 Hello and welcome to Hist Fest 2021. My name is Rebecca O'Deal and I'm the director of Hist Fest and I'm so excited to share all of this weekend's events with you and but please do check out everything that's going on via the website www.histfest.org. Before we get started there's just a couple of housekeeping points to note and using the menu above you can provide feedback on the event and also if you wish donate to the British Library. The library is a charity and your support really does help to open up a world of knowledge and inspiration to everyone. Your feedback is also incredibly important in helping the library to plan future cultural events. You can find a tab there with a link to the library's booksharp where you can browse a range of titles by the festival's many speakers. Below the video there are social media links in case you want to continue the conversation on different platforms later on. You can also find short biographies of our speakers. I'm now going to hand you over to our event sponsors to introduce the resistance and rebellion panel of speakers. Hello everybody and welcome. My name is Polly Russell and I'm the head of the Eccles Centre at the British Library. The Eccles Centre was set up in 1991 to encourage engagement with the British Library's America's collections. Today the centre is involved in a broad slate of activities including supporting public events like this one, sponsoring library exhibitions, contributing to important acquisitions and offering fellowships for academic researchers and creative practitioners. If you would like to find out more about what we do and the opportunities that we offer do look at the Eccles Centre pages on the British Library website. Now we are delighted to be sponsoring this event today, Resistance and Rebellion from Tacky's Revolt to the Haitian Revolution with speakers Harvard academic and author of Tacky's Revolt, the story of the Atlantic slave war, Professor Vincent Brown, the historian, archaeologist and University of Glasgow academic, Dr Peggy Brunash, and our chair for today, the historian of 18th century Caribbean music, Wayne Weaver. Over to you. I'm Wayne Weaver and I'm delighted to have with me today Dr Peggy Brunash of Glasgow University and Professor Vincent Brown of Harvard University. I'm delighted to have you both here today. I just wanted to ask to get us started about the general context of anti-colonial resistance in the 18th century, be it in Jamaica, in Haiti or elsewhere in the Caribbean. How can you set the scene for us? Well, thank you, Wayne. It's a pleasure to be with you and with Peggy as well. And I'm looking forward to our conversation. I think one of the first things you have to understand is that the way that European empires expanded into the Americas was through the system of slavery and plantation agriculture. So kind of earlier than the British and the French establishment in the Caribbean, you had the Spanish and the Portuguese establishments in South America. And their profits, the profits derived from colonial enterprise were concentrated in mining and in plantation agriculture. So when the British and French really kind of begin to establish their colonies in the 17th and on to the 18th century, they are following that model established by the Spanish and the Portuguese. And they're growing crops in the Caribbean for export to Europe. The most profitable of those crops was sugar. And as it turns out, sugar is incredibly difficult to grow and requires huge amounts of labor. And as the Portuguese had done, the British and the French import huge numbers of enslaved African captives into the Caribbean to grow that sugar. So both in Jamaica, which was the most profitable British colony in the Americas in the mid 18th century, and in Saint-Domingue, which was the most profitable French colony in the Americas and really the most profitable European colony in the world, those colonies are overwhelmingly staffed by enslaved Africans. So in Jamaica, in the mid 18th century, some 90% of the population of some 100 to 150,000 is enslaved. Now, that slave system is extraordinarily brutal. Sugar is a difficult crop to grow, as were the other agricultural commodities, and could only be grown by labor that was coerced, compelled by discipline and torture. And really what I have called as a system akin to consistent perpetual warfare in order to produce those products, which produce those extraordinary profits. So when one begins to talk about resistance going directly to your question, one is talking about resistance to an extraordinarily exploitative and brutal system maintained by collective violence. And occasionally, those subjects of that violence meet violence with violence. And we find that certainly in the British Caribbean and especially in Jamaica, really from the time the British take Jamaica from the Spanish in 1655, all the way through the period we're talking about, there are consistent rebellions, you know, a major rebellion every decade or so, leading up to the rebellion that I've discussed in my recent book, Tacky's Revolt, in 1760 and 1761, which was the largest slave revolt in the 18th century British