ebooks Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century by Tera W. Hunter in History

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What did people make of death in the world of Atlantic slavery? In The Reaper's Garden; Vincent Brown asks this question about Jamaica; the staggeringly profitable hub of the British Empire in America--and a human catastrophe. Popularly known as the grave of the Europeans; it was just as deadly for Africans and their descendants. Yet among the survivors; the dead remained both a vital presence and a social force.In this compelling and evocative story of a world in flux; Brown shows that death was as generative as it was destructive. From the eighteenth-century zenith of British colonial slavery to its demise in the 1830s; the Grim Reaper cultivated essential aspects of social life in Jamaica--belonging and status; dreams for the future; and commemorations of the past. Surveying a haunted landscape; Brown unfolds the letters of anxious colonists; listens in on wakes; eulogies; and solemn incantations; peers into crypts and coffins; and finds the very spirit of human struggle in slavery. Masters and enslaved; fortune seekers and spiritual healers; rebels and rulers; all summoned the dead to further their desires and ambitions. In this turbulent transatlantic world; Brown argues; "mortuary politics" played a consequential role in determining the course of history.Insightful and powerfully affecting; The Reaper's Garden promises to enrich our understanding of the ways that death shaped political life in the world of Atlantic slavery and beyond.