Empire: World History - 57. Tacky's Revolt: An Atlantic Slave War

Episode Date: June 15, 2023

The stage is set. It's 1760 and the enslaved people of Jamaica are ready to rise up. It will begin with Tacky. William and Anita are again joined by Vincent Brown, Professor at Harvard and co-founder of Timestamp Media, to discuss the climax of Tacky's Revolt. Sign up to The Knowledge here: www.theknowledge.com/empire/ LRB Empire offer: lrb.me/empire This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/empirepod. Twitter: @Empirepoduk Goalhangerpodcasts.com Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Jack Davenport + Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. And welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Durimple. Right. Our very special guest, you don't need me to tell you, because you've been riveted since Tuesday. I know you have. It's Vincent Brown.

And he's written this amazing book that we talked a little bit about in the first part of this two-part podcast. Tacky's revolt. We didn't even get the tacky of the revolt at all. Until the last minute. No, to the last minute. I mean, it's just, it reminds me of my sort of history revision that I did at school. It's like, you know, just do everything else except the thing that the thing. You're going to be examined. That's just terrible, but it's how I roll.

Okay. So tell us about Taki, what do we know and what do we think of his arrival in these lands? And what does he think? Just in the last minute of the last podcast, you actually used the word chief Taki. Do we know that he was a chief on the West Coast? So we actually don't know as much about Taki as we know about Apongo, Wager, who I described in the last episode of the podcast. We know that he arrives kind of as a grown man,

but perhaps a young man, and that we do know that Taki or Tetchi is a title for a chieftain, a Gah chieftain in West Africa in the Gold Coast. There are other Tachis, actually. There's a Tetchy who's a leader of a slave conspiracy in Antigua in 1736, and there's this Taki or Tetchy in the parish of St. Mary who leads Tachy's revolt in 1760. So we don't know that much about him. We don't know exactly when he arrived, but we know that he worked on frontier plantation in Jamaica. And this is an estate that kind of overlooks the bay of Port Maria and the town.

So it was kind of strategically located from that place in the parish of St. Mary. He could survey the British positions. Do we know what he did when he first arrived? We know that he was probably some kind of headman, on a sugar plantation. So that meant he was perhaps even a driver. As we know that Apongo, Wager was a driver in Westmoreland.

So what is a driver? Because I think not everybody will know what that is. Yeah, certainly. So, I mean, in part because, you know, these plantations were overwhelmingly populated by enslaved people, right? There were not enough white people to assume all the positions of authority.

And what wound up happening is certain enslaved people would be promoted to oversee others, and then the white overseer would be... The line manager to the driver. The line manager over them. Yeah, great, thank you. And so, you know, you had these kind of divisions, gradations of hierarchy, even among enslaved people.

And what we think is that, you know, people who may have had habits of command in West Africa, like Apongo or like Taki, those would have been recognized, and those people would have been put into positions of authority over other enslaved people on Jamaican plantations. Does that mean they sort of have, you know, the quite literal whip hand over their fellow countrymen? Would they have enforced the brutality on the plantations? They do.

And so often the kind of direct enforcers of what we can call white brutality on plantations are in fact black people. And the population is divided how on the plantations, Because again, when we look at representations, thanks to Hollywood, again, it's predominantly women who are doing the cotton picking and the men are doing the sugar cane cutting. But that's Hollywood. What's reality?

And what is the division of labor here among genders and ages? Yeah, in fact, the best research on sugar plantation labor shows that women were equally involved in the planting of sugar cane. But women were not as likely to be drivers. So those positions were largely reserved for men, although there were some women drivers, especially over what they called the second and third gangs, the lesser gangs that often included children and more women. Sometimes women would be drivers over those gangs, and they were involved in, say, kind of cleaning up the cane trash and clearing up after the hardest labor had been happening. But those main gangs, the people who were digging the holes for sugar cane, the people who were chopping the sugar,

sugar cane, even though many of those people would have been women, the drivers like Tacky or like a pongo, were much more likely to be men. And if you've got a, I mean, if you're there breaking your back all day in the heat and the humidity and you see somebody who's got the same color skin as you on a horse with a whip, I'm sort of thinking that they're in danger because, I mean, I know I'd probably want to knock him off his horse and do some great damage to him. I mean, what was the driver's life like? How much danger were they in?