Empire. Now, of course, that precedes the Haitian revolution that happens in the 1790s, which was the largest slave revolt really in the history of the world. Now, if I may tack on to what Vincennes so brilliantly said, something that people tend to forget is that because of these modes of oppression, in order to establish the highest amount of profit for these European planters, and the normalizing of this brutality of this violence, there was never at any period in time, whether we are talking original contact between Europeans and indigenous communities. And when Europeans tried to dominate them, it happened when we had, in terms of smaller farmers, learning the land, starting to figure out how to expand to full blown plantation economy, where we have the traditional understanding of these large sugar plantations. From the very beginning, these modes of oppression that were placed upon non whites were always met with resistance. In some ways, very calculated, long planned resistance that Vincent in his book discusses in depth, that had influences on both sides of the ocean, but also in very subtle ways, in more individual, personal ways, just to find some sense of autonomy or independence, or some aspect of freedom. Resistance was always there. Native American or indigenous populations partook in that, enslaved blacks also did. And of course, in the situation with Vincent, when you have the scales so tipped in one direction of the vast majority that is silenced, marginalized, brutally controlled, forced to do labor they did not ask to be part of. And yet this is being controlled by a very small number. This warfare that Vincent is saying is, how else can you get around it? You are constantly brutalizing people knowing that it's normalized, but that there will be some sort of pushback. So therefore, the Europeans idea is, we have to keep doing this, or they will rebel. But they're going to rebel because you've been doing it. It becomes this circle of violence, the circle of warfare that does not stop because of the need to profit and increase revenue. I'm really interested in this idea of resistance and the resistance being in some cases small acts of resistance. I don't know, can you speak to some examples? I mean, as a musician, I'm particularly aware of cases where songs might have been written that are maybe mocking the Europeans who are working and living maybe around the population of African descent, or maybe other acts of resistance that might have been perpetuated before we move on to the actual results. Yeah, I mean, I think, sorry, please go ahead. Thank you, Vincent. I would say that the idea of resistance is often to make it quite simple, put in this dichotomy of either overt or subtle or passive. I don't like the term passive, but definitely covert or subtle. But there's actually nuances in all these different ways, right? It's far more complicated than that. In terms of more subtle, covert forms, it could be as simple as finding ways to feign sickness, break farming equipment, truancy, running away for a short period of time, perhaps running away for a long period of time and never planning on coming back. Hence, we have maroon communities that did that and lived quite successfully in many ways in many parts of the Caribbean. In some cases, it's quite gendered in terms of women performing abortions, infanticide, partaking in sexual unions to hopefully entice the planter into having into some sort of negotiation that the child that comes forth has a better life than the enslaved mother. There's all these different ways. Yeah, I mean, I think it's worth remembering that the idea of slavery is to reduce the enslave to a mere extension of the slaveholder's will. And so there are all kinds of ways in order to maintain one's dignity and resist that imperative that you be merely an extension of the slaveholder's will. And all those things that Peggy laid out are part of that process. So I think it's important to remember the predicament that people were in first and foremost as we delineate all the different ways in which they resisted that degradation of their personhood. That's very interesting. So I suppose we should we should move on to the actual details of the of the uprisings. And I suppose, yes, let's do them chronologically. So tacky's revolts. What happened and how did it come about? I don't know. I mean, I'm a real lover of your previous monograph, The Reaper's Garden, where you talk about death in great detail. I just I wondered if you could maybe speak to that alongside telling us the way how tacky's revolts got started, basically. Yeah. So well, thank you for that. I appreciate the compliment. Reaper's Garden largely concerned how it was in a system in which there was extremely high mortality, right? And we know that wherever people were growing sugar, there were very high mortality rates, where funerals were one of the most ubiquitous kind of bases of social communion, how it was that in a society in which people died so rapidly, people act the living actually maintained relations with the dead. And those became a factor in their political activity, really from kind of relationships among