The Great Resistance
The 400-Year Fight to End Slavery in the Americas
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- Prenotazione
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- Uscita prevista: 6 gen 2026
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- 17,99 €
Descrizione dell’editore
For more than four centuries, enslaved people across the Americas, from the United States and the Caribbean to Mexico and Brazil, fought any way they could to gain their freedom. For the first time, their dramatic stories are gathered in one sweeping narrative that offers a message of inspiration in our own time.
“Among the emancipators are the millions whose stories will never be known. They lived the struggle. They were the great resistance.” Thus does acclaimed historian Carrie Gibson conclude her magisterial chronicle of four centuries of effort by enslaved people in the western hemisphere to gain their freedom. “Freedom is an idea,” she writes, and the actions of the thousands who fought to escape slavery made clear that “freedom had to be for everyone, otherwise it was a lie.”
The horrific enslavement by Europeans of twelve million Africans taken to the Americas has been widely written about, and important individual slave revolts have been recorded; but Gibson tells a larger story, portraying the multitude of freedom struggles across the entire hemisphere—from North America to the Caribbean to Brazil—as one long-running quest for freedom. From the first African revolt in 1521 on the island of Hispaniola, to the 18th-century Maroon Wars on Jamaica and the revolution that gave Haiti its independence, and thousands of smaller acts of defiance in between, Gibson vividly chronicles the continuum of resistance that eventually ended the slave trade and, with Brazil’s decision in 1888, the institution of slavery itself.
This was the most diverse ongoing insurrection the world has ever known, and the way it was responded to shaped every nation in the Americas in meaningful ways. “If scholars were to emphasize the efforts of the enslaved more than the condition of slavery,” historian Vincent Brown has written, “we might at least tell richer stories about how the endeavors of the weakest and most abject have at times reshaped the world.” With its deep scholarship and rich narrative, The Great Resistance is a major contribution to the literature around slavery and freedom and, in our time, a tribute to the persistence of the human spirit to overcome even the darkest of circumstances.
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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.