The thing is, is the driver was in some ways an expression of the authority of the planter, the plantation manager or of the owner. And so they were given special concessions and favors, a bit better house, a bit more food, better clothing, some more range of movement, autonomy. And then, of course, there's just a simple fact of being granted a kind of authority over other people that would enhance someone's sense of self, right? So that's what they gained from the deal. Now, that also meant that, you know, people didn't like them, would protest them.

They had to negotiate among being slaves to maintain their authority. So, right, their authority was derived from the slave planters. At the same time, there's a politics involved in not provoking a rebellion, right, as a driver. Now, I think one of the things you mentioned was that, you know, these people, maybe may have all had black skin. And that's where one has to take politics among black people seriously. Remember that blackness, color was not the only axis of identification. Yeah. What is it? I mean, are these from very varied catchments? I mean, are they speaking the same languages? Where are they brought from? Well, that's exactly right. So you have people coming from Africa from a wide swath of

territory from the Senegal River all the way down to the Zaire River. And then even around as far as Madagascar. So they speak different languages. They worship different deities. They're from different policies. They recognize different kinds of political authority. Is there any attempt at this stage to convert to Christianity or is it an entirely non-Christian world within the slave community? So among the enslaved, it's mostly a non-Christian world. Many of your listeners will not know, however, that in West Central Africa, right, there were many Catholics. In fact, the Kingdom of Congo formally converted to Catholicism in 1491, a year before Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Yeah. So from 1491, right, on through the 19th century, the Kingdom of Congo maintained a relationship

with the Catholic Church. And so there were many converts in West Central Africa that were at least exposed to symbols of Christianity. And, you know, many were also committed. Catholics, right? Those people were in Jamaica as well. But for the most part, right, Christianization in the broadest sense didn't really happen until missionaries began to arrive in the second half of the 18th century. Same time as in India. Exactly same time. Yeah. The Protestants really don't kind of get their act together and their missions to, you know, the heathens, as they called them, until the later 18th century. So first we have the Moravians among the Protestants, and then the Methodists and the Baptist, the Anglicans never really kind of, you know,

pay that much attention. And what sort of spiritual life would you have had on a plantation? Are the shamans, other forms of spiritual life are brought from the non-Christian African religion? Well, this is a kind of really fascinating and for me, kind of perennally difficult question to just examine the contours of African and black spirituality before Christianization. And of what we do know is that there are people who are coming from various parts of West Africa trying to recognize what's similar and trying to think about how they can together come up with new ritual traditions to do the kinds of things that spiritual life must do. Maintain relations between the living and the dead, right?

Maintain relations between the material and the supernatural world. Create fellowship among communities that is about kind of harnessing spiritual forces for the social good. And those things are going to be drawn heavily from African ways of knowing, the afterlife, African ways of knowing spirits and deities, but they're going to be remixed and reformulated in the Americas. You put a man like Taki on a horse,

and you give Taki a whip. You are also running the risk of giving him authority to turn against you, I'm thinking. I mean, you know, this is, so, you know, you put somebody like that as a driver. They are able to range across great swathes of the plantation and the county. At what point do we even know when Taki decides, actually, I'm not on your side anymore, I'm on their side. What happens?

We don't know exactly, but you were exactly right to point out that it's not really a contradiction, but it is a risk, which is that if you grant someone authority, they may not use that authority on your behalf, right? They may at some point decide, that there's a better route toward maintaining their own authority, toward fulfilling their own goals working against you. And that certainly we know what happens with Wager, Apongo, that sometime after it's clear that he's not going to be redeemed and sent back to Africa, he begins to plan his part in this what's going to be the largest slave vault in the 18th century British Empire. We don't know exactly when Taki decides this. What we do know is somewhere on the 9th,