the enslaved to relationships between masters and slaves, all the way up to parliamentary politics in Britain. I thought about how it was that relations with the dead factored into people's political activity. That was a very thematic book. And in this book, as it turned out in Reaper's Garden, one of the pivotal events was this event that we know as tacky's revolts in 1760 and 1761. And so in this second book, I dove far more deeply into that event, trying to explore its causes and consequences. And just briefly to kind of sketch out the contours of the event itself, on the late night of April 7, 1760 and into the early morning of April 8, which happened to be Easter, about 100 or more enslaved Africans on the north side of Jamaica in the parish of St. Mary gathered together and then marched up to Fort Haldane at the Port of Port Maria and took over the fort. They raided the fort for weapons, and then they marched up the main roads of the parish, raiding, conquering and burning plantations along the way. This episode really inaugurated a whole series of slave revolts across the island that lasted well into 1761, and one can say even as late as October, 1761. We know from the earliest accounts that one of the principal leaders of that first revolt in the parish of St. Mary was an African named Taki. And Taki was the name, it was a God name, God being kind of a Gold Coast language, roughly what's now Ghana, for an African chief. But there were many others. And after that first revolt was suppressed in the parish of St. Mary, there was another even more massive revolt on the leeward western side of the island in the parish of Westmoreland. And that revolt involved as many as 2,000 enslaved Africans who kind of held out for several months across that leeward side of the island. The revolt overall cost the planters about a quarter of a million pounds sterling. In the about 60 whites were killed in the suppression of the revolt. So at least 500 enslaved men, women and children were killed, and another 500 or so exiled from the island. As I said, this turned out to be the largest slave revolt in the 18th century British Empire. It was also, as we as we know, organized and executed primarily by Africans from the Gold Coast region of West Africa, as I said, roughly what's now Ghana. And so what I tried to do in this revolt was look at how this revolt was connected to events that were taking place in West Africa at the time, to really see Tacky's revolt as a kind of eddy within larger currents of warfare that shaped the Atlantic world. And so I saw Tacky's revolt in the book as a war within several other wars. And briefly I can say this, it was a war, it was a major battle of the Seven Years' War between Britain and France and Britain and its other imperial rivals, like Spain. So in 1760, Britain fought against its imperial rivals, what later historians would call the First European World War. Historians have left Tacky's revolt out of that, but the soldiers, sailors, and Marines who suppressed Tacky's revolt couldn't be so ignorant because many of the ones who had fought in more famous battles of the Seven Years' War in Quebec, in Senegal, and Martinique in Guadeloupe, then had to go to Jamaica to suppress Tacky's revolt. So it was part of that war. But it was also an outgrowth of battles within Africa. And briefly for our viewers, one of the ways the slave trade worked was by Europeans purchasing captive Africans who'd been captured in African wars. Now many of those wars had been stimulated by the sale of European firearms, guns that enhanced the scale, increased the scale and lethality of those African wars, and consequently produced more African captives for sale. So from the late 17th through the 18th century, you had this kind of African military revolution in West Africa, especially on the Gold Coast that produced ever more captives for sale to the Europeans. One of the consequences of that is many of those people who were war captives had military experience in West Africa, and they used that military experience in their revolt in Jamaica. Now Peggy mentioned the Maroons. There was a kind of large maroon war in the 1730s in Jamaica that was so difficult for the British to suppress that they didn't know they would be able to keep the island. And they signed treaties with the Maroons in 1739 and 40 that enabled the Maroons to preserve some of their autonomy. But by diplomatic arrangement, the Maroons were acquired to police future slaverables, which they did. And that led to another kind of conflict. I'm calling it another war within a war, which was among the enslaved themselves. And if one takes black politics seriously, and African politics seriously, one has to think about those internal conflicts, which in fact, the British and other Europeans used to help divide and conquer those enslaved black people. But then of course, when there was a slave revolt, one can see a race war, frankly, between white slaveholders and black slaves. So imperial war, enslaving war in Africa, a communal war of belonging and race war, tacky's revolt was all of these as it played out in 1760 and 1761. That's the story I've told in