with. And also kind of which other Africans they might find themselves pitted against who spoke different languages or worship different gods. We’re from different parts of the West African coast. So that process was a creative process that was always a transformation that was shaped by the process of warfare in the Gold Coast. Moving out to the americans, to the transatlantic slave trade and then finding yourself uh, in the predicament of slavery in the Americas where they had to decide again who they were going to be aligned with, who we’re going to be there fellows, what kinds of communities they were going to make right? So again, kind of within and beneath the category of slave within slavery. There are all of these other kinds of association going on that are going to determine yeah, who rebels and with whom and with what consequences. And that’s the process that I was trying to understand, not just assuming that core monty was an identity that was relatively static, but understanding the process of people making right in in this world. That was beset by violence and turmoil and change and, and privation as you said. Um, but that then allows people to make fellowship in Jamaica in a different way than they would have done in africa.

[0:16:58 Speaker 0] And I want to talk about that final piece of the puzzle. Jamaica Chapter two is the Jamaican garrison. And really throughout we get a vivid, detailed portrait of one. Just the topography of Jamaica, the dense forest, the bay, um, uh, the rivers, the gullies. Uh, it’s really the mountains, it’s extraordinary. Um, but you also talked about uh, the way in which Jamaica becomes the most profitable british colony by the 16 nineties, but truly also the most dangerous white people are dying. Black enslaved people are dying, but talk to us about Jamaica and why is Jamaica so important here? But what would, but what was so attractive to the british besides the money, uh, for staying? And it seems with what reading this book seems like it was a very, very dangerous place to be, certainly for the enslaved Africans, but but for whites as well.

[0:17:57 Speaker 1] Yeah, Well, I mean, the answer is the money, the money, the money, the money, right? Um So kind of what happens over the course of really kind of european colonization almost from the beginning is Europeans learned that growing agricultural crops for exports second only to mining, which the spanish really get into through the, through the 16th century, growing agricultural crops for export to europe is about the most profitable enterprise that you can get into. And among those agricultural crops, the most profitable of those is sugar. Now, sugar requires huge amounts of labor to grow Europeans had known this from the time they were planting sugar in the mediterranean, all the way out through the sugar plantations in the atlantic islands off the coast of Africa and santo may in brazil and then up into the caribbean. So wherever you have people growing sugar with the enormous amounts of labor and with the hard regimentation that sugar plantations developed certainly by, by the mid 17th century, you have enslaved labor, right? And and huge quantities in slave labor. It takes so much energy to do that work. And yet it’s so profitable, right? The product of that work, that it actually becomes cheaper, more profitable for planters to work people to death, Right? Rather than feed them, house them, clothe them properly, allow them to start families and raise Children to work them to death and replace them with new captives through the african slave trade, Right? That becomes cheaper than it is to allow people to survive. So what you have is a kind of demographic churn where the slave trade is, you know, kind of feeding the sugar plantation, which are utterly dependent on the slave trade. Um, but sugar plantation work is a sugar plantations are so profitable that there’s no real incentive to change that system. Now this is happening in the tropics, in part because you have so much demographic churn these these territories, with all these people coming in are nodes in a circuit of transatlantic disease right there, epidemic hotspots. So they’re tropical diseases coming in and the Europeans are dying of those tropical diseases as well. What these territories are so profitable, There are a lot of Europeans who figure, you know, I might as well take my chances, hope to get rich and get out before I die and get back to europe and set myself up as a wealthy person. A lot of these people, especially in the british empire, are maybe the 2nd and 3rd sons of prominent families. They’re not people who are going to inherit the estates in the in great Britain, but they can make a fortune in the caribbean and then come back to Britain and become very prominent, very influential people. So the world I’m describing, there is a world in which there are a lot of people who come out to Britain hoping to get rich and then hoping to go back and many of them do and they’re far wealthier then, then even those people who stayed. So the lobby for the Caribbean planters is incredibly influential in the mid 18th century. They even have, you know, people elected to parliament there in the ear of the Prime minister. Um so it’s quite profitable for people who survive right and get out in time and then can just see the caribbean territory as an investment. But it is also deadly.