of April 7th, he goes to Trinity Plantation and organizes this conspiracy. And early on the morning of April 8th, they attack Fort Haldane, which is the British fort at Port Maria. They overwhelm a very lightly defended fort. With what? With their hands, with machetes from the field, with what, how do they do it? How do they overpower? With machetes, a few of them may have had guns that they had, they had managed to convey from the plantations. But really what we think is that they had machetes. They're able to overwhelm this lightly defended fort, and then they take the weapons from the fort. And that's when they begin to coalesce

and begin marching up the parish, right? Attacking plantations and burning them as they go. How many, how many in the beginning and how quickly does it start growing and momentum with numbers? So our estimates are maybe about a hundred people at the beginning, swelling to several hundred by the time the revolt kind of reaches its peak a couple days later. So how many plantations do they overwhelm and how to liberate the slaves from?

I don't have an exact number for you. It's in the book. But they attack four or five plantations all up along the main road of the parish. And that means they're going to have liberated, you know, several hundred enslaved people. In the course of a single night or in a couple of days? In the course of about 36 hours. Wow. Yeah.

Okay. So it's well coordinated and it's well organized. It's extremely well coordinated. And that's why kind of. one of the common ways of thinking about these revolts as just reactions to the brutality of enslavement doesn't quite capture the kind of intention and strategy and tactics that's involved in staging this kind of revolt. I think that's better captured by thinking about them as wars. So, I mean, I have a question because, you know, this is, this is like you can't pick up the phone

and say, tonight's the night. So how do you pass the word from one plantation to a plantation, four plantations down, that tonight is the night. I mean, sometimes I've heard music plays a part in this, that, you know, there are coded messages that's, I mean, is that right? Is it through music and song, their message and drums that it's passed on? How?

Yeah. Well, it's a good question. What we know is that, look, because so much of the population was enslaved, all the people who convey goods and therefore information from plantation to plantation are themselves enslaved as well, right? So the word is passed as people are going on about their daily chores.

And they're remarking, they try to find either specific dates when they're going to be festivals. Of course, this happened on Easter, right? The Westmoreland Revolt happened on Witt Sunday on May 25th. So they find, in remark, on specific dates or specific phases of the moon, right? Or specific events like the departure of the fleet. So there are all of these ways of kind of timing these kinds of events to say, when this happens, and we all know what this kind of event signifies, that's when the time for the revolt is going to be. And is there any indication that Tacky has military training from his past, that he's coordinating in a militarily advanced way? Yeah. I mean, what we know is that the way they fight this campaign against the plantations is similar to the way Gold Course warriors fight their campaigns against each other.

How fascinating. So explain that more. That's interesting. Yeah. So what they often do is they form small bands and they skirmish. They hit and run, hit and run, skirmishing with British forces with the militia first and then the British Army and then even Marines from the Royal Navy and burn plantations along the way to signal that the uprising is happening.

That's the second answer to your question, Anita, is there may be an initial moment, but then once the rebellion begins, it's the flames rising up from the plantation. that signal that it's on. And everybody who's been alerted that this might happen, know that it is happening now. And any indication on an overarching aim? Are they trying to take over the island or just get revenge or do we have any notion of what they're after? So they obviously didn't leave their strategic plans behind for us to find. So we don't have with any certainty an answer to that question. But by mapping the way they moved across the landscape, I think it's possible to discern some of their strategic intentions. So, for example, in the parish of St. Mary, these Africans move

up the main road to the parish. They don't immediately go to the mountains, say, to form maroon communities, independent communities that can be defended from the British. We haven't mentioned the maroons before, so just explain the maroons. So from the time the British first took the island from the Spanish in 1655, as part of Oliver Cromwell's Western design, right? The Western design largely fails. to dislodge other European powers from the Americas, but they do manage to take Jamaica from the Spanish in 1655. When they do, small groups of slaves that the Spanish had flee to the mountains, and they continue fighting the British through the end of the 17th century, on into the 18th century. As they do, uprising after uprising, their forces gather.