the book. That's absolutely fascinating. Thank you. It's thrilling. And at the same time, shocking and harrowing and distressing. And yet, there's a great sense of pride that one has to take actually in hearing all of this. I can't help but think about that while I'm hearing you speak. It's worth remembering Africans never stop resisting, enslaved never stop resisting, and to just hand it off, right? It culminated in the largest slave revolt in the history of the world and the Haitian Revolution about three decades later. And I think really on that, I think we have to move. There's lots of tantalizing questions that I want to ask and I may welcome back. But Peggy, I wondered if you might tell us the context of the Haitian Revolution. The Haitian Revolution had too many lighters in a powder keg. You had too many people with visions of autonomy, ideas of citizenship, ideas of human rights, civil rights, ideas of freedom. And how does one challenge tyranny and imperial authority at the same time? The Haitian Revolution encompassed this authority or look back to African authority, the ideas of freedom, and what other American and European wars were happening, right? So the whole 18th century was just war, non-stop, right? Regardless of what race or nation you're talking about. The entire 100 years was all about war, whether we're talking about, as Vincent mentioned, maroon wars in the 30s, other kinds of resistance happening. So you had the maroon wars in the 30s. You had, in 1758, a significant enslaved African named Makandel in San Domingue, who successfully inspired many of his followers to secretly poison as many estates, the livestock, the personnel as possible. And they finally got him and executed him, burned him at the stake in 1758. So you got 1730s, 1758, that happens. And who also happened to witness that execution to send overture as a younger man. 1761, 1760, 1761, tacky's revolt. Seven years war, as Vincent already said, is also happening in there, right? And then after, even though the tacky's revolt was put down, we know, and Vincent talks about this, so clearly within five years, there are other major revivals of resistance happening again. 1776, everybody knows that date is when the American Revolution kicks off, right? It's almost like we're going boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, around the known world of what is supposed to be civilization, right? Supposed western civilization. 1776, you've got that. And then 1789, the French have their revolution. Everyone in San Domingue is paying attention to this. So you have free people of color that are also saying, we also have our rights. We should be citizens and respected as that. But then you see also that the enslaved are saying, but we are also human and should be free to be free to also live our rights. So what happens two years later, 1791, Haitian Revolution kicks off. Right? It just goes and goes and goes until we get into the 19th century. So in terms of the Haitian Revolution itself, you have so many different insurgents happening. It is one of the most complex wars. You cannot see it as white versus black because in some cases it was about the French versus the non-whites. But sometimes you had free blacks, enslaved blacks fighting with the French, fighting against the French, fighting with the Spanish. I mean, just allegiances were changing all the time. And even though you did have many of the enslaved that took up arms and would follow leaders like Desaline and Toussaint Louverture as well, not just those military leaders, but some of those that were still considered enslaved, they did not all necessarily have the same end goal. And that unfortunately is what has troubled many people in trying to make the Haitian Revolution as a very simple good guys, black, bad guys, white. It was far more complicated than that. And we always have to remember that. One of the other things we often do too often is that we still see it as a very solely masculine male war as if women had no part in this. When women were fighting, resisting alongside men as soldiers, sometimes as spies, sometimes in just being able to help the resistance in any way possible as maroon leaders, there were all these different ways that women were definitely part of this. In many cases, just as Vincent has been talking about, where you had military, military leaders very adept in warfare that came from West Africa, there were women who fought in the Haitian Revolution that were also warriors like the Dahome women that were warriors there and just took up arms and fought in the Haitian Revolution. But a lot of those names never seemed to come up, which I always find highly problematic because again, it's this false representation that war and the desire for freedom is solely male. And I pick up on that point because I think that's really so important what Peggy is saying. So it goes back to your first question about resistance. And we've had this idea that women tend to resist in different ways more on the domestic front as opposed to these violent confrontations. And that is in part true. So I think of Aisha Finch's fantastic book, Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba, where she talks about how important women were to logistics and care and the organization and motivation for even the violent slave revolts, even if they weren't doing the actual physical fighting. But then one of the things that Peggy's saying too is we have also this stereotype of warfare as almost an exclusively masculine activity. And this despite the fact that whenever you look and look closely, you find women engaged in combat throughout history. One thinks about Linda Haywood's fantastic biography of Queen Jenga of Angola. And the subtitle is Africa's warrior queen. Who is a military leader of significant, significant power. One thinks of Queen Nanny of the Maroons. One thinks ahead to Thavolia Glimp's fantastic work on the Civil War, where she shows that there were women fighters, black and formerly enslaved women fighters in the Civil War, not just Harriet Tubman and her raid on the Combahee River, but others, right? So kind of whenever you look and the dummy fighters that Peggy mentioned, so whenever you look, you find that women are represented, even if not in his greater numbers as men. And I think that compels us to rethink our general assumption that warfare is an exclusively male activity throughout history until the present. Because when one looks closely at history, one finds women doing a lot of the fighting. But what's also interesting, Vincent, is when some of these women warriors are portrayed or discussed by contemporary historians of their time, they are given such a negative representation, which I think is fascinating, right? They're never respected for their strategic tactics or their prowess in military advancements. If they do anything, it's because they're evil secretly, or they have powers, right? They said that about Nanny was, well, in some ways, it could be seen as a compliment that she might have had powers, but how else could she have been able to have led the windward maroons, right? She had to have powers because a woman couldn't do that. I think this is where we have to kind of separate what women actually do from the gendered meaning of an activity, right? They're kind of, I guess, you know, semi-autonomous. So warfare has been traditionally gendered as male, right? Seen as a male activity. So that when women do it, they're somehow de-gendered, right? Or they're gendered as masculine. And even Jenga in Angola, right? Kind of gendered as male, right? For a large part of, one would say, their military career, right? So the meaning of warfare kind of, you know, is ascribed a masculine gender. But, you know, in actual fact, there are biological women engaged in combat throughout this period. But one has to kind of separate what women do from what the activity means in gendered terms. Right, right. I just find it absolutely fascinating how the descriptions of these women is less about how skillful they are as leaders, how dynamic and charismatic they are as leaders, and how it has to be something unnatural to them. Which, you know, we also need to be very careful about. And how is it, how do we find the women in these performances, in these events, right? Because a lot of them aren't often discussed or remembered. I mean, and just looking outside Jamaica or San Domingue, which is currently known as Haiti today. When you look at Guadalupe and the woman known as Solitude, right? She has this beautiful statue of her erected, not far from where she met her demise. But this was a pregnant biracial woman who was a rebel and fought. Unfortunately, you know, they saw her as this nasty evil person when she was doing nothing different than what everybody else has been doing, which is fighting the good fight for their objective, whether it was freedom, whether it was not to have slavery reinstated in Guadalupe at that point in time, or something else altogether, statehood, nationhood. Yeah. I don't want to trivialize the point, but actually extend it to say one can look at all the kinds of activities of care performed by men that were then seen as feminine because they were not performing traditionally masculine roles. So much so, and under conditions of slavery, those relations of care were scrambled to put it politely, so that people did lots of things that didn't have what would have been then traditionally gendered assignments. And that's one of the reasons why kind of emerging from slavery, one of the strongest claims that, you know, black men make is I am a man trying to claim some distinctive gender role, right? Because many felt they had been feminized by the kinds of activities they had practiced. I think it just goes back to saying like, this is a broad and important point, then one has to see how gendered meaning is working, even when it looks at something like slave war and slave resistance. Absolutely. Wonderful. I don't know, I just feel, as you were talking about women there, the figure of Aqua, a queen of Kingston came up. Can you tell me, Vincent, who a little bit about this character, this person? Yeah, so we don't know much about her except what emerges in the context of the slave war itself, and particularly in the work of Edward Long, who