This well-researched work details a little-known slave rebellion in 1763. As an educator, I have often had to correct students who claim that enslaved persons never fought back. This book is an engrossing story of not only how they fought back, but the lack of historical weight given to those stories. Stories of slave rebellions are purposefully kept out of textbooks, making this text even more critical. I look forward to using excerpts with my classes.

Thank you to #NetGalley and the New Press for providing me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

My review on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3453702135

This book is important because nobody has studied or published about the 1763-64 Dutch Berbice slave rebellion in-depth until now -- 2020. Many of the rebellions led by enslaved people (that we know about) lasted only a short time, sometimes only days. This book details a rebellion that lasted about a year, and was so close to being won. AND this predates the Haitian rebellion by nearly THREE decades. Like, what -- to all of this. Why hasn't this story stuck with us? It's an incredible one.

I loved how the author gives nuance into the various stakeholders, hierarchies, and struggles for power -- from the enslaved revolutionaries, the Creoles, the Dutch plantation owners and slaveholders, the mutineers, and the native Amerindians. The book explores how one group manipulates or uses the other for its own gain, through violence or by other means, and how difficult it is to find freedom without somehow replicating oppression and reinventing social hierarchies. The book shows us that freedom, the fight for resources among these stakeholders, all running with their own priorities, many fueled largely by their devotion to capitalism at the expense of all else including the lives of others... this all makes for strange bedfellows and alliances.

The book is very much a scholarly work, not written for popular audiences looking for a quick, easy read. I think most people will really need to be interested in the subject matter to get through it, but it's not a long read at all. It can feel dense and I had to reread certain portions to keep up with the details, names, places, and timeline. This may speak to how well researched this book is, and to my own ignorance. The region, cultures, and events discussed were completely new to me, and my ignorance may have slowed me down. It's a fascinating story that treats the event and the human beings who were a part of it with respect and empathy.

I'm glad that I now know about this important event, and I'm grateful for the author's work in thoroughly documenting what should be a much more well known moment in human history.

Thank you to #NetGalley and the New Press for providing me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

"I had never heard of Berbice or of the 1763 slave rebellion. Few have: no one has studied the uprising in depth."