[0:21:22 Speaker 0] Now, you right here paying attention to movements in space and over time offers a new perspective on the military maneuvers of the combatants. By mapping the narrative sketch by planters onto the geography of ST mary’s Parish. We can discern patterns of political intent for both the rebels and the counterinsurgents and see that taxis revolt was just one episode in a much larger Coram anti war. So my question is who was tacky? And let’s discreetly talk about taxis revolt. Yeah. And then we’re gonna move on to the core monte war. But I want to know who was tacky because he comes across here very, very interesting. And there’s a number of different, very vivid sketches of different african leaders who are very reminiscent of basically Spartacus. You know, we think we want to send you pictures Black Spartacus and uh oh dear has arisen, has that book Black Spartacus, but we see our Jamaican and west african Spartacus here uh in multiple ways to so who was tacky and what was taxis revolt?

[0:22:33 Speaker 1] So we have known this slave revolt in Jamaica in 17 60. S taxis, you will, ever since the earliest accounts of it by, by british planters, um, identified Taki is one of the principal leaders. Now we know Tacky Tacky or trashy is the name a guy named for Gold Coast chieftain. Right. So we know that Tacky was probably a person of statute within africa and then perhaps was also a driver in Jamaica. We don’t know much more about attacking the principal figure. We do know that that first part of the revolt, the first phase of the revolt in the parish of ST mary on the north side of the island that started on april 7th 17 60. Um, Tacky was among the leaders of that revolt, but he wasn’t the only leader. There were other leaders named even in the first news accounts of the revolt. But when we get the summary accounts by planters like Edward Long who wrote a three volume history of Jamaica in 17 74 they contained one of the longest early accounts of taxes vote. We see tacky name is that principle leader. Now when I began to investigate that and what I wanted to know is as much as I could about tacky. But what I found out is that there were so many other leaders, Also, people who may have been prominent people in Africa, who may have been drivers. That means prominent people on caribbean plantations who then became leaders of these slave rebels. So one of the people I found out that I ended up learning, I found out about that I ended up learning much more about than I learned about attacking himself was a leader named wager, also known by his african name, a pongo. And I learned from the diary of a plantation overseer that a pongo had been accustomed to visiting the british governor, Chief agent of Cape Coast Castle, which was Britain’s principal for on the Gold Coast. Um, in the late 17 thirties, early 17 forties. Now that agent from Cape Coast Castle retires from the West African company, he sets himself up in Jamaica as a planter and years later, pongo is himself captured, sold to the Europeans. He ends up in Jamaica, where he again encounters that former chief agent of Cape Coast Castle, who lays out a tablecloth for a pongo on sunday visits and insinuates that, you know when his slaveholder, when his master comes back to the island and the owner is a Royal Navy ship captain, that this former governor would have wager, oh, pongo redeemed and sent back to West Africa. Now this former governor, his name was john coke, dies in 17 56. And sometime in the intervening four years between 56 17 60 wager becomes one of the principal leaders of this largest slave revolt in the 18th century british empire. So what I wanted to do, what I found out about this story was retrace a pongo renamed wagers movements throughout the atlantic world and I discovered that not only was he a prominent figure in West Africa, but he also served for a year on a Royal Navy warship under his, his owners a command, right. And then he was placed as a slave driver on that ship owners plantation before he became a principal slave leader. Right now, a slave revolt leader. So now this is kind of like a spartacus figure, right? So someone who’s a prominent military captain who turns his weapons against his masters. Um, and it turns out that wasn’t a completely uncommon phenomenon. And so I kind of wrote tacky into that larger story of these Africans who had military experience, who retained that when they came to Jamaica, and then who used that experience to fight the slaveholders during the slave

[0:26:33 Speaker 0] verbal talk to us about the slave communities that you narrate here, um including the maroons. It’s not really black and white in terms of people’s loyalties. One of the things, you know, is that uh, it was often enslaved people themselves, who uh were the people who betrayed plots and plots of insurrection. The maroons in your narrative at times are used as a counter insurgency to quell, uh, not just taxis revolt, but the larger, wider core monte wars uh, that are waged on the islands. So, let’s talk about that community of both black women and men. Um and what, you know, you talk about how, you know, some people set up autonomous, independent societies, not just the maroons, but even others uh and and the way in which there are shifting loyalties that are not necessarily just dependent on uh language and ethnic characteristics, but dependent on a range of factors. Um So talk about that. I thought that was fascinating.

