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The Reaper's Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery
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.
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.
368 pages, Hardcover
First published February 28, 2008
About the author
Vincent Brown
3 books38 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
Vincent Brown is the Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University and the author of The Reaper’s Garden, which won the James A. Rawley Prize, the Louis Gottschalk Prize, and the Merle Curti Award. He has received Guggenheim and Mellon New Directions fellowships. His online interactive map Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760–1761: A Cartographic Narrative has been viewed by 87,000 users in 184 countries, and 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.
Vincent Brown is the Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University and the author of The Reaper’s Garden, which won the James A. Rawley Prize, the Louis Gottschalk Prize, and the Merle Curti Award. He has received Guggenheim and Mellon New Directions fellowships. His online interactive map Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760–1761: A Cartographic Narrative has been viewed by 87,000 users in 184 countries, and 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.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
March 10, 2009
The politics of power and control negotiated through death, to me is the main theme of the book. For enslaved Africans death might have disrupted their social lives but it also provided the avenue through which new customs or even old customs could be adapted to suit the prevailing circumstances. Brown's emphasis on the fact that death in colonial Jamaica was not an equalizer but yet another opportunity to prove their superiority was quite interesting. I like the effective use of primary sources to give faces to the story. Indeed the story of death cannot be impersonal.
November 13, 2019
A masterpiece. This is without doubt the best work I’ve read on Atlantic slavery. It helps to show slaves as active agents in the construction of early modern Atlantic civilization, while simultaneously articulating how this agency was carefully negotiated in a system designed to dehumanize. It drags a touch in the middle, but it constantly brims with such passion and heat that even the dragging commands attention.
I was extremely impressed by this work; it has certainly opened my eyes to a whole new historiography!
I was extremely impressed by this work; it has certainly opened my eyes to a whole new historiography!
August 12, 2020
Professor Vincent Brown holds the prestigious Charles Warren professorship of Histoary at Harvard University. In addition to earning his history Ph. D. at Duke University, Dr. Brown also studied film and video at that university. This particular book received the Merle Curi Award in 2009 as the year's best book on the intellectual or cultural history of the United States.
All that being said, I was somewhat underwhelmed by this book. Perhaps that owes to Dr. Brown focus on the symbolic meaning of death in colonial Jamaica rather than more tangible aspects of enslavement. That is not to say his arguments are incorrect.
The Reaper's Garden begins with a fascinating and macabre song being sung by enslaved Africans to a newly arrived European, suggesting that, like so many, this white man would soon grow sick and die. In truth, death stands out as a key component of life in British colonial Jamaica. While both European colonizers and enslaved Africans in British colonial North America experienced natural increase, with births exceeding deaths before the end of the 1600s, black slaves and whites in Jamaica required constant replenishment due to extraordinarily high rates of death.
Partly this situation owned to the disease environment, but, in the case of enslaved people, harsh work demands, a lack of sufficient and nutritious food, and, what did not seem to be mentioned very much, an uneven gender balance among those bought in as slaves, meant Jamaica never became a true settler slave society, to my view. This mean a limited development of a Creole of Afro-Jamaican culture, as a variety of African cultures were constantly being replenished in Jamaica though newly arrived enslaved people.
Thus, argues Brown, the specter of death haunted every aspect of Jamaican life. For example, the burials of the enslaved were contested between the enslaved and the white power structure. These wary whites rightly recognized that funeral gatherings often gave cover for planning for plots and resistance. Near the end of the book, we learn about the Baptist War, a larger and deadly slave revolt that he thinks helped tip English public opinion against the very wealthy and well-connected West Indian slave owners in Parliament, where they had long been well-represented. These rebelling slaves were led by Native Baptists, enslaved people who claimed a Baptist identify.
The book takes the history up to the end of Jamaican slavery and peers beyond that date towards the future. Here, in an insight that seems to point towards the 2020 era of arguments over the public memory of the American past, and not just Civil War monuments, Dr. Brown notes that the later history of Jamaica would include debates and disputes over the memory enslavement and the island colonial history.
