Winner of the Merle Curti Award Winner of the James A. Rawley Prize
Winner of the Louis Gottschalk Prize Longlisted for the Cundill
Prize "Vincent Brown makes the dead talk. With his deep learning
and powerful historical imagination, he calls upon the departed to
explain the living. The Reaper's Garden stretches the historical
canvas and forces readers to think afresh. It is a major
contribution to the history of Atlantic slavery."-Ira Berlin From
the author of Tacky's Revolt, a landmark study of life and death in
colonial Jamaica at the zenith of the British slave empire. What
did people make of death in the world of Atlantic slavery? In The
Reaper's Garden, Vincent Brown asks this question about Jamaica,
the staggeringly profitable hub of the British Empire in
America-and a human catastrophe. Popularly known as the grave of
the Europeans, it was just as deadly for Africans and their
descendants. Yet among the survivors, the dead remained both a
vital presence and a social force. In this compelling and evocative
story of a world in flux, Brown shows that death was as generative
as it was destructive. From the eighteenth-century zenith of
British colonial slavery to its demise in the 1830s, the Grim
Reaper cultivated essential aspects of social life in
Jamaica-belonging and status, dreams for the future, and
commemorations of the past. Surveying a haunted landscape, Brown
unfolds the letters of anxious colonists; listens in on wakes,
eulogies, and solemn incantations; peers into crypts and coffins,
and finds the very spirit of human struggle in slavery. Masters and
enslaved, fortune seekers and spiritual healers, rebels and rulers,
all summoned the dead to further their desires and ambitions. In
this turbulent transatlantic world, Brown argues, "mortuary
politics" played a consequential role in determining the course of
history. Insightful and powerfully affecting, The Reaper's Garden
promises to enrich our understanding of the ways that death shaped
political life in the world of Atlantic slavery and beyond.
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