Bryan Rommel-Ruiz, вЂњReaping the Bounty of Death,вЂќ Common-Place 9.3.5 (April 2009)Д«rian Refford, вЂњWorlds of Death and Power,вЂќ H-Net Reviews (April 2009)

Fett, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 40.1 (Summer 2009): 139-140 Browne, Journal of the Early Republic 29. 2 (September 2009): 514-515Д¬lГЎudia Rodrigues, Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 14.1 (April 2009): 258-260 Bruce, Jr., Journal of American History 96. Robert Olwell, William and Mary Quarterly 66.4 (October 2009): 1004-1007Дickson D. Maurice Jackson, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, Volume 6, Issue 4 (Winter 2009): 145-147.Д¬hrister Petley, Slavery and Abolition 30.4 (December 2009): 565-567Дiana Paton, American Historical Review 114.4 (October 2009): 1122 Shepherd, вЂњFrom вЂNumbered NotationsвЂ™ to Named Ancestors: Finding Contemporary Meaning in Vincent BrownвЂ™s The ReaperвЂ™s Garden,вЂќ Small Axe 31 (March 2010) Trevor Burnard, вЂњJamaica as America, America as Jamaica: Hauntings from the Past in Vincent BrownвЂ™s The ReaperвЂ™s Garden,вЂќ Small Axe 31 (March 2010) James Delbourgo, 'Gardens of Life and Death,' British Journal for the History ofД¬olin Dayan, вЂњRituals of Belief, Practices of Law,вЂќ Small Axe 31 (March 2010) Insightful and powerfully affecting, The ReaperвЂ™s Garden promises to enrich our understanding of the ways that death shaped political life in the world of Atlantic slavery and beyond. In this turbulent transatlantic world, Brown argues, вЂњmortuary politicsвЂќ played a consequential role in determining the course of history. Masters and enslaved, fortune seekers and spiritual healers, rebels and rulers, all summoned the dead to further their desires and ambitions. 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. 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.

In this compelling and evocative story of a world in flux, Brown shows that death was as generative as it was destructive. Yet among the survivors, the dead remained both a vital presence and a social force. Popularly known as the grave of the Europeans, it was just as deadly for Africans and their descendants.

What did people make of death in the world of Atlantic slavery? In The ReaperвЂ™s Garden, Vincent Brown asks this question about Jamaica, the staggeringly profitable hub of the British Empire in America-and a human catastrophe.

Reaper meaning