Certainly a book worth reading, even if its less familiar approach is one that I'll need to mull over more with time. At a minimum, I have a better sense of Jamaica's colonial history and its place in the broader reaches of Vast Early America and the history of English colonization that often we Americans only view as a prelude to 1776. While I work to teach the 1st half US survey with an eye to this larger story, Dr. Brown makes an important suggestion of the importance of seeing colonial Jamaica as part of this story, and not excluding this history due to thinking of, writing about, and teaching students history in part along national history lines.
All that being said, I was somewhat underwhelmed by this book. Perhaps that owes to Dr. Brown focus on the symbolic meaning of death in colonial Jamaica rather than more tangible aspects of enslavement. That is not to say his arguments are incorrect.
The Reaper's Garden begins with a fascinating and macabre song being sung by enslaved Africans to a newly arrived European, suggesting that, like so many, this white man would soon grow sick and die. In truth, death stands out as a key component of life in British colonial Jamaica. While both European colonizers and enslaved Africans in British colonial North America experienced natural increase, with births exceeding deaths before the end of the 1600s, black slaves and whites in Jamaica required constant replenishment due to extraordinarily high rates of death.
Partly this situation owned to the disease environment, but, in the case of enslaved people, harsh work demands, a lack of sufficient and nutritious food, and, what did not seem to be mentioned very much, an uneven gender balance among those bought in as slaves, meant Jamaica never became a true settler slave society, to my view. This mean a limited development of a Creole of Afro-Jamaican culture, as a variety of African cultures were constantly being replenished in Jamaica though newly arrived enslaved people.
Thus, argues Brown, the specter of death haunted every aspect of Jamaican life. For example, the burials of the enslaved were contested between the enslaved and the white power structure. These wary whites rightly recognized that funeral gatherings often gave cover for planning for plots and resistance. Near the end of the book, we learn about the Baptist War, a larger and deadly slave revolt that he thinks helped tip English public opinion against the very wealthy and well-connected West Indian slave owners in Parliament, where they had long been well-represented. These rebelling slaves were led by Native Baptists, enslaved people who claimed a Baptist identify.
The book takes the history up to the end of Jamaican slavery and peers beyond that date towards the future. Here, in an insight that seems to point towards the 2020 era of arguments over the public memory of the American past, and not just Civil War monuments, Dr. Brown notes that the later history of Jamaica would include debates and disputes over the memory enslavement and the island colonial history.
Certainly a book worth reading, even if its less familiar approach is one that I'll need to mull over more with time. At a minimum, I have a better sense of Jamaica's colonial history and its place in the broader reaches of Vast Early America and the history of English colonization that often we Americans only view as a prelude to 1776. While I work to teach the 1st half US survey with an eye to this larger story, Dr. Brown makes an important suggestion of the importance of seeing colonial Jamaica as part of this story, and not excluding this history due to thinking of, writing about, and teaching students history in part along national history lines.
November 19, 2013
"The Reaper's Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery" looks at funerary practices, inheritance, ritual execution, iconography around the dead, and cultural ideas about the role of the dead in the lives and politics of the living in eighteenth century Jamaica. Because I've studied American history and the history of slavery, there was very little that was new to me in this text. However, I think it's a very valuable study of how death figures into the lives of the enslaved and those enslaving them. Of course, slavery and death went (go) hand-in-hand, and of course slaveholders had the power to end the lives of their human property; but how did the powerful and the powerless alike use the dead to their respective advantage? That's an interesting question.
January 23, 2024
Vincent Brown’s book is a morbid and poignant review of Jamaica’s history in Atlantic slavery. It frames the politics and society of the British Empire's most “profitable” colony in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through the spectre of death. In doing so, Brown suggests an alternative reading of slaving history that centres around the themes of colonial societies in a global political economy, resistance to enslavement and cultural transformation. Not only was Jamaica a graveyard for white European colonialists who hoped to make a buck, most of them scumming to disease with only a small number returning to Britain alive with a fortune, but it was also the final destination on a long march towards death for African slaves. The wealth derived from particularly sugar plantations (although there were others such as coffee), lured entrepreneur Britons to tempt fate and drove them to exploit the workforce from the African continent. Wealth and death thus became intrinsically linked. The journey from central Africa, where most slaves came from, was one of numerous layers of death. Hunted by West African slave traders, those that survived capture endured an up to 1000 kilometres walk to the "factories" on the coast where they were sold to slave ships. Many died on the route or at ports, unceremoniously discarded into rivers and fed to sharks. Once sold, they would need an enormous amount of fortune, or perhaps misfortune, to survive the dreaded middle passage, disease and madness befell most. Few would survive the first few years of slave work in Jamaica.
