| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Reaper's Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery. By Vincent Brown. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008. xviii, 340 pp. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-674-02422-9.)
Death was omnipresent in the British slave society of Jamaica, for slaves and slave owners alike. In The Reaper's Garden, Vincent Brown makes use of that simple fact to examine what he describes as the "political meaning of death" in the colony (p. 5). He shows that in wills, in funerary rites, in religious beliefs, and even in the disposition of bodies Jamaicans—slave and free—managed death in ways that both strengthened and challenged the structures of slave society. The result is a sophisticated and revealing portrayal of Jamaican slavery.	1
Focusing on the period from the mid-eighteenth century to emancipation in the 1830s, Brown paints a vivid portrait of Jamaica and its society. As he says, Jamaica was probably Britain's most successful colonial venture by the mid-eighteenth century, a place that offered European settlers enormous wealth and opportunities. At the same time, those possibilities depended heavily on the brutal African slave trade and a vicious colonial slave system.	. . .

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