The Reaper’s Garden

“Brown’s study ought to be read by scholars and students of Caribbean history as well as specialists of the black diaspora and the Atlantic World.”—Philip Howard, The Americas

“Engrossing… Brown’s major concern is the cultural significance of death in a land marked by high mortality. Here, his account is compelling and highly original. He is especially interested in how both whites and blacks used death to control the strange environment they found themselves in.”—Trevor Burnard, Times Higher Education Supplement

“Vincent Brown makes the dead talk. With his deep learning and powerful historical imagination, he calls upon the departed to explain the living. The Reaper’s Garden stretches the historical canvas and forces readers to think afresh. It is a major contribution to the history of Atlantic slavery.”—Ira Berlin, author of Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America

“In this riveting and remarkable book, Vincent Brown carries us to the epicenter of the experience of slavery. He shows us how, in plantation Jamaica and along the Atlantic currents that shaped it, the worlds of the living and the dead were always tightly intertwined.”—Laurent Dubois, author of Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution

“A magisterial and brilliant account of the politics of death in the world of Atlantic slavery. We experience in vivid detail the role of the dead in the relationships, aspirations, and politics of the living. If the ghost of slavery haunts us in the present, as Brown reminds us, it is because our freedom dreams are tethered to those of the enslaved.”—Saidiya Hartman, author of Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

“The Reaper’s Garden is a truly luminous book that will establish Vincent Brown’s reputation as a brilliant interpreter of the African diaspora.”—Marcus Rediker, author of The Slave Ship: A Human History

“An elegant and powerful study of the ways that all of Jamaica’s people—poor and rich, slave and free, black and white—lived in the constant shadow of death in England’s richest and most important colony. A profound exploration of the meanings of death and the dead for the living.”—James Sidbury, author of Becoming African in America