was an 18th century Jamaican planter and historian who wrote a three volume history in Jamaica and in the records of the Jamaica assembly where she's mentioned as well. But Aqua, who they called Kuba, queen of Kingston, was someone who in the midst of the revolt was seen sitting under a canopy in Kingston, among many other enslaved Africans, sitting in state, they said, kind of elevating herself, and that's why they called her a queen of Kingston. She was also seen with a sword, a ceremonial sword, which was supposed to indicate a rebellion. Now she was captured, tried, exiled from the island, but then managed to convince the ship captain that was taking her away to drop her off on the other side of the island. As it turned out, drop her off very close to where one of the main centers of rebellion had been, and I surmise that she was going to rejoin the fight, in fact. Now we don't know much more about her than that. The historian Walter Rucker has written an excellent book on the Gold Coast diaspora, where he has argued that that's a kind of role she might not have played on the Gold Coast, but that in Jamaica she could elevate herself in ways that she may not have been able to elevate herself as a leader in West Africa. I don't know that that's necessarily the case, but that's what's been said about her. Interesting character though. Very interesting. And it's also interesting to just pick up on and underline the point that you're making about the fact that the African population in the Caribbean at this time were very aware of what was going on elsewhere in the globe. They were integrable to the other conflicts and the goings on everywhere. It goes back to what we were saying about the meaning of slavery. There's this idea that a slave is merely the extension of a master's will. But when one thinks about the predicament of enslavement and those people there, of course they understood what was going on around them. Everything depended on them understanding what was going on around them. Many of them, from 50 to three quarters of the population of Jamaica at this time, even greater percentage of the population of San Domingo and the Evaluation Revolution, these were migrants who were engaged in African political conflicts, were subject to African political conflicts before they got to the Americans. And as people in extremely precarious circumstances, they had to be keenly aware of what was happening, of the dangers of their predicament, and also of potential opportunities. And so when one kind of shifts focus away from the ideology of enslavement, that slaves were simply ciphers, extensions of a master's will, to the personhood that was there in that predicament, it becomes obvious that they were political people, that they had to understand what was going on, and that they had to make extremely fraught calculations about their situation in order to resist slavery. But this is also dependent on the fact that for the most part, for most of at least what we understand as resistant leaders, most of them were not Creole. And what I mean by that is that they weren't born and raised within the Caribbean, within the plantation economy, they weren't indoctrinated from birth, that their lot in life was to solely be a producer that will be used like a sponge and discarded within six years. If they're lucky, maybe they may get 10 or 15. Many of them were born free, raised within their own culture, within their own ethnic community, and taken from that. And then dropped into the Caribbean, those that survived the horrific phenomenon as the Middle Passage, survived that alone psychologically and physically. And then we're expected to believe in this false indoctrination that they are nothing but enslaved people to be used as a commodity, to produce commodities for someone else. That is why so many of the leaders that you see in these different events, whether we're talking on Jamaica, Curacao, throughout the Caribbean, so many of them were African and resisted the ideology that they should be anything but free and themselves. Yeah, I think that's a really important distinction. But we can't forget that even those people who were Creoles kind of born within slavery had African parents, could see other Africans who had been free, could mark the possibilities for freedom among either free colored populations or among whites. So even those Creoles who were consistently told from birth that you are to be nothing but a slave didn't always believe it. So that one sees when we have even kind of larger Creole populations in the 19th century, slave rule doesn't stop. No. And in fact, the largest slave rule in Jamaican slavery is Sam Sharpe's rebellion in 1831 and on into 1832 among a mostly Creole and Christianized population of enslaved people. And that happened after the 1816. That was after the end of the British slave trip. So again, these these revolts were always happening, always happening, that even if it was put down in one place, it was never and and of course, the their bodies had to be made examples of their heads will be cut off, put on, on, on posts and things. It did not stop people from organizing, planning, plotting, preparing