@book {177651,
	title = {The Reaper{\textquoteright}s Garden},
	year = {2010},
	pages = {368},
	publisher = {Harvard University Press},
	organization = {Harvard University Press},
	address = {Cambridge, MA},
	abstract = {
What did people make of death in the world of Atlantic slavery? In The Reaper{\textquoteright}s Garden, Vincent Brown asks this question about Jamaica, the staggeringly profitable hub of the British Empire in America{\textemdash}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{\textemdash}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, {\textquotedblleft}mortuary politics{\textquotedblright} played a consequential role in determining the course of history.
Insightful and powerfully affecting, The Reaper{\textquoteright}s Garden promises to enrich our understanding of the ways that death shaped political life in the world of Atlantic slavery and beyond.
Reviews:
James Delbourgo, "Gardens of Life and Death," British Journal for the History of Science 43.1 (March 2010): 113-118.
Colin Dayan, {\textquotedblleft}Rituals of Belief, Practices of Law,{\textquotedblright} Small Axe 31 (March 2010)  Trevor Burnard, {\textquotedblleft}Jamaica as America, America as Jamaica: Hauntings from the Past in Vincent Brown{\textquoteright}s The Reaper{\textquoteright}s Garden,{\textquotedblright} Small Axe 31 (March 2010)  Verene A. Shepherd, {\textquotedblleft}From {\textquoteleft}Numbered Notations{\textquoteright} to Named Ancestors: Finding Contemporary Meaning in Vincent Brown{\textquoteright}s The Reaper{\textquoteright}s Garden,{\textquotedblright} Small Axe 31 (March 2010)
Maurice Jackson, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, Volume 6, Issue 4 (Winter 2009): 145-147.  Christer Petley, Slavery and Abolition 30.4 (December 2009): 565-567   Diana Paton, American Historical Review 114.4 (October 2009): 1122  Robert Olwell, William and Mary Quarterly 66.4 (October 2009): 1004-1007  Dickson D. Bruce, Jr., Journal of American History 96. 2 (September 2009): 514-515  Cl{\'a}udia Rodrigues, Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 14.1 (April 2009): 258-260  Randy M. Browne, Journal of the Early Republic 29. 2 (Summer 2009): 336-339  Sharla M. Fett, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 40.1 (Summer 2009): 139-140  W. Bryan Rommel-Ruiz, {\textquotedblleft}Reaping the Bounty of Death,{\textquotedblright} Common-Place 9.3.5 (April 2009)  Brian Refford, {\textquotedblleft}Worlds of Death and Power,{\textquotedblright} H-Net Reviews (April 2009)  John K. Thornton, {\textquotedblleft}The Cultural Context of Slavery in the Atlantic World,{\textquotedblright} Journal of African History 50.1 (March 2009): 135-137  Brendan DeCaries, {\textquotedblleft}Death{\textquoteright}s Other Kingdom,{\textquotedblright} Caribbean Review of Books 18 (November 2008): 12-17  Erik R. Seeman, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 9.2 (Fall 2008)  Trevor Burnard, Times Higher Education Supplement (Thursday, May 29, 2008): 50-51
},
	url = {http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674057128},
	author = {Vincent Brown}
}
