The Great Resistance: The 400-Year Fight to End Slavery in the Americas

The history of the most diverse insurrection the world has ever known.

For more than four centuries, enslaved people across the western hemisphere, from the United States and the Caribbean to Mexico and Brazil, fought any way they could to gain their freedom: from the first African revolt in 1521 on the island of Hispaniola to the eighteenth-century Maroon Wars on Jamaica, and the revolution that gave Haiti its independence. In The Great Resistance, acclaimed historian Carrie Gibson recovers their dramatic stories in one sweeping narrative. Focusing on the thousands of acts of defiance that kept the flame of freedom alive, Gibson vividly chronicles the resistance that eventually ended the slave trade and, with Brazil’s abolition in 1888, the institution of slavery itself.

Intertwined with this quest for emancipation were the political revolutions that gave rise to the modern nation-state. At a time when all post-slavery societies face serious questions about social and racial inequality, Gibson provides a radical new interpretation of abolition set amid a sweeping global landscape.

With its deep scholarship and rich narrative, The Great Resistance is a tribute to the persistence of the human spirit to overcome even the darkest of circumstances.

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