So that by the 1730s, they're fighting a protracted war with British copy. And the British don't even know that they're going to be able to keep the island, right? This fighting gets so hot in the 1730s, a lot of planters think that they're going to have to abandon their enterprises altogether. What finally happens then is the British sue for peace. And so treaties are signed in 1739 that grant the maroons their autonomous existence in their mountainous encampments, but also require the maroons to police future slave revolts and capture runaways for the British. Why do they agree to that? It's a diplomatic concession

to maintain their own freedom, right? So these wars against the British were just as hard on the maroons as they were on the British colonists. And this isn't just in this island. I've come across similar stuff in Reunion. Yeah. I mean, this is a common tactic. When the colonists cannot win, they try to sue for terms of peace that will still allow them to maintain their control of these colonial territories. And one of the things is, is the maroons are adept, highly adept at fighting on this terrain. And so by treaty, the British obligate them in order to maintain their own freedom to police future slave revolts. In the case of Tacky's revolt, they do. Is that what happens when Tacky's revolt kicks off? Do the maroons come down from the mountains with their muskets

or whatever they've got? Tacki's revolt is the first big, big test of this diplomatic arrangement that the maroons will help to suppress future slave revolts. And in the case of Tacky's revolt, they do. Right. Okay. So how long does the momentum build before those men come down from the mountains? Have you got a militia fighting them at first? What's the order?

So there's a pattern that you see in the suppression of these slave revolts, and you certainly see it playing out in the course of the revolt of 1760, which is that the first on the scene are the militia. The colonial militia that's drilled and trained on their parade, grounds really is comprised of the overseers, the bookkeepers, the plantation managers. Someone will notice there's the rebellion, ride from plantation to plantation and collect all the white people to go and make an attack. And they will number in their tens, their hundreds, I mean, how many are we talking about?

Yeah, probably in the dozens and scores. Right. Okay. Now, these militia attacks are generally unsuccessful, especially in these early stages of attackings, well, in part because the after. the Africans often have military experience. Often these people are trained fighters who've been involved in African wars. And the planters may not.

And the planters may not be. And the Africans are more accustomed to fighting and even training in the kinds of tropical terrain that they find in Jamaica. So, you know, the militia are, you know, not generally extremely successful. And then you have British Army forces, right? A bit more successful because more disciplined and better trained. But the people who are really effective at fighting African rebellions are other Africans and the descendants of other Africans. The Maroons were obligated by treaty to help suppress these rebellions.

It's such a tragic bit of the narrative. It's awful. It's just awful. And they have the skill at fighting on this kind of rough, mountainous and jungle terrain. So how long before they put down this particular rebellion? So this early phase of the rebellion, what we call Tacky's revolt in the parish of St. Mary, last less than two weeks. ultimately. Wow. Okay. Okay. And what sort of revenge is taken on the, on the defeated forces? A, people are just summarily executed on the spot, often without any kind of trial.

Heads are cut off, you know, extreme tortures are meted out to try and gather information on what's happening. Kind of the whole, again, catalog of brutality that you see in counterinsurgency and suppression. Yeah. And also you talk about actually some of the, those who rose up and revolt taking their own lives because they just can't stand the idea of losing. That's right. I mean, when it becomes clear that this revolt is not going to be successful, many of the fighters end up taking their own lives before they can be captured. You write somewhere about coming across a tree, hanging with bodies. Yeah, in fact, that's something that emerges from the Diary of Thomas Dissawood again,

where he talks about, you know, Africans, dead Africans stinking in the woods. There are so many corpses in trees, dead in the woods. woods and hanging in the woods that the woods begin to stink of dead humanity. I hate that man so much. We haven't actually, though, explain what happens to Taki himself. Do we know? Well, we know from the account of Edward Long, that planter historian who wrote the three-volume history of Jamaica, that Taki was shot by a maroon. Because it's a kind of dramatic story in Edward Long that, you know, Taki and the maroon were running at full speed, and he was shot at full speed. Now, we also...

know from Edward Long that his head was cut off, was brought to Spanish town, where it was displayed on a pole, and that someone took the head down, as Edward Long said, unwilling to see it displayed in such an ignoble manner. Now, there are people in Jamaica in the parish of St. Mary who will claim, through legend and folklore, that Tacky was never killed, that somehow he escaped, he hid in a cave, He escaped. He went into this area known as Taki Falls, this deep ravine with a major waterfall, and evaded capture. Is he going to come back to liberate Jamaica? Well, that's the interesting thing, right?

