The Great Resistance
The 400-Year Fight to End Slavery in the Americas
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected 12 Feb 2026
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- 19,99 €
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- Pre-Order
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- 19,99 €
Publisher Description
The history of the most diverse insurrection the world has ever known.
For more than four centuries, enslaved people across the western hemisphere, from the United States and the Caribbean to Mexico and Brazil, fought any way they could to gain their freedom: from the first African revolt in 1521 on the island of Hispaniola to the eighteenth-century Maroon Wars on Jamaica, and the revolution that gave Haiti its independence. In The Great Resistance, acclaimed historian Carrie Gibson recovers their dramatic stories in one sweeping narrative. Focusing on the thousands of acts of defiance that kept the flame of freedom alive, Gibson vividly chronicles the resistance that eventually ended the slave trade and, with Brazil's abolition in 1888, the institution of slavery itself.
Intertwined with this quest for emancipation were the political revolutions that gave rise to the modern nation-state. At a time when all post-slavery societies face serious questions about social and racial inequality, Gibson provides a radical new interpretation of abolition set amid a sweeping global landscape.
With its deep scholarship and rich narrative, The Great Resistance is a tribute to the persistence of the human spirit to overcome even the darkest of circumstances.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Resistance to the Atlantic slave system constituted "perhaps the largest, longest-running, and most diverse ongoing insurrection the world has ever known," according to this magisterial account from historian Gibson (El Norte). To highlight the continuous and singular nature of the struggle, she tracks it from beginning to end—starting with the initial resistance to the slave trade that took place in Africa, mutinies on slave ships (of "an estimated 36,000 voyages... at least 3,500" had on-board rebellions), and the first slave revolt in the Americas: the 1521 Christmas Day uprising on a plantation owned by a son of Christopher Columbus. The latter, Gibson remarks, "bore the hallmarks of rebellions to come, taking place on a holiday when officials were distracted." This kind of focus on military strategy suffuses the book, as Gibson points to the ways the resistance learned and adapted. The most important such development was the emergence of "marronage," wherein enslaved people would abscond to the wilderness, ally with Indigenous people, and launch raids on plantations. Gibson goes on to analyze the Haitian Revolution's success and its significance to the resistance as a whole (it was a "volcanic explosion" whose "hot ash... ignit more blazes"), before tracking the arduous path to total abolition. Digesting vast amounts of information, Gibson constructs a sweeping vision of resistance to slavery as a defining element of Western history that made "abstract concepts of freedom concrete." Expansive and elegant, this is a marvel.
