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.
- 2009 Co-winner of the Merle Curti Award, Organization of American Historians
- 2009 James A. Rawley Prize, Organization of American Historians
- 2008-2009 Louis Gottschalk Prize, sponsored by the
Executive Board of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
and the Louis Gottschalk Committee