We've got the documentary record of Taki, but of course, that documentary record can't be taken at face value. Edward Long himself was a slaveholder who hated Africans and clearly was no fan of the revolt. and then we have this legend on the other side that survives. I tend to stick with the documentary record as a historian, but I do take some cues from folklore and legend as well in terms of how I represent this. Anyway, look, this is the end of this particular phase, but it is not the end of the revolt.

Join us after the break, where we talk a little more to Vincent Brown of what this has started. Welcome back. So the initial stages of Tacky's revolt, lasting only, a few weeks put down by fellow Africans, the maroons who come down from the mountains, which is completely heartbreaking, to be honest. Vincent, in your book, I was assuming in the course of this revolt that we're talking about men, men fighting and so on, but you say that 40% of the captives taken at the end of this revolt were female and that they suffer very brutally at the end of this.

That was one of the most fascinating things that I discovered in the course of researching this. which is, you know, we tend to think of these kinds of violent revolts as being led overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, by men. But one of the things that happen in these revolts is because the white population was so outnumbered, if they captured people, they didn't want to leave people to guard them. And so that's where the Royal Navy came in. Often what they would do then is put these people aboard a Royal Navy warship, and then they would go back into the parish to keep suppressing the revolt.

Now, because the Royal Navy is a big bureaucracy and they like their accounting, anytime someone boards a Royal Navy worship, they've got to be listed on the muster. And so we have on the muster, the first 25 rebels captured in this first phase of Tacky's revolt in St. Mary, we've got their names. And as it turns out that of those 25, 10 have what are identifiably women's names. And that is 40% of those first rebels captured, which is about the percentage of women. women in the parish at the time. So women are proportionally represented among the very first rebels captured. Now, we don't know exactly what they were doing

in the course of this rebellion, exactly how and why they were captured, but I think it does encourage us, compel us, to ask some questions about that conventional assumption that women aren't involved in this kind of violent revolt. So, Taki is no more. I mean, I like to think he's under the waterfall somewhere. He's there in the waterfall, definitely.

There's no question. I shall cling to that. For the Hollywood version. Yeah, well, I mean, it's fine by me. He will come back to see the end of the Commonwealth. Absolutely. Listen, but what about the aftermath and what does it spark? Because this must be absolutely terrifying to the British that, you know, some jumped up little driver has managed to overturn the apple car completely within, you know, at the space of 36 hours, how can this be?

What is the reaction to that? And is it not just a beacon? You know, like you described the plantations on fire. being seen by others, does that not inspire others to say, well, if he could do it, we could do this? That's exactly right. There is some question about whether or not Tacky's revolt inspired the others or whether or not this was a very widely laid plan, and the St. Mary part of the revolt made have just happened too early. Because in late May, on May 25th, on Witt Sunday, there's another uprising in the parish of Westmoreland, this one led by Apongo,

we were talking about in the last episode of the podcast. And this is much more extensive and lasts much longer than Tacky's revolt in St. Mary. The planters, as they're kind of learning about what happened, seemed to discern that the revolt was initially planned for Witt Sunday, May 25th, but that the rebels and St. Mary's went off too early. That's fascinating. We don't know if they were right, or if the Witt Sunday revolt was inspired by what happened in Tacki's Revolt.

What I think, though, is that this was a widely laid plan, and you can see that because so many of the other revolts kind of happened around the same time across different mountain ranges where they were simultaneous, indicating a previous network of information and news and planning that I think you can tell from just where things happen and when. And these people presumably haven't got calendars and clocks, and they're not working on. Well, I mean, they've got the moon. Right, which is a calendar. You know, so people are, people are gauging time in ways that we don't anymore. But yes, they don't have the internet, that's for sure. So what happens with the Pongo? How many rise up with him and what is the result?

