{"product_id":"reapers-garden-death-and-power-in-the-world-of-atlantic-slavery-9780674057128","title":"Reaper's Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eWinner of the Merle Curti Award\u003cbr\u003eWinner of the James A. Rawley Prize\u003cbr\u003eWinner of the Louis Gottschalk Prize\u003cbr\u003eLonglisted for the Cundill Prize\u003c\/b\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cb\u003e\"Vincent Brown makes the dead talk. With his deep learning and powerful historical imagination, he calls upon the departed to explain the living. \u003ci\u003eThe Reaper's Garden\u003c\/i\u003e stretches the historical canvas and forces readers to think afresh. It is a major contribution to the history of Atlantic slavery.\"--Ira Berlin\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cb\u003eFrom the author of \u003ci\u003eTacky's Revolt\u003c\/i\u003e, a landmark study of life and death in colonial Jamaica at the zenith of the British slave empire.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eWhat did people make of death in the world of Atlantic slavery? In \u003ci\u003eThe Reaper's Garden\u003c\/i\u003e, 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. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIn 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. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eInsightful and powerfully affecting, \u003ci\u003eThe Reaper's Garden\u003c\/i\u003e promises to enrich our understanding of the ways that death shaped political life in the world of Atlantic slavery and beyond.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eBrown, Vincent:\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e - 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 \u003ci\u003eThe Reaper's Garden\u003c\/i\u003e (Harvard), 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 \u003ci\u003eSlave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761: A Cartographic Narrative\u003c\/i\u003e has been viewed by 87,000 users in 184 countries, and his documentary \u003ci\u003eHerskovits at the Heart of Blackness\u003c\/i\u003e, broadcast nationally on PBS, won the John E. O'Connor Film Award and was chosen as Best Documentary at the Hollywood Black Film Festival.","brand":"Harvard University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50326911123730,"sku":"9780674057128","price":30.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_10058c5a-cd83-4036-bc5b-340d0c72f939.jpg?v=1727706775","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/reapers-garden-death-and-power-in-the-world-of-atlantic-slavery-9780674057128","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}