Blood on the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast

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THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE BERBICE SLAVE REBELLION

Winner of the 2021 Cundill History Prize
Winner of the 2021 Frederick Douglass Prize

'A gripping tale about the human need for freedom ... spellbinding' - NPR
'A masterpiece ... a story for the ages' - Elizabeth Fenn, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Encounters at the Heart of the World

In February 1763, thousands of slaves in the Dutch colony of Berbice - in present-day Guyana - launched a massive rebellion - and very nearly succeeded. For an entire year, they fought their enslavers, dreaming of establishing a free state, what would have been the first Black republic. Instead, they vanished from history.

Blood on the River is the explosive story of this forgotten revolution, an event that almost changed the face of the Americas. Historian Marjoleine Kars draws on long-buried Dutch interrogation transcripts to reconstruct a rich day-by-day account of this extraordinary event, providing a rare look at the political vision of enslaved people at the dawn of the Age of Revolution. An astonishing original work of history, Blood on the River will change our understanding of revolutions, slavery and the story of freedom in the New World.

Reviews

'A riveting addition to the history of the search for freedom in the Americas' - Kirkus Reviews

'A richly detailed account of a gripping human story' - H.W. Brands

'[An] epic history ... A sweeping, thoughtful narrative, joining a new wave of books that make visible previously dismissed Black voices' - Carolyn Kellogg

'A gripping tale about the human need for freedom ... The story of the Berbice Rebellion begs to be told, and Kars' telling is impressive' - Martha Anne Toll

'A model for how academic history can reach a wide audience, a narrative-driven work which presents pioneering archival scholarship in which we can hear the voices of the enslaved protagonists ... Kars represents the complexities of the rebellion without romanticising it' - Bethan Fisk

Author Bio

Marjoleine Kars teaches history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A noted historian of slavery, she is also the author of Breaking Loose Together: The Regulator Rebellion in Pre-Revolutionary North Carolina. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.