The Great Resistance: A Panoramic Account of Slavery's End
Carrie Gibson's new book, The Great Resistance, presents an ambitious chronicle of the fight for freedom by enslaved Africans and their descendants across the Americas, spanning four centuries from the 1500s to the 1800s. Gibson describes her work as painting a historical landscape that stretches the entire length and breadth of the Americas, focusing on what she calls the largest, longest-running, and most diverse ongoing insurrection in world history.
A Vast Tapestry of Stories
In 500 pages, Gibson attempts a story that historian Eugene Genovese once remarked might require ten large volumes. Flitting from Baltimore to Bridgetown to Bahia, her 35 chapters weave a dense tapestry of escapes, armed uprisings, and revolutions. The narrative is rich with stories from Spanish Cuba, Portuguese Brazil, French Martinique, and Dutch Curaçao, as well as more familiar settings like the United States and the Anglophone Caribbean.
While well-known events and figures such as William Wilberforce's campaign to end the slave trade and Abraham Lincoln's role in the American Civil War are included, Gibson places them within a much broader context. Her firm focus is on how enslaved people envisaged their freedom and fought for it, highlighting both prominent leaders and obscure characters.
Key Figures and Maroon Societies
The book delves into the lives of figures like Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who rose from slavery to lead the Haitian Revolution from 1791 to 1804. It also sheds light on more obscure individuals, such as an Akwamu noble known as King Claes and a woman named Breffu, who helped lead an African uprising on the Danish-Caribbean island of Saint John in 1733.
Gibson narrates the achievements of escapees who carved out their own maroon societies in the hills and forests of plantation colonies. She explores how enslaved Africans utilized martial skills brought across the Atlantic and how, in the 19th century, efforts shifted from escaping into self-contained communities to launching full-frontal attacks on the slave system itself.
Scholarship and Limitations
Gibson's chronicle relies on a vast sea of scholarship, noting that rebellions have often been marginalized in accounts of emancipation. However, she surprisingly says little about the most common types of resistance, such as song, storytelling, theft, or sabotage, which represented day-to-day defiance for many enslaved people.
As Gibson points out, enslavers lived in fear of violent uprisings, but rebellion was relatively rare due to its high risks. The final chapters detail how slavery ended at different times and ways across the Americas, moving beyond simplistic explanations centered on white abolitionists or enlightened rulers.
Debates and Transformations
Historians debate the extent to which slave uprisings shaped emancipation. For Genovese, the Haitian Revolution was a critical turning point, marking a transition to broader pushes for freedom. Gibson describes it as a volcanic explosion with embers igniting more blazes across the Caribbean, but her narrative, with cryptic chapter titles like Liberation and Lashings, lacks clear analysis of these transformations.
Transatlantic networks facilitated dialogue among enslaved people and with reformers elsewhere. For example, black abolitionists like Samuel Sharpe, who led an 1831 uprising in Jamaica, were inspired by figures like William Wilberforce, while enslaved rebels in the Caribbean influenced abolitionist thinking in Britain, though never as equals.
Conclusion and Lessons
In closing, Gibson notes that white acts of abolition often came with caveats, such as the £20 million compensation to British slaveholders in 1833 or Brazil's law of the free womb, which freed children only under enslavers' control until adulthood. She offers a cursory overview of key lessons, emphasizing that people used every route out of slavery, but over time, it became clear that freedom had to be for everyone to be meaningful.
The Great Resistance: The 400-Year Fight to End Slavery in the Americas by Carrie Gibson is published by Basic, providing a comprehensive look at this pivotal struggle in history.