[0:27:49 Speaker 1] Yeah. What I wanted to do first and foremost was to take black politics seriously, to take the politics of the enslaved seriously. And what that meant was not to assume that I knew everything they wanted at all times because they happened to be enslaved, but to really take it as a question, what are they trying to achieve? Not only vis a vis the planters and the slave society, but vis a vis each other? And because I had started in africa with conflicts in africa that facilitated the growth of slavery, I had to think about how those conflicts either continued or transformed when people got to the Americas, right? And that’s all part and parcel of just saying like, look, um, if I’m going to understand that, you know, there’s a lot of white on white violence in this world to the british. The british are fighting the french for 100 years in this period, the english are fighting the irish, right? The Scottish are sometimes in between them. There are a lot of different kinds of conflicts and we know how to take those seriously, right? Even while understanding that, you know, white people might unite in this world to enslave Africans and black people. So I wanted to flip that and look at how, despite the fact that, you know, by the time that I’m writing, almost all the people who are in bondage are black and you know, a majority of them are African, um they still remain, retain their own identities, their own communities, their own struggles that are not wholly defined by the power of slaveholders, right? And this is part of an effort not to reduce the history of slavery uh to not to reduce the history of black people to the history of slavery as an institution. Right? I think sometimes we we let those slide into each other where if we think we understand slavery as an institution and how it works and how it oppresses black people that then we’re also understanding already black history, and what I’m saying is that those things are semi autonomous, always related to each other in this period, but black history exceeds the history of slavery, it exceeds the history of the deprivations and the oppressions of white people and Europeans. So I wanted to take that seriously. So I want to think about all the various kinds of communities, um you might even call them policies that black people made within slavery. We know a little bit about the story of the maroons, right? So from the time the british took uh the island of Jamaica from the spanish in 17 55 there were groups of runaways that escaped in the turmoil of that imperial conflict, but then continued to escape british plantations or english plantations as they, as they developed. And they form communities in hard to reach areas, often in the mountains and they fought conflicts to maintain their own autonomy from plantation society. By the 17 thirties, the british are engaged in a major war with these maroon communities in Jamaica and the british don’t even know that they’ll be able to keep the island. In fact, the war is so hard fought that the british are compelled to sue for peace and they signed treaties with the maroons in 17 39 and 17 40 that grant them their autonomy. But these treaties also oblige the maroons to police future slave revolts, which in order to maintain their autonomy, they do, they fulfill their end of a diplomatic bargain. And there you see how I’m treating the maroons in terms of geopolitics and diplomacy. What they have to do to maintain their own autonomy is help the british suppress future slavery rules. So that sets them up as enemies of the slave revolt when we get to 17 60. And it’s clearly the case that the british might not have been able to suppress taxis over had it not been for this alliance with the maroons who are much better at fighting in the bush and in the mountains. Then british militia and an army units are

[0:32:02 Speaker 0] now this larger cora monte war. One of the things you do both in your narrative and with these maps is show really the extent that taxis revolt which was supposed to take place on the wit sun holiday. And you can talk to us about the wit son, but it’s a religious holiday. They mistakenly thought easter sunday was the holiday and so they sort of jumped the gun a little bit. But there are these larger wars throughout, not just the parish ST mary’s parish, but you show here the parish of ST Elizabeth, ST James ST anne’s, you show Westmoreland. Um um the maps here show september october december january. Um It’s so it’s so interesting and it’s this sort of huge campaign of of uh not just insurrection uh but real, a real politically motivated in a way, rebellion. Um So talk to us about the wider core Monte war and and how did that, in what ways did that succeed, and ultimately in what ways did it did it not?

