From the Wolfson History Prize-winning author of Black Spartacus a revelatory history of
enslaved people's resistance to Atlantic slavery . 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 Africa 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
opposition 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 José Antonio Aponte
Nat Turner and the pregnant rebel Solitude freed writers of narrative accounts like Frederick
Douglass and Ottobah Cugoano and the countless maroons insurgents and conspirators whose acts
of defiance destabilised the slave order in the colonies and galvanized the movement for
abolition in France Britain and the United States. Hazareesingh gives particular emphasis to
the powerful roles of women as campaigners disruptors and warriors. Drawing on written
archives and oral history as well as a rich body of secondary sources 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 liberty was shaped not only 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 anticolonial
revolution and the first independent black state 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 solidarity and commitment to freedom. 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.