to resist yet again, whether in mass or to run away and find their way hopefully into the mountains where they could either join a maroon community or start their own. I'm interested in that that that just picking up on that that context of opportunities and opportunism and something that that Vincent you've written about in Tacky's revolts about about road building and actually the fact that the the the the black or the the enslaved population is specifically what I'm referring to here. It are involved in this in this in the projects of road building and improving the getting about in in in in in in Jamaica specifically. Could you just talk to us a little bit about that specific? Yeah, and that gets into why I think it's so important to think of African history in parallel to what's happening in American history and to consider them together at the same time, right? So as I said, the slave trade worked through a kind of symbiotic relationship between the expansion of European empires, the weapons trade and an African warfare on the coast, right? One of the expanding polities in on the Gold Coast was Ashanti, right? Kind of with its with its capital at Kumasi was an expansive slave trading one could say almost imperial state, right? And Ashanti was engaged through the 18th century were in a major road building campaign, right? And they were using kind of Africans, many of whom ended up in the Americas to build those roads. As it happened, right? After the signing of the maroon trees in Jamaica, the Jamaican colonists were engaged in major road building campaigns as well. And employed Africans, some of whom had many of them had road building experience in West Africa, right? Now, what is the significance of kind of experience building roads? Well, that's movement across the landscape, understanding very well where the cracks and fissures and gaps are in state power, where it is that one could escape to, right? A better knowledge of the landscape gives you a better sense of possibility, a political possibility. So by kind of, you know, understanding that there were people who had not only military experience, but also construction experience that from Africa that they used in in the Americas, one also then gets a sense of how their political opportunities seemed to them, right? And that's why I think one has to understand not just kind of African culture as a background, but actual African history as it was playing out at the same time as American history in order to understand the experience of the people who were captive migrants to the Americas, and also what they did when they got there. I just have, I have two, you know, important questions to ask before we begin to sort of wrap up. The first one is very much, well, they're both for both of you, Peggy, I suppose I'll ask you to go first. How was peace or some form of peace resolved? How would these conflicts, you know, kind of in some way resolved or brought to an end, be that according to the historians, the European historians of the day or anything else that you know? In terms of the Haitian Revolution, peace occurred when Napoleon finally conceded that he did not win, even though he ended up bringing even Polish troops to come and fight for him, which guess what, they ended up siding with the Haitians. So that didn't work. In terms of the Haitian Revolution, peace was achieved briefly with the establishment of the First Black Republic in the world in 1804. I say briefly, because once Haiti did not need to deal readily in terms of warfare with France or any other European power, then the fight became very obviously internal. The country was divided into different kingdoms, one and the different military leaders, you know, Henri Christophe, Dessalines, everyone got a different cut of the land and whether they called themselves emperor or king, once again, playing into the political system that they were fighting against in the first place, which already tells you this is not going to work out. So technically for Saint-Domingue that threw away its colonial shackles in the sense of slavery, but still kept much of the idea of its political construction and governance, the way France did with emperors and kings, that would be the way that they ended up finding peace with regard to Europe, but not within themselves. No. And in Jamaica, I'm sensing it was an equally unstable piece that was eventually established. I know that treaties were signed, I think you've mentioned. Yeah, I mean, Peter Tosh once said, you know, peace is the certificate that they give you when you graduate to the graveyard, right? I don't see that in the context of Jamaican slavery, there ever was peace. One of the things that I'm arguing is that slavery itself was a kind of low intensity state of war. Collective violence was always instrumental to the maintenance of the system. And so it's hard for me to see kind of where warfare ended and peace began, certainly through the period that I'm talking about, and maybe even afterwards. So it's a hard question for me, right? What I see is changing and transforming patterns of violence. And so Tacky's revolt itself was largely suppressed