EIHS Lecture: The Coromantee War: Charting the Course of an Atlantic Slave Revolt

The transatlantic slave trade spread people from a vast region of Atlantic Africa throughout the Americas. The trade also redistributed political and military power. Upon captivity, people who had been administrative or military leaders suddenly found themselves uprooted from sustaining landscapes, scattered by currents and trade winds, and replanted in strange territories where they struggled to rebuild their social connections and recover their influence. Inevitably, some determined that only war could rectify their dishonor. More than highlighting resistance or the agency of the dispossessed, the Jamaican Coromantee War of 1760-1761 shows how the turmoil of enslavement, which ruptured systems of social authority and cultural continuity, figured the development of enslaved militancy as it originated, traveled, took root, and germinated in far-flung contexts.

Vincent Brown is Charles Warren Professor of American History, professor of African and African-American studies, and director of the History Design Studio at Harvard University. 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. A native of Southern California, he was educated at the University of California, San Diego, and received his PhD in History from Duke University, where he also trained in the theory and craft of film and video making. He has been the recipient of the Mellon New Directions fellowship, John Simon Guggenheim fellowship, and the National Humanities Center fellowship.

Brown is the author of numerous articles and reviews in scholarly journals, he is Principal Investigator and Curator for the animated thematic map Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761: A Cartographic Narrative (2013), and he was Producer and Director of Research for the television documentary Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness (2009). His 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.
Free and open to the public.

This event is part of the Thursday Series of the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies. It is made possible by a generous contribution from Kenneth and Frances Aftel Eisenberg.