From the Wolfson History Prize-winning author of Black Spartacus, a revealing 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 sheds light on the lives of revolutionaries like Toussaint Louverture, José Antonio Aponte, Nat Turner, and the pregnant rebel Solitude; freed writers of narrative accounts such as Frederick Douglass and Ottobah Cugoano; and the countless maroons, insurgents, and conspirators whose acts of defiance destabilized the slave system in the colonies and fueled the movement for abolition in France, Britain, and the United States. Hazareesingh places particular emphasis on the powerful roles of women as activists, disruptors, and fighters.

Utilizing written archives and oral histories, along with a rich body of secondary sources, the book traces the networks of cooperation that linked runaway settlements, covert rebellions, and organized uprisings from Haiti, Jamaica, Brazil, and Cuba to Mauritius and the United States. It demonstrates how the fight for liberty was shaped not only by Western Enlightenment ideals but also by spiritual, martial, and religious influences from the enslaved people's lives in Africa before the Middle Passage – and by the inspiring example of Haiti, the first successful anti-colonial revolution and the first independent black state, whose legacy resonated throughout the 19th century.

Daring To Be Free reshapes our understanding of Atlantic slavery by illustrating how the lives of the enslaved were defined not by their dehumanization at the hands of colonizers and slavers but by their resilience, solidarity, and dedication to freedom. It also examines the ongoing legacy of the slave trade in contemporary debates about the legacy of slavery and the possibilities for redress, reparations, and memorialization today.