After painting this grisly picture in the first chapters, Brown goes on to explore the traditions and customs that developed in the society that lived under the shadow of the grim reaper’s scythe. From the burial rites to the spiritual imagining of the dead, whites and blacks alike attempted to re-create their native traditions in the frequent event of death. The slaves often saw death as a form of liberation and believed their souls would return to their homelands, finally escaping the shackles of the buckra to become a transatlantic spirit that embodied freedom. The whites used death as a form of political control, the Navy, for example, executed some of its sailors for breach of conduct and hung their bodies as an example to both other whites and the newly arrived slaves. Slave owners would also use beliefs about the afterlife to deter suicide, beheading or burning corpses and showing this to other slaves. In this sense, the use of the dead as a means of shaping the actions of the living was akin to "… practising a politically potent form of necromancy " (p. 131). The latter chapters of Brown’s book touch on the British evangelic movements that had a role in ending slavery in the early nineteenth century, suggesting that the “soul” of the empire became tarred with the guilt of atrocity. He also briefly addresses the legacy of slavery, not only the institutions and inequality that it impacts modern-day society but also that the voices of the dead still carry weight in the politics of today.
Brown’s book is an original contribution to the literature of Atlantic slavery. Pulling upon a diverse range of sources, including ethnographic studies, court records, accounting reports, oral histories, letters and diaries, it contains a plethora of narratives. As such it does not portray this history as a simple struggle for emancipation as some other historians do, rather it addresses the experiences of diverse actors to underline the ghastly reality in all its complexity. While the focus of this book was the British slave trade in Jamaica, it could have benefitted from further inclusion of the legacy that the Spanish colonisers left on the island pre-British rule. Indeed, the plight of the indigenous Jamaicans who were destroyed would have been an apt addition to the narrative of the “graveyard” of Jamaica. Nevertheless, this is a moving and powerful work that reminds historians of the importance of life by giving voice to the dead.
After painting this grisly picture in the first chapters, Brown goes on to explore the traditions and customs that developed in the society that lived under the shadow of the grim reaper’s scythe. From the burial rites to the spiritual imagining of the dead, whites and blacks alike attempted to re-create their native traditions in the frequent event of death. The slaves often saw death as a form of liberation and believed their souls would return to their homelands, finally escaping the shackles of the buckra to become a transatlantic spirit that embodied freedom. The whites used death as a form of political control, the Navy, for example, executed some of its sailors for breach of conduct and hung their bodies as an example to both other whites and the newly arrived slaves. Slave owners would also use beliefs about the afterlife to deter suicide, beheading or burning corpses and showing this to other slaves. In this sense, the use of the dead as a means of shaping the actions of the living was akin to "… practising a politically potent form of necromancy " (p. 131). The latter chapters of Brown’s book touch on the British evangelic movements that had a role in ending slavery in the early nineteenth century, suggesting that the “soul” of the empire became tarred with the guilt of atrocity. He also briefly addresses the legacy of slavery, not only the institutions and inequality that it impacts modern-day society but also that the voices of the dead still carry weight in the politics of today.
Brown’s book is an original contribution to the literature of Atlantic slavery. Pulling upon a diverse range of sources, including ethnographic studies, court records, accounting reports, oral histories, letters and diaries, it contains a plethora of narratives. As such it does not portray this history as a simple struggle for emancipation as some other historians do, rather it addresses the experiences of diverse actors to underline the ghastly reality in all its complexity. While the focus of this book was the British slave trade in Jamaica, it could have benefitted from further inclusion of the legacy that the Spanish colonisers left on the island pre-British rule. Indeed, the plight of the indigenous Jamaicans who were destroyed would have been an apt addition to the narrative of the “graveyard” of Jamaica. Nevertheless, this is a moving and powerful work that reminds historians of the importance of life by giving voice to the dead.