So what we know is that this revolt actually kind of starts in the parish of Westmoreland where Arthur Forrest, that Royal Navy ship captain, had his own Jamaican sugar plantation. and that revolt spreads very rapidly through Westmoreland. The white population essentially evacuates the parish, goes down to the main town in Savannah Lamar, and many of them board Royal Navy warships and wade off the coast, while the militia, then the British Army, then Marines from the Royal Navy, go in up into the hills to suppress the revolt. The Royal Navy and the Marines are present, or they've been summoned from elsewhere?

I mean, let's remember that, you know, Jamaica was one of the principal royal naval stations in the Americas. And so some are present. This is a time of war. So there are more warships present than there might normally be. And Marines alongside those warships. So there are, you know, the Navy is pretty ready to deploy very rapidly. And you talk about a rebels barricade being erected by a Pongo and his people. The rebels barricade is fascinating because, you know, as I was looking at this parish landscape, trying to map out how the rebellion happened, I managed to find a map that was produced, made from surveys that were taken in the late 1750s through the early 1760s, and it was finally put together in 1763 for the governor who suppressed the revolt. And that map lists

a rebels barricade in the parish of Westmoreland, right? So right there on the map, it's not on any previous maps, it's not on any later maps. Because these surveys happened through the time or the revolt, the rebels' barricade is listed there. And that is where the rebels, after burning many of the plantations in Westmoreland Parish, did go up into the mountains and form a rebel encampment. You can see from where they formed this encampment that they were trying to defend themselves, both from the planters in the plains and also from the maroons in the mountains. And what it looks like is they wanted to establish their own maroon community

that could be defensible from both the maroons who had signed the treaties, and from the planters who hope to suppress it. Which makes perfect sense. You can't get off the island, so you go up to the mountains. Yeah, because you're safer and out of reach, and you can break a deal there. And is it a guerrilla war? I mean, you're getting the impression that these guys are disappearing into the jungle and coming out again and striking in that West African war model?

Absolutely. They're skirmishing kind of both through the dense bush, but also up into the mountains in the way they might have in West Africa, in a way that's largely alien to the way Europeans would have fought in battle lines in Europe. And so I think you can call it one of the early kind of modern guerrilla conflicts against a major empire. He's got up to the hills, the rebel barricades have finished. What is the final stages of that revolt? Yeah.

So that revolt lasts several weeks, in fact. But Apongo is finally captured, brought into town and displayed in the public jibet, where Thistowood actually goes to see him. The overseer Thomas Thissawood sees him dying. He's captured live. Yeah, he is captured, and that's reported in the newspapers that he's captured. And then there is another rebel named Simon, who conducts a long march from the parish of Westmoreland

across the neighboring parish of St. Elizabeth and into the parish after that before he is finally captured in 1761. You compare him to Spartacist, I think in the book. Right, because you know, you hear Simon's name popping up again and again and again where people are going to say, I'm Simon, no, I'm Simon, no, I'm Simon, because this revolt is kind of laid so deeply in the hearts and minds of the enslaved population. News of this does get back to England and I mean, there is sympathy, is there not, for those people who are punished in such unspeakable ways that you've described. Is this a pivotal point in the, in the

psyche of Britain itself to learn that this goes on in its name? Yes. So news travels in waves to various constituencies in Great Britain. You know, first, obviously, the policymakers find out about this. And, you know, they're mostly concerned that the strategic colony is maintained and that the profits keep flowing, right? And so, you know, they deploy all necessary forces to make sure that this is suppressed. And they're quite happy to see that happen. But as news accounts, begin to filter out, both from people who had been there and through sailors who'd been there and travel back to the UK, the stories of the brutality meted out against the rebels and against the enslaved population become as affecting for a lot of people as the stories of white suffering

that are being told by colonists. And so what you have is a kind of, you know, I guess, dueling empathy, right? There are those people who empathize with the colonists because, of course, that's the extension of us, but there are also these people who are horrified by what's being done in the name of England and of Great Britain. William Blake famously, doesn't he? When he hears about the Haiti slave revolt, he writes beautifully about the enslaved people situation. You know, William Blake, actually, we know of kind of all of these engravings that William Blake made of the tortures and suffering of enslaved Africans because he's quite sympathetic to what they've gone to. And you see these expressions of sympathy kind of all over the Anglophone Atlantic

