This is an extraordinary and compelling cultural history of life and death in mid-colonial Jamaica, the first monograph by historian and scholar of African-American Studies, Vincent Brown (Harvard University). The three separate awards Brown has garnered for The Reaper's Garden are well deserved, and it should become a classic in the many fields to which its material pertains.

The book has two axes. The first is the mortality crisis itself: Jamaican slave society in the eighteenth century was perilous for both African slaves and European colonials, a “death-world” as philosopher Edith Wyschogrod might categorize it. Brown therefore revisits and reinterprets the various locations and sites of death: the cargo hold of the slave ship, the child's deathbed on the sugar plantation, violent repression of slave rebellions and the slave courts where death sentences were handed down, and so forth. The second axis is the spiritual and religious legacy of West Africa that survived among African slaves in the Caribbean, a legacy which emphasized communion with deceased ancestors and the continued activity of the spirits of the dead on earth. Brown's evocative thesis, precisely at the intersection of these two pressing phenomena, is that death was one of the primary (if not the primary) generative historical forces of the Atlantic world. He writes, “Death in Jamaica destroyed individuals, while generating a society” (127). The Reaper's Garden describes and documents this generative process rigorously and in detail. Around the omnipresent proximity of the dead, survivors crafted a culture of untimely death: a “mortuary politics,” as Brown terms it. His primary concern is African-Atlantic history and experience, but this study is immersed in both the European and African contexts and Brown easily moves from a discussion of one community to the next, accurately representing how, in the historical realities of these two groups overlapped just as frequently as they collided.

Scholars and students of Religious Studies and church historians are most likely to be drawn to and intrigued by Brown's effort to account for how the spirits of the dead shaped history and culture. Brown sets out to write “a materialist history of the supernatural imagination” (5) that is, on every page, grounded in the details of daily life, struggle, and politics. Anthropologists have, for some time now, sought to account for the agency of spirits in Black Atlantic religions: Karen McCarthy Brown's initiation into Haitian Voudou, Lindsay Hale's interviews with Brazilian Umbanda spirits through their human mediums, and, most recently Todd Ochoa's personal reconciliation with Cuban Palo “society of the dead.” Nevertheless, what Brown offers here is quite distinct from these other scholars. It seems a rare thing for a historian to take so seriously both the tremendous and terrible suffering of their subjects while also taking seriously the way that their religious beliefs have real consequence in society and history. It occurs to me that perhaps The Reaper's Garden might qualify as a work in the spirit of “abundant history” as conceptualized by scholar of religion Robert Orsi. That is, Brown does not marginalize his subjects' experience of “presence” (of spirits, of the dead, of ancestors). As Orsi writes, “Presence requires a history of its own, and experiences and practices of presence suggest the lineaments of that history,” (“Abundant History: Marian Apparitions as Alternative Modernity,” Historical Speaking September/October 2008, 12–15; 15).

Brown's historiography is meticulously wrought, drawing on almost every genre of colonial evidence: published colonial literatures (poetry, biographies, popular literatures, newspapers, missionary histories, political tracts), sermons, death registers, shipping logs, wills and letters, denominational records, and also material culture. Chapter one draws the link between death and slave economies. Chapters two and three treat funerals and wills (respectively) to show how the “dead speak from beyond the grave.” Through funeral rites the “enslaved recovered a sense of their common humanity” (69), asserting a set of social meanings, or “first principles,” including family belonging, cultural continuity, and community cohesion as distinct from the values of slaveholders for whom funerals served for the reassertion of status and power. Chapter four treats terror, torture, and the violation of dead bodies in the preservation of white supremacy. Chapter five explores the discursive use of the dead in the antislavery movement, including the use of deceased and dismembered bodies of Africans in abolitionist political imagery. Under the anti-slavery movement the high rate of death among African slaves in the Caribbean shifted from being an economic problem to being a moral one, becoming the basis for a European-based movement of colonial reform (156). Chapter six returns to a discussion of funeral rites, this time examining how the Christian missionaries of various denominations sought to “purify” slave funerals of their African cultural referents. Contestation over mortuary practice thus emerges as one of the primary locations for the negotiation of social meaning. Chapter eight examines the archeological evidence, particularly funerary monuments (graveyards and gravestones).

It is clear that Brown's book is not just about Jamaica but also about the larger Atlantic world, as the title claims. The knowledge that modern America is built on a vast necropolis, on the bodies of the African, indigenous and sometimes also European dead, has not yet penetrated our social and political imagination. The Reaper's Garden brings these hauntings, in all their historical specificity and persistent power, to the center of our attention.