in 1761, even though there was simmering violence ever after. Kind of smaller scale revolts through the 1760s, a major slave conspiracy in 1776. Some disturbances in the 1790s, even though compared to Saint-Domingue, Jamaica stayed relatively quiet as far as the British were concerned. So I think that that's kind of important to remember that, you know, that this warfare and peace aren't kind of mutually opposing states, right? There's kind of, you know, less violence in one area and at one time. And sometimes that's contingent on more violence over there, right? Peace between Europeans often means more warfare against people in the rest of the world. And I think that that's kind of worth remembering always. There is no sense of peace. There's no true sense of peace if there's a plantation economy based on modes of oppression. There is no real peace. Absolutely, yes. And I suppose my last question is one which is slightly different. Now, you're obviously both historians with voice and a presence. What are you, you're raising awareness here of really what I think really important stories for people of the African diaspora today. What is your goal, really? What do you want people to take from you raising awareness of these particular passages in time? Well, one of the things that I focus on is Black food ways. And I see Black food ways, particularly when we think of slave food ways and what evolves into whether it be soul food in North America or different forms of Creole cuisine in the Caribbean. I see that as culinary resistance. I see the fact that in many places in the Caribbean, especially in the French Caribbean, their laws had to be created to remind planters to feed the enslaved. Those laws don't exist for the beasts of burden. That seems to be clear, but that laws had to be created in France and then local ordinances in the Caribbean constantly trying to oppress upon French planters, you must feed them if they are to keep living and working. And so the fact that resistance in terms of food and the fact that these different subsistence practices were created, were modified, not only to sustain life, but to provide pleasure and bond communities and families together, especially through a social power that is still very apparent today in our in our descendant communities, because everybody knows if you want the best pepper pot, you go to auntie so-and-so, or if you want the best fried chicken, you go to so-and-so, or Miss, you know, Miss Jackson, she made some gumbo, she's got the best, right? There's a social power that still exists, but still continues to bond people. So the idea for me that I love trying to impress upon audiences is that there's so many ways that we can understand resistance, but it's not always, you know, there are other ways beyond just fighting slavery. There is also the idea of sensory pleasure, of celebration, of pride, that we still hold on to many of those slave food, those slave cuisine dishes today because we choose to, we don't have to, we choose to. It is part of our identity, and we love that. So the idea of culinary resistance as celebration, as joyful, as something we can, we still celebrate is what I like to press. I think that's so important what Peggy just said, and it reminds me that one of the reasons I do this work, and I think that, you know, drawing from what she said that she does this work, is to remind myself and others that, you know, kind of what Black people have done, even under extreme circumstances, was and is consequential, right? I mean, as historians were in some ways, you know, kind of pushing a boulder up a hill, in part because, you know, GWF Hegel, right, the philosopher, one of the founders of modern Western philosophy, proclaimed in the early 19th century that Africa, and by extension Black people, forms no historical part of the world, right? That nothing, there's no historical movement in Africa, that nothing that happens there is consequential. And in fact, right, when the disciplines, the academic disciplines, were set up in the 19th century, the discipline of history didn't consider Africa to be a subject worthy of study. Africa was the province of anthropologists, right? And the idea was one who'd go to Africa to find primitive culture, but not to find consequential history. It's not really until decolonization in the mid 20th century that we get, you know, serious professional academic studies of Africa, right, as being consequential for all of world history. So in some ways, we're kind of starting behind. And that and even what we know in academia, right, is not necessarily suffused throughout the world as common sense. And so one of the things that I think we're both doing is trying to build a common sense that Africa and its descendants, right, matter in the world. What they have done, what they have built, even against all odds, is consequential and is worthy of note. Fabulous. And I can't think of a better note on which to end. Dr. Penny Brunash, Peggy Brunash, thank you so much for your time, Professor Brown. Likewise, thank you so much for your time and for your words. Thank you. Thank you, Wayne. Thank you, Peggy. Thank you, Vincent.