world. Even as you see people were saying like, well, right, this is how the empire works and this is what's got to happen. So is this the catalyst? Could you go as far as to say that Tagu's revolt and the uprisings that follow it are a catalyst for the abolitionist movement? I think the revolts of the 1760s are pivotal in this way. A, there is a kind of new awareness, and even as I said in some quarters, an outpouring of empathy, especially in places that are not as directly dependent on an enslaved population in their territory. At the same time, though, there's a new fear, right, that the introduction of all of these potential rebels from Africa undermines the security of the colonial enterprise.

And so you see some of the earliest legislation passed to try and limit the slave trade as a security measure, as a kind of anti-immigration security measure in North American colonies. And this really begins to start to chip away at the prerogatives of slave traders and slaveholders in such a way that, like, you know, before we even see the kind of the moral campaigns against the slave trade, we see this kind of anti-immigrant campaign against the slave trade emerging. That's so interesting. So we're not getting rid of slavery. We just don't want any more of those troublemakers involved.

So we're just going to pull up the drawbridge. I've never thought about it that way. Well, I mean, I think it's worth remembering that anti-blackness and anti-slavery can coexist quite comfortably. So kind of early in the wake of Tacky's revolt, there are lots of people who want to suppress the slave trade because they don't want any more black. people in their territories. So at what point does slavery end in Jamaica? Because one would like to think that, you know, and the happily ever after is, and slavery died. It was, you know, if it wasn't tacky, then it was a pongo. And if it wasn't a pongo, it was Simon, if it wasn't Simon, it was, you know, whoever. How many more years does Jamaica have slavery? Oh, well, I mean, yes, it would be

nice if kind of, you know, one revolt was all that was needed to end slavery. But slavery doesn't end in Jamaica until the 1830s. The slave trade is first abolished by Great Britain in 1807, and then slavery continues for another 30 years. There's legislation to end slavery in 1834, and then there's a period of apprenticeship where formerly enslaved people are still largely enslaved until 1838, when slavery is finally abolished. So it's quite a long time after Tacky's revolt, and there are many revolts in between 1838 and 1760. But, you know, one can say that slavery does enter the British Empire three decades before it ends in the United States. How do people think of Taki now in Jamaica?

I mean, what is the position he holds in people's imagination? Well, one of the things that's been fascinating for me is to see how the book has been taken up in a campaign to make Taki a national hero in Jamaica. And you see this in the work of, say, activists. Like there's this one activist named Black X who's been walking across the island wearing a 30-pound chain to commemorate Tacky's revolt, to try and get Tacky recognized as a national hero. And when he found the book, he realized that it could be helpful to his campaign. And it's gotten some lift from politicians even. So just recently, just a couple of weeks ago, there was a motion tabled to make Chief Tacky a national hero by a member of parliament. from St. Mary Parish.

Anita's too modest to say this herself, but we should say that Anita's own campaign last week also resulted in a goal, I think you can say, and that we finally got a nice plaque raised in Sophia Dulip Singh's old house in Hampton Court. And Anita was there addressing it, along with the descendants of the bankers, the suffragettes. Yes, yes, no, yes.

Evelyn's great-granddaughter, and I got the great honour of pulling the rope to unveil it. I honestly don't think there's anything that's going to match it. So between the two of you, you're both doing very important work. These reminders are important because these people were important. So, yes, I'm thrilled. I'm thrilled for you. I hope, Vincent, that you'll come back when this becomes real. And there really is sort of a monument raised.

Well, I think, you know, these campaigns for commemoration are continuations of these battles that we're describing in the past. I mean, that's the interesting thing about it. So I was also involved in consulting with St. Peter's Church in Dorset, where there was actually a plaque in honor of someone who had helped to suppress Taki Zubult that was right there in the church. Now it kind of became controversial, and so, you know, the church decided they might do something about it, and they finally moved it from the church to a historic museum where it can still be studied, but it's not in its place of honor. So these campaigns to commemorate honor or dishonor certain figures from even the 18th century past are ongoing.

