Review by Booklist Review
In the popular imagination, the end of slavery is linked to noble white abolitionists: William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, the Quakers, and, of course, Lincoln. Africans and African Americans are treated as passive victims, bit players in their own story, save for rare, exceptional individuals. Hazareesingh (Black Spartacus, 2020) rips away the screen of white saviorism to reveal a compelling history of enslaved people fiercely and collaboratively seizing freedom with their own hands. Beginning in Africa, where numerous local leaders refused to cooperate with European slavers and often fought them off, to fierce slave rebellions in Spanish and Portuguese American colonies, through the revolutionary uprisings in Haiti and Dominica, enslaved Africans waged war against slavery and were often successful. Resistance also involved sabotage, poisoning, and flight, with runaways forming large "maroon" communities throughout the Americas. Hazareesingh points out that enslaved Africans provided networks of support for each other, and maroon colonies engaged in negotiations and diplomacy with colonial enslavers. Resistance leaders were often skilled politicians, religious figures, or military strategists. Even when rebellions failed, they weakened the overall slave system and discouraged its expansion; Hazareesingh notes that millions of Africans were spared slavery due to slave resistance. A bracing and necessary historical corrective.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
"The enslaved rebelled against their captivity throughout the entire period" of the Atlantic slave system, according to this stunning revisionist saga. Historian Hazareesingh (Black Spartacus) chronicles myriad examples of "verbal expressions of dissent," escapes and slave ship mutinies, "poison and sabotage," acts of self-harm that denied the enslavers one's labor, as well as "military rebellion, insurgency, and warfare." He also argues that "enslaved resistance must be evaluated beyond the single criterion of whether it led to the direct overthrow of the institution of slavery," pointing out that, for centuries, resistance was a vital practice that fostered "dignity and autonomy" for millions. "Resistance thinking," he writes, cultivated "networks of community and solidarity" that eventually became "forms of self-governance." Hazareesingh traces this legacy of resistance directly to Africa, where many communities, targeted by "African imperial armies and slave-raiding parties," refused to submit; many of these groups not only survived but thrived, and seeded oral traditions among those enslaved that resistance was possible. Hazareesingh likewise tracks the spiritual dimensions of resistance thinking throughout the Atlantic world, showing how oath-taking, sacred rituals, and new religious narratives forged new political identities, with one striking example being Nat Turner, who "shrouded his preparations" for rebellion in the story of "his personal journey towards the Kingdom of Heaven." Pointedly demonstrating that the enslaved's efforts contributed more to their freedom than "the campaigns of enlightened white abolitionists," this is a remarkable reorientation of the history of the modern world. (Dec.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Wide-ranging survey of the many ways in which enslaved Africans and their descendants resisted their captors. Toussaint L'Ouverture, who led the Haitian war of independence against France, is well known. A young Black servant from Guadeloupe named Solitude is not, though she fought against French colonial forces there. Executed in 1802, Solitude now has a statue in Paris, "the first-ever dedicated to a black woman in the French capital," as Mauritian historian Hazareesingh writes. Ironically, the French also imposed economic sanctions on free Haiti soon after, demanding indemnities that have crippled the country ever since; as Hazareesingh notes, "the economist Thomas Piketty calculated in 2020 that the Haitians are owed $28 billion by the French government as restitution for the debts incurred for their independence payments." Rebellions against enslavement took many forms. By the author's reckoning, hundreds of mutinies occurred on ships in the Middle Passage, among the first known of them a 1532 revolt on a Portuguese ship where 80 captives seized control and sailed back to the coast of Benin. Another form of rebellion took place in Brazil, Panama, and elsewhere, in which enslaved people escaped, formed multiethnic communities that included "Amerindians and poor whites fleeing from the violence of colonial society, destitutes, family outcasts, and those--such as Jews and African priestesses--persecuted for their spiritual beliefs." And then, most worrisome to slaveholders, there were outright revolts such as that mounted by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831, as well as armed bands that helped free recaptured slaves fleeing to Canada on the Underground Railroad--one of them led by Harriet Tubman. Ironically, Hazareesingh notes, most of these acts of rebellion and resistance, while "integral to the practice of Atlantic slavery, and an inescapable part of it," have often been forgotten, history having tended to congratulate white abolitionists as the sole liberators, a condescending error that this book corrects. A much-needed and sure-to-be-influential addition to the literature of African enslavement. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
