*A Jacobin Best Book of 2025* *A Spectator Best Book of 2025 as picked by Sam Leith* 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.