Marjoleine Kars’ words in the prologue prepare the reader for the uncharted territory she embarks upon in her new book (which releases August 11) Blood on the River. I teach AP World History, a course in which slave rebellions occupy a not-insignificant place in the curriculum, and I had never heard of the Berbice slave rebellion. That could be said of many concepts or events in history, so I asked a private Facebook group of over 6,000 AP World History teachers, a group where you can ask almost any question about another culture or any nation’s history (providing it has a definitive answer) and receive an answer within minutes. What answer did I get? …Crickets. It seems that Kars is right. Few have heard of this slave rebellion. But as Kars unfolds the story, I began to wonder why such a narrative doesn’t occupy a larger portion of our awareness.
Berbice was a Dutch colony in modern-day Guyana (South America) with the vast majority of the population enslaved on plantations. Ordinary African-descended people started a rebellion and they were able to take control of half the colony for almost a year before being defeated by a coalition of European colonial forces. Given the overwhelming success of the Berbice rebellion and the extent to which it worried other colonial powers, it is positively shocking how thoroughly it had been lost to history. Marjoleine Kars has done tremendous work in unearthing the details of the Berbice rebellion from the Dutch colonial documents where the truth has sat, unheralded, for centuries.
One of the most impressive aspects of Kars’ Blood on the River is the depth to which she gives the enslaved people agency and voices in the narrative. We, as Westerners, tend to think of individual liberty and natural rights as a thoroughly Western concept, one that started with the Enlightenment and exploded into the American, French, Haitian, and Latin American Revolutions. But Kars explains that such a narrative is too simple and does not give gravity to the same notions being held by African-descended people:
Historians of slavery have argued that enslaved people held similar understandings (to those in the later American Revolution). In lives of incessant violence and acute exploitation, enslaved people, like oppressed workers everywhere, nevertheless expected a modicum of fairness and predictability. They labored with an expectation of sufficient food to do the work, time off, some autonomy, reasonable rules with clear consequences, and a chance at building families and communities. The terms of social “contracts” differed from place to place, shaped by local law and custom, the particular plantation economy, and the historical contingencies that shaped the struggles between enslavers and enslaved. Such expectations about conditions do not mean that people accepted their enslavement. Nor do they mean that the enslaved people did not resist their exploitation in daily life. Rather, ruled by terror, and wary of armed rebellion, most begrudgingly accommodated themselves to their enslavement as long as certain minimum standards were observed, in order to survive.
Despite the serious nature of the content, Kars even finds opportunities for levity and humor, usually to throw shade at the Dutch colonizers. When a colonial official and Coffij (the leader of the formerly-enslaved rebels) are communicating back and forth in hopes of agreeing to end the fighting, Kars writes of the official:
Dispensing with any honorifics in a bid to assert dominance he did not possess, Van Hoogenheim addressed his letter merely “Aan den Neeger* Coffij.”
(Note: “Neeger”, despite its modern similarity to a terrible word, meant “Black” in Dutch. So the translation is still a disrespectful “to the Black Coffij”, but they had … other words he could have used if he wanted to be downright insulting.)
I don’t know, “…in order to re-assert dominance he did not possess” really got me there. But another passage is even more humorous in its shock value. The Dutch go “on a reconnaissance mission to Company plantation Hooftplantage to ascertain whether the bomba (an enslaved person who directed work crews and received extra rations and privileges in return) and his people remained loyal to the Dutch.” Kars then writes:
The next morning, Hooftplantage appeared deserted, except for two men who dared the Dutch to come ashore. One of them rang the plantation bell (perhaps in mockery of this call to work or as a signal to his friends). Then he patted his buttocks and yelled, “Lick my a**” (censoring mine). That seemed a clear answer regarding loyalty, so the captain turned his ship around.
Both of these passages, and others as well, add a dose of levity to the narrative while also upending the assumptions of white supremacy that originally led to the horrors of slavery.
Kars is also clear, however, on how this all ended. And it wasn’t because the Dutch were more powerful by themselves, not in the least. It was the reigning world trade system, favoring the Europeans, which allowed the Dutch to reconquer the lives of these men and women:
Coffij’s lack of a global trade network was his undoing. His strategy was solid. Taking advantage of the rebels’ position of strength, he worked to convince the Dutch to end all hostilities. A treaty would have allowed him to redeploy his resources from military to peaceful ends, cultivate gardens, and rebuild his political coalition.
But that treaty was not to come to fruition. French and British colonial forces joined with the Dutch because Europeans benefited from European hegemony, and Coffij didn’t have a trade network to lean on to keep pace. The unjust system squelched the Berbice rebellion, and the unjust system continued. The rebels were not given fair trials, most were killed, and the rest were subjected to slavery again. Kars describes in detail the unjust system of “justice” that reigned in post-rebellion Berbice, culminating in this quote:
The need to control slaves, made alien by their legal status and manufactured racial differences, justified the hollowing out of an already weak and arbitrary judicial system.
Blood on the River provides a terrific vantage point from which to learn about an almost-unknown event in world history. It is groundbreaking in more than just its subject matter. If you love history, especially if you are looking for antiracist history, you need to read it. (While you’re at it, check out the other books by The New Press, because they’ve got some great-looking ones right now.)

I received a review copy of Blood on the River courtesy of The New Press and NetGalley, but my opinions are my own.

Great book! Well written with dynamic first few chapters. It has a power of classic "Montaillou..." of Le Roy Ladurie. Like the french scholar Kars gives a voice to the mostly voiceless actors of the history - black slaves. Good book especially in times of Black Lives Matter.