Bob Graham Center for Public Service

Watch the recording of the event at this link.

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“Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War” traces the roots, routes, and reverberations of the largest slave insurrection in the eighteenth-century British Empire.

Warfare migrates. This was never more apparent than in the era when the violence of imperial expansion and enslavement remade the history of Europe, Africa, and the Americas, as they interacted across the Atlantic Ocean. European imperial conflicts extended the dominion of capitalist agriculture. African battles fed captives to the transatlantic trade in slaves. Masters and their subalterns struggled with one another continuously. These clashes amounted to a borderless slave war: war to enslave, war to expand slavery, and war against slaves, precipitating wars waged by the enslaved against slaveholders, but also between slaves themselves.

Vincent Brown is Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University, and the co-founder of Timestamp Media. His research, writing, teaching, and other creative endeavors are focused on the political dimensions of cultural practice in the African Diaspora, with a particular emphasis on the early modern Atlantic world.

Professor Brown’s first book, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (2008), was co-winner of the 2009 Merle Curti Award and received the 2009 James A. Rawley Prize and the 2008-09 Louis Gottschalk Prize. His most recent book is Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (2020), which was awarded eight national prizes.

This is the second program in a two-part series presented by the Dr. Patricia Hilliard-Nunn Sankofa Initiative for confronting slavery and its legacies at the University of Florida.

UF Series Funders and Co-Sponsors: 

The Dr. Patricia Hilliard-Nunn Sankofa Initiative; Bob Graham Center for Public Service; Samuel Proctor Oral History Program; History Department; African American Studies Program; Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere (Rothman Endowment); Political Science Department.