Daring to be Free

The ending of the slave trade and abolition of slavery by European powers during the 19th century is generally told as the work of enlightened liberals fighting against entrenched slaving interests in the Caribbean and European capitals. Sudhir Hazareesingh here turns this narrative on its head, showing how the enslaved resisted their oppressors from the earliest years of the Atlantic slave trade in the 16th century until the abolition of slavery in the United States in 1865, and how this was the driving force for change. Daring To Be Free portrays the struggle for liberation from the perspective of the enslaved, wherever possible in their own words. It shines a light on the lives of revolutionaries like Toussaint Louverture, Nat Turner, and the pregnant mutineer Solitude; freed writers of narrative accounts like Frederick Douglass and Ottobah Cuguano; and the countless rebels, insurgents and conspirators whose acts of defiance destabilised the slave order in the colonies and galvanized the movement for abolition in France and Britain. Hazareesingh gives particular emphasis to the role of powerful women as campaigners, warriors and disruptors. Drawing on both written archives and oral history, the book traces the networks of cooperation that connected runaway settlements, covert rebellions and organized uprisings from Haiti, Jamaica, Brazil and Cuba to Mauritius and the United States. It shows us how the struggle for freedom was shaped not by western Enlightenment ideals but by the spiritual, martial, and religious influences from the lives of the enslaved in Africa before the Middle Passage and by the inspiring example of Haiti, the first successful black revolution and the first independent black republic, which echoed down the 19th century. Daring To Be Free reshapes our understanding of Atlantic slavery by portraying how enslaved lives were defined not by their dehumanisation at the hands of colonialists and slavers but by their own resilience, rebellion, and commitment to emancipation. It also examines the afterlife of the slave trade in contemporary discussions about the legacy of slavery and possibilities for redress, reparations, and memorial in our own time.