TACKY'S REVOLT.

• Author: Kobell, Rona
• Position: BOOK - Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War

In 1760, hundreds of Jamaican slaves began an insurrection against their British overlords. For 18 months they fought, hoping not only to reclaim their freedom but to seize the sugar plantations where they had been forced to labor. Scholars, drawing mainly on texts from the white plantation owners, called the rebellion "Tacky's Revolt" after one of its leaders.

In his exhaustively researched new book, Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War, the Harvard historian Vincent Brown draws on letters, lieutenants' logs, cartography, and other sources to make a convincing case that this was more than just an isolated event. Its duration, he adds, had less to do with Tacky than with complicated geopolitics.

Brown argues that Tacky's Revolt was really four wars at once. Slaves fought their white owners for freedom and survival. They fought formerly enslaved Jamaicans--the runaways and their descendants known as Maroons--for control of territory. They fought...