The Great Resistance

The Great Resistance is the story of the struggle for abolition, starting from the earliest runaway slaves in the 1500s to the end of slavery in Brazil in 1888, with a focus on the enslaved people who fought for their own freedom. For too long the story of slave liberation has focused on the role of white allies - important though they were - and the larger imperial publics and governments who changed their minds about the status of the very people they had earlier been happy to enslave. The story of abolition is neither smooth nor linear, and to understand its jagged and often contradictory course it is necessary to look at a wider historical horizon, one that takes in not only Britain and the United States, but also Spanish America and Brazil. It is also a story intimately intertwined with political revolutions and the rise of the nation-state. There is no explaining the establishment of western democracy without the inclusion of the debates around slavery and abolition. The Great Resistance offers the opportunity to think about freedom from the ground up, from the actions and words of people who were born into or escaped bondage. At a time when all post-slavery societies - not least Britain and the US - are facing serious questions about social and racial inequality, The Great Resistance provides a radical new interpretation of abolition, set against a sweeping historical landscape that takes in the entire hemisphere.