December 30, 2022
"If people looked to the past to find the roots of contemporary forms of inequality, domination, and terror, rather than the origins of freedom, rights, and universal prosperity, they might see early colonial Jamaica as home to the people who made the New World what it became...If circumstances should ever make such a reading inevitable, this dark vision of British America certainly would seem an undeniable precedent, and the reaper's garden a haunting metaphor for popular politics in an age of catastrophe. And perhaps this image embodies a useful parable too, for stories of political experience that each us how people in the most catastrophic circumstances have struggled to make their world anew could one day teach us how to the do the same." (Brown, 260)
Thus ends the enlightening, all-too-horrible, all-too-realistic history of "Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery." Consisting of seven chapters, book-ended by a prologue and epilogue, "The Reaper's Garden" is history at its most perceptive, for the author, Vincent Brown, professor of History and of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University, takes the reader on a journey through the history of the slave period of Jamaica by focusing, laser-like yet in a relaxed manner, on differing elements of death and slavery. Marshaling an impressive amount of primary sources and previous scholarship related to the subject matter, Dr. Brown links death, an almost ubiquitous presence in the charnel house that was the transatlantic slave trade and Jamaica,
to all aspects of life in Great Britain's most profitable colony. However, this usage of the concept of death is no lifeless conceit utilized to link a dilettante's ideas; no, for the experience of death infused all aspects of the slave experience on that most benighted of islands, and the author argues convincingly that this is true. For all aspects of the early modern period in Jamaica, from the "Middle Passage," to attitudes towards the newly departed (among the whites as well as the more numerical Africans), to the growing distaste for the institution of slavery in the home country (Wilberforce and evangelical Christians), to monuments commemorating history in Jamaica itself, were touched by the constant presence of the arrival of the grim reaper. Supplemented as it is by drawings and engravings from the period (including a William Blake image on its cover), this tome does a superb job of advancing its thesis, as well as providing historical support concerning all aspects of the subject. This is a truly fine book on an essential topic.
Thus ends the enlightening, all-too-horrible, all-too-realistic history of "Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery." Consisting of seven chapters, book-ended by a prologue and epilogue, "The Reaper's Garden" is history at its most perceptive, for the author, Vincent Brown, professor of History and of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University, takes the reader on a journey through the history of the slave period of Jamaica by focusing, laser-like yet in a relaxed manner, on differing elements of death and slavery. Marshaling an impressive amount of primary sources and previous scholarship related to the subject matter, Dr. Brown links death, an almost ubiquitous presence in the charnel house that was the transatlantic slave trade and Jamaica,
to all aspects of life in Great Britain's most profitable colony. However, this usage of the concept of death is no lifeless conceit utilized to link a dilettante's ideas; no, for the experience of death infused all aspects of the slave experience on that most benighted of islands, and the author argues convincingly that this is true. For all aspects of the early modern period in Jamaica, from the "Middle Passage," to attitudes towards the newly departed (among the whites as well as the more numerical Africans), to the growing distaste for the institution of slavery in the home country (Wilberforce and evangelical Christians), to monuments commemorating history in Jamaica itself, were touched by the constant presence of the arrival of the grim reaper. Supplemented as it is by drawings and engravings from the period (including a William Blake image on its cover), this tome does a superb job of advancing its thesis, as well as providing historical support concerning all aspects of the subject. This is a truly fine book on an essential topic.