Well, finally, I mean, just on that, because the thing in the church was removed, is that the way you feel the world should treat these monuments, these statues, these commemorations of people who were involved in slavery? And we had very famously, Carlson pulled down in Bristol and thrown into the bay. And some people think that that's a dreadful thing to do because it erases the history. It's better to put a plaque next to it to explain. I mean, what would you prefer, if you like? So let me start by saying, I have no argument with the activists who tore down Colston statue and threw it into the river.

So I'm not mad at those people for doing that. But as a historian, yes, I would prefer that we continue to. view and study and think about these historical artifacts because that is our past. And it's the evidence of the past. And it's the evidence of our past. We don't have to have them maintained in places of honor. But in fact, I think we commemorate the past, especially the darker aspects of our past, as a warning, right, about what humanity is capable of and what we should avoid in the future. And I don't want to remove or erase those warnings from our landscape. And Vincent, finally, finally, I promise, we will let you go. We've kind of held you hostage for two days.

Finally, finally, finally, finally. Why is it important? Vincent's revolt. Why is it important to talk about empire? Why do you toil in this field? Well, I could ask you both the same question, but my answer is this. I don't think most people understand how intertwined human history is. We tend to think of our history in national terms, right? and the history of empire teaches us how connected we are to people who might not be like us. So early on when I was doing my research on Jamaica, way back in the mid-90s, I remember staying with a friend in Britain, an Indian friend, an Indian woman who was married to a British guy. It's a college-educated guy.

And when he learned what I worked on, he said, yeah, why is it that Jamaican speak English anyway? And his Indian wife said, colonialism, you bloody idiot? Why the hell do you think I speak English? Right? Now, I don't blame him for that, right? Because, I mean, as you will know that after decolonization, British schools stopped teaching the history of the British Empire and started teaching again the history of Britain as this chain of islands off the peninsula of Europe. And so when people started showing up again from the former empire, the former colonies, a lot of Britain's thought, well, what if they got to do with us? And the answer, of course, is, well, we're here now because you were there, right? But that kind of history of empire, I think, is vital to understanding the societies we live in today. And if people are just thinking of their history in narrow national terms, they won't understand why there's a plaque to someone who suppressed Tacky's revolt in a parish church in Dorset. We've had this response to so many of our podcasts. And the most common tweet we see when we log on to our Twitter site is, I didn't learn this in school.

I didn't know any of this. I have a college history degree. I did not learn any of this. And bizarrely, not only in this country, but also in India, we find so many Indians aren't learning this as well and around the world. Yeah, although I have to say things are changing because I didn't learn any of this, but I just was talking to my 13-year-old the other day who is deep in the misery of revision at the moment. And he is one of the modules in history is slavery.

So there is something, yeah, that is something that would never have happened when I were a lad. But, you know, he is doing it. And the work continues, and the work continues, and I honor you guys for doing this work. We should just conclude by saying that if you're going to buy one book this month, you need to go out and get Tacky's Revolt, the story of an Atlantic slave war by Vincent Brown. Vincent and I were both up for a prize, the Cundle Hill for history, which neither was got. But I'm glad to see that you got not one but five other prizes on the back of your paperback, the Annisfield, Wolf. book award, the James A. Ronsley Prize, the Oscar Ketcher Prize, the Phyllis Weekly Book Award, and the Elsa Guevara Book Prize. So many, many congratulations.

You've won lots, too. You've won lots too. Don't you worry you pretty little head about it? You've got lots to be. Vincent, it's been an absolute delight to have you. Thank you so much for your time, for your candor, for your wisdom. It's been marvelous. Oh, it's been an honor. It's been an honor and a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. You were just wonderful. Vincent, thank you so, so much for coming on. It was just amazing. That is all that we have time for on Empire. Do join us again next week and until then it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnden. And me, William Durunpool.