[0:33:16 Speaker 1] Yeah, at the beginning of our conversation, you talked about how this is a book that actually takes this conflict seriously and tries to see it on its own terms and really burrows into it and sees it in detail. One of the first things I did was, you know, to try and again asked this question about what the rebels wanted. Of course, most of the sources we have about the revolt were produced by slave holders, and so they’re obviously antagonistic to the desires of the rebels and they don’t tell us everything we want to know about. So, what I did was I wanted to collect every source that I did have on the rebellion and plot these sources over time on a timeline, but also plot them on the map. So I could figure out how the entire series of events played out across the Jamaican landscape in these various parishes that you mentioned um over the course of about a year and a half, and what I found there is that you could begin to discern some of the strategic intent of the rebels when you saw their movements, their trajectory across the landscape. So mapping became a kind of method for me to interpret the revolt. And it was also the method that I used, as I said earlier, to try and integrate this world of europe and West Africa and the Caribbean, to really see the geography of all of these places as being interconnected, integrated by the movements of people across these landscapes. And that’s what I did with the revolt itself. So one of the things you see is that, you know, there are a series of events I broken up into about three phases. One, this early outbreak of taxis revolt that begins on Easter 17 60 in the parish of ST mary, and then a series of conspiracies and small uprisings across the island. And then a much bigger revolt that begins in the Whitson holiday. Uh, May 25th 17 60 in the parish of Westmoreland. And then that lasts much longer, in fact, than the attack is revoked in the Parish of ST mary. And toward the end of that revolt, you have a long force march led by another african from the Gold Coast named Simon, um, all the way across to and into the third parish across the island before that’s finally extinguished into 17 61. So you could see what I think is really an attempt to design to take the whole island. But the problems of coordination, of timing again, the wits and holiday versus versus easter sunday. Um, but also communication across the entire island became more difficult for the enslaved than it did for the british, especially once the Royal Navy became involved in, the Royal Navy plays a crucial function in suppressing the rebellion. I spent a lot of time on naval counter insurgency in the book because I think it helps to explain why it is the british who are outnumbered um, initially were able to suppress this revolt by the, by, by, by a really late 70 60 and on into early 17 61. So ultimately that attempt to take the entire island is not successful. And one might think given the overwhelming british firepower that could be brought to bear. Um, after all, Jamaica was the most powerful british uh, military depot in the Americas. Um, one can think that it was doomed from the start, but one of the other things that I did was to kind of trace out the reverberations of the revolt and you can see that people remembered it and that it inspired future revolts in Jamaica, but also elsewhere in the Americas. And so you, no one can say that this revolt in its aims were suppressed in 17 61. But one can’t say that the desire to revolt and the belief that the british could be beat, the hope that they could be beaten, that was not extinguished in 17 61 when the british suppressed taxes report.

[0:37:25 Speaker 0] Yeah. Now you talk about in routes and reverberations, um, the impact of the larger core monte wars. When we think about this period, we always think about the Haitian revolution. Absolutely. Um, when we, you know, how does, how does tacky, how did the core Monte wars? How does Jamaica impact? And you do this in routes and reverberations, but also in your epilogue, sort of make a few different arguments, including looking at sort of these two british uh colonists at the time who writes sort of competing memoirs about taxis, you know, uh, drivel about the core Monte wars, you know? Um um and and and some are one is really more depraved, I suppose longs than the other. Um, but tell us about the, what are the reverberations? Do we see taxis revolt as a precursor to the Haitian revolution or something that might have even influenced the Haitian revolution? Because you you talk about how these tales of of slave uprisings were were handed down. Generationally people enslaved Africans who were on the island for less than four months would hear about uprisings that occurred four decades before even before they were born. So you do a great job there. But talk to us about the reverberations of the core monte wars and really um you know, you talk about wars empire, the wars that the british were fighting against the french and the Portuguese. Um um and how these wars within wars, these african wars uh, that produced uh the captives. But then these insurgent wars have these reverberations that really impact the american revolution and the Haitian revolution as

