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

by Marjoleine Kars

***Winner of the 2021 Cundill History Prize***

This is the story of a massive slave rebellion in 1763 in what is now Guyana, on the northeast coast of South America. At the time, it was a Dutch colony, known as Berbice. Though it took place right at the start of the ‘Age of Revolutions’ that would transform the world, many of us have never heard of either the colony or the enslaved Berbicians who rebelled against it, described in the book as “among the most oppressed people in the Atlantic world.” They nonetheless managed to take over the colony and hold onto it for more than a year. It’s an extraordinary story, told in extraordinary detail by Marjoleine Kars, a professor of history at the University of Maryland, thanks to a treasure trove of documents she found in the national archives in the Netherlands.

The book, according to the author

“The archive was extraordinarily rich. In addition to the daily journal of the colonial governor and reams of European correspondence, it contained five hundred handwritten pages of slave interrogations and—even more tantalizing—letters the rebelling ex-slaves had written to the Dutch authorities. We have few sources for the eighteenth century in which enslaved people actually speak, and here were their voices captured in old Dutch.”

Prologue, Blood on the River by Marjoleine Kars