The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery [Paperback]

What did people make of death in the world of Atlantic slavery? InThe 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 Gardenpromises to enrich our understanding of the ways that death shaped political life in the world of Atlantic slavery and beyond.

Browns study ought to be read by scholars and students of Caribbean history as well as specialists of the black diaspora and the Atlantic World.Engrossing& Browns major concern is the cultural significance of death in a land marked by high mortality. Here, his account is compelling and highly original. He is especially interested in how both whites and blacks used death to control the strange environment they found themselves in.Vincent Brown makes the dead talk. With his deep learning and powerful£Ý