[0:39:26 Speaker 1] well. So, so this becomes a kind of crucial um Ellen and my attempt to show how these black rebellions matter to a history that we often think of as being larger. Right, so again, khakis revolt in the most profitable, most militarily significant and best politically connected colony in the british empire in America right happens during the Seven Years war. But most historians haven’t even considered as part of the Seven Years war. This despite the fact that many of the same soldiers and sailors and marines who fight another better known campaigns in the Seven Years war, including Quebec and Senegal and martinique and Guadeloupe, then go to Jamaica suppressed package of all. And yet it’s seen as something else, right? Despite the fact that it’s a fundamentally important conflict and you still get people trying to say, well, I don’t know if it’s really a front in the Seven Years war because we already know the Seven Years war is between Europeans, but it is as far as the people who are fighting it are concerned, this is what’s happening. So I wanted to see those things as interconnected. Now, we also know the reverberations of the Seven Years war are far and why that the colonists in the 13 north american colonies of the british empire right react against a whole new raft of policies that were preferred by british imperial administrators in the wake of the Seven Years war to reorganize um and help to pay for what is now an expanded empire after, after the defeat of the french decisive, defeated the french during the Seven Years war. So we already know that, you know, the reforms that, that north americans are revolting against in the 17 seventies are partly a result of the british experience in the Seven Years war. What we haven’t accounted for is the fact that they’re also looking at how costly it was to suppress that revolt in Jamaica. That that’s a fundamental part of british imperial mindset when they go to design these new colonial policies for for the Americas. So in that sense taxis the world is indirectly part of the context for the american revolution, but we can extend it out beyond that. Which is that, you know, we see that you know about 500 or more, probably many more but 500 black men, women and Children are officially killed in the suppression of the revolt. At least 500 more are exiled from the island rather than being killed. And those people go to places like british Honduras, they go to places like north America, we’ve tracked some to south Carolina, some to Virginia. We know that some are smuggled into french Sando meringue, which becomes Haiti. We know that in british Honduras, roughly the area that’s now Billy’s uh there’s another revolt in 17 65 probably led by many of these veterans of taxis revolt. We don’t know what happens to those people who go to south Carolina and Virginia, but we can assume that they tell the story of that revolt. Whoever they encounter in north America. So tacky or what reverberates into north America. We know um as you alluded to that people are telling the story of the 17 60 revolts to Africans that are arriving in the island a half century later, that that story is being kept alive by word of mouth, a kind of oppositional history being taught and learned on Jamaican plantations by the enslaved. Right now, we also know that some of these people in Jamaica ended up in san domain where 30 years later the Haitian revolution begins Now while we don’t have direct connections between taxes evolved and the rebels of the Haitian revolution, we know the Haitian revolution is part of this world, in which Africans are telling each other stories of rebellion against european empires. And so I think that that connection is pretty clear there

[0:43:28 Speaker 0] Now. The epilogue, I couldn’t end this conversation without talking about bob Marley. The epilogue

[0:43:35 Speaker 1] has uh, you

[0:43:36 Speaker 0] know, war, you know, war, these

[0:43:39 Speaker 1] philosophy that hold one race superior and another.

[0:43:45 Speaker 0] So the age is the age of slave war. You right. Um, in the epilogue, dominant peoples and nation states develop elaborate conventions for legitimating violence, maintaining their honor and victory and defeat and deeming violence to be a normal if unfortunate, feature of political struggle. But vis a vis those they dominate by daily habit. There is no limit to the lengths to which the powerful will go to maintain supremacy. They will commit atrocities and massacres to be sure, but they will disavow them to, they will refuse to admit that their combatants are legitimate enemies and they will denigrate the past and present struggles of less powerful people’s I thought that was powerful and and connects both this story to our own time in really, really important ways.

[0:44:37 Speaker 1] Yeah, I mean, what you and I have just lived through a long, long period, about 20 years of terror war, um, probably longer where, you know, our own country, the United States, our own military that we pay our taxes for has been engaged in these twilight struggles around the world with militants who are not seen to be legitimate combats. Uh, and yet kind of, you know, the actions of our own government seems to produce. You know, more and more of these conflicts. They don’t seem to be, uh, they don’t seem to be ended. They seem to just be perpetuated so much so that people talk about a forever war and an eternal war that we seem to be engaged in. You know, that just kind of made me think about these conflicts between imperial powers and these improvised militias um, in the period of atlantic slavery that seemed to be unending. Uh, and so what you see there reflected is my kind of reflection on, you know, how it is that we identify legitimate and illegitimate combatants, despite the fact that the fighting continues and continues and continues.

[0:45:47 Speaker 0] You know, I’m going to close on one of the sentences that I really, I mean, my whole book is underlined and marked and highlighter. But you talk about and talking about Jamaica in 17 60 say this slave war was part of a vast transatlantic phenomenon comprising the epic journeys of its combatants, their predecessors and struggle and those they inspired. But it’s hard to see where the story concluded all of slaves, wars, essential features, rapacious exploitation, racial subjugation and the proliferation of Wars within Wars would continue. But your final sentence, you say as long as enslaved Africans and their descendants continued to fight, they would never be defeated. Yeah,

[0:46:32 Speaker 1] I still believe that.

[0:46:36 Speaker 0] Yeah. And I think that that concludes the book in such a poignant and powerful way. Um, you know, I’ll close by saying, you know, any do you have any last thoughts? Because it’s something, this is a book that I’m definitely gonna teach. It’s part of black politics. But, you know, in terms of for for listeners, for the impact that you would want this book to have by the way, everyone, this book is won multiple awards. Um, it’s up for other big awards. Um, I definitely, you know, think this is a book that, you know, should win the Pulitzer prize that’s not gonna be announced for june, but it’s it’s it’s that it’s that book. And with this book vince you vaulted into the rarefied air of some of the truly great historians of slavery.

[0:47:22 Speaker 1] I’m up there with you,

[0:47:23 Speaker 0] Sadia, Sadia Hartman, um Stephen Hahn, uh you know, really do Boys, Black Reconstruction, uh David blight eric Fonar

[0:47:33 Speaker 1] uh that’s too much. But I’ll take

[0:47:36 Speaker 0] mesmerizing. It’s really that good. It’s really incredible.

[0:47:40 Speaker 1] Well hey, it’s been a fantastic conversation. I appreciate you taking the time to read carefully and to talk to me about it to tease out some of the some of the things in the book that I think are important. I mean I just come back to to taking black history and black politics seriously to not us to not assuming just because we kind of understand racism that we understand Black history. An african american history and african history on its terms. That these are subjects that are just as important that matter. Just as much as the european history or the U. S. History. There were more accustomed to learning that to me is the most important thing about the book is that, you know, hopefully we’re finally coming around to take in these subjects as seriously as they deserve to be taken and to seeing them as consequential as they in fact were in the history of Humankind.

[0:48:35 Speaker 0] Well, thank you Vince. This has been a great conversation. We’ve been speaking with my friend Vincent Brown, who’s the Charles Warren, Professor of african american history and professor of american history at Harvard University. Uh, he’s the author of the award, winning the Reapers Garden, winner of many fellowships and prizes in his latest book. Really, truly a brilliant book, masterpiece taxis revolt the story of an atlantic slave war. This is already won multiple prizes, but this is destined to be an enduring classic, the kind of book that’s going to be taught and read many, many decades from now continuously. So, thank you so much, my friend for this conversation.

[0:49:15 Speaker 1] Thank you, my friend,

[0:49:17 Speaker 0] Thanks for listening to this episode and you can check out related content on twitter at Peniel joseph. That’s p e n i e l j o s e p H and our website CS rd dot LBJ dot utexas dot e d u. And the Center for Study of Race and Democracy is on facebook as well. This podcast was recorded at the Liberal Arts Development Studio at the College of Liberal Arts, at the University of texas at Austin. Thank you. Yeah