June 19, 2019
Vincent Brown moves beyond discussion of violence and slavery to consider the impact of death on Jamaican society and slavery. Brown argues that death was the colony’s defining feature and informed how Africans and their descendants made sense of their surroundings as well as the institution of slavery. Brown's study begins in west Africa where he calls attention to the myriad ways death emerged and was discussed in the African slave trade, the middle passage and eventually on the British colony of Jamaica. Brown teases out the ways in which death shaped and ordered an emerging Afro-Jamaican culture. Of course, whites—elite planters, the middling classes and poor—faced high mortality rates on the island colony. Whites on the island looked to death to maintain their connection to the metropole, distinguish themselves from the enslaved and emphasize their superior social position. Despite the ways death was used to establish and reinforce race and class differences, Brown also demonstrates the ways in which both blacks and whites on the island came to share similar practices and beliefs in large part due to religion. An artfully written and thoroughly engaging monograph.
June 27, 2024
Excellent, readable academic history of the social and spiritual role of death in Jamaican slavery and, more broadly, during the transatlantic slave trade as a whole. It’s detailed, compelling, horrifying, and very well-structured, and it definitely makes me want to learn more about the role of spirituality in slave revolts and Caribbean syncretic religious practice.
January 30, 2019
Brilliant exposition of "mortuary politics" in Jamaica in the days of slavery.
November 4, 2019
Thats a high rating for a book i had to read for class but honestly it wasnt so bad i wouldnt read it again but i didnt straight out hate it qriting was excellent
October 9, 2024
"Mortuary politics mediated group cohesive, property relations, struggles to give public influence a scared dimension, contests over the colonial moral order and efforts to politicise local geography and history."
Vincent Brown looks at how Mortuary Politics shaped the course of history for the contending groups in Jamaica. Brown looks at how death shaped daily life, and how it bleeds over into property, authority, morality, territory, and belonging is the base of the book. Brown is coming from an Atlantic perspective, claiming the history of Jamaica can be seen clearer in the wider web of the connections and comparisons with other parts of the Atlantic basin.
What is mortuary politics? The social meaning from beliefs and practices with death and how they are employed. Brown says the linkage with death makes the dead integral to social and political organization and mobilization, and therefore vital to historical transformation.
Brown uses a plethora of source material: tombstone inscriptions, wills, diaries, parish vestry mins, plantation account papers, court returns, travellers reports, assembly mins, visual images, archaeology of burial sites.
Shared experiences of death and dislocation helped form common assumptions, idioms, and beliefs that would shape meaning in the new world among African persons.
"Remembrance of the dead made an ineffable history intimate, accessible, and inspirational, in turning a usable past into a useful one, which could motivate consequential action in future struggles. And because these struggles never end the dead rarely rest in peace."
September 21, 2013
If ever there was a compelling case to be made for new histories that include the dominant, Vincent Brown persuasively makes it on pages 258-260:
"If people looked to the past to find the roots of contemporary forms of inequality, domination, and terror, rather than the origins of freedom, rights, and universal prosperity, they might see early colonial Jamaica as home to the people who made the New World what it became... And perhaps this image embodies a useful parable top, for stories of political experience that teach us how people [of all races] in the most catastrophic circumstances have struggled to make their world anew could one day teach us how to do the same."
"If people looked to the past to find the roots of contemporary forms of inequality, domination, and terror, rather than the origins of freedom, rights, and universal prosperity, they might see early colonial Jamaica as home to the people who made the New World what it became... And perhaps this image embodies a useful parable top, for stories of political experience that teach us how people [of all races] in the most catastrophic circumstances have struggled to make their world anew could one day teach us how to do the same."
August 16, 2013
One of the view history books that has kept me enthralled the entire way through. It gives a detailed look into the brutal lives of slaves on their journey. It shows how their oppression caused them to form brotherhood, which allowed them to revolt against the system of slavery and obtain their freedom. A MUST READ for any history lover.
July 24, 2009
Beautifully written account of slavery in Jamaica.I'm certain it will shape future approaches to the study of slavery as it relates to death, power, spirituality, terror and violence. MUST READ
October 28, 2019
An OK read for the researcher and enthusiast.
Read for personal research
- found this book's contents helpful and inspiring - number rating relates to the book's contribution to my needs.
Read for personal research
- found this book's contents helpful and inspiring - number rating relates to the book's contribution to my needs.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews