Sudhir Hazareesingh DARING TO BE FREE

Daring to be Free

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.

Sudhir Hazareesingh

Sudhir Hazareesingh is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow and Tutor in Politics at Balliol College, Oxford. His books includeThe Legend of Napoleon (winner of the Prix du Mémorial d'Ajaccio and the Prix de la Fondation Napoléon),In the Shadow of the General(winner of the Prix d'Histoire du Sénat),How the French Think(winner of the Grand Prix du Livre d'Idées), andBlack Spartacus(winner of the Wolfson History Prize and the American Library in Paris Award). In 2020, he became a Grand Commander of the Order of the Star and Key of the Indian Ocean (G.C.S.K.), the highest honour of the Republic of Mauritius.

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