Daring to Be Free

A revelatory history of enslaved people's resistance and self-emancipation, across the Atlantic world and beyond.

The ending of the slave trade and the abolition of slavery by European powers during the nineteenth century is generally told as the work of enlightened liberals. Sudhir Hazareesingh turns this narrative on its head, showing the extraordinary degree to which the enslaved resisted their oppressors and emancipated themselves.

Daring to Be Free portrays the struggle for liberation from the perspective of the enslaved and, wherever possible, in their own words. It shines a light on the lives of revolutionaries like Toussaint Louverture, Nat Turner, and the pregnant mutineer Solitude; freed writers of narrative accounts like Frederick Douglass; and the countless rebels, insurgents, and conspirators. Hazareesingh gives particular emphasis to the role of powerful women as campaigners, warriors, and disrupters.

Drawing on both written archives and oral history, the book traces the networks of cooperation that connected runaway settlements and rebellions from Haiti, Jamaica, Brazil, and Cuba to Mauritius and the United States. It shows how the struggle for freedom was shaped less by Western Enlightenment ideals than by spiritual, martial, and religious influences from the lives of the enslaved in Africa before the Middle Passage. Daring to Be Free reshapes our understanding of Atlantic slavery by portraying how enslaved lives were defined not by their dehumanization at the hands of colonialists and slavers but by their own resilience, rebellion, and commitment to emancipation.