Daring to be Free: Rebellion and Resistance of the Enslaved in the Atlantic World by Sudhir Hazareesingh

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Daring to be Free: Rebellion and Resistance of the Enslaved in the Atlantic World by Sudhir Hazareesingh

One takeaway from Daring to be Free is the anxiety and inefficiency of the slave system in the New World. The slavers were forced to maintain constant militarized vigilance over an unwilling workforce, and could never be assured that the most trusted household servant might not conspire to kill them if given the chance, whether by poison, arson or ambush.

The other takeaway in this remarkable trans-Atlantic account is the amount of active resistance by the enslaved in virtually every colony and New World nation. The successful revolt in Haiti, which gained independence from France, was only one instance among hundreds of insurrections, albeit the only one to achieve its goal.

Sudhir Hazareesingh, a native of Mauritius and fellow of the British Academy, grounds his study in the culturally, socially African nature of that resistance, which took the form of mythmaking, foot-dragging and he pursuit of autonomy as much as in violence. Without the full connivance of West Africa’s indigenous rulers, 12.5 million captives could not have been taken by white slavers to the New World. However, Hazareesingh documents how that resistance began on the African continent.

Daring to the Free accommodates many voices as it pivots between continents, uncovering the often forgotten yet crucial role of enslaved women in organizing and supporting resistance and the occasional alliances between Africans and Amerindians. Hazareesingh looks to the centrality of Obeah, the diffuse systems of African belief that found several expressions in the New World, most famously in the vodou of Haiti and Louisiana, and grants a certain credence to an occult war against slavery. He doesn’t ignore the Islamic enslaved, whose practices continued for some time in parts of the New World until their descendants were subsumed into Black churches.

Far from being a browbeaten, ignorant and docile labor pool, the ranks of the enslaved included former rulers and warriors whose skills were lent to fomenting rebellion. Hazareesingh dismisses the idea that freedom was the child of the European Enlightenment and finds it inscribed in the heart of humanity and well understood by African captives.

Hazareesingh situates slavery in the United States within the transatlantic systems he documents and gives accurate accounts of Frederick Douglass and other Black abolitionists as well as a balanced understanding of the evolving attitudes of Abraham Lincoln, whose suppression of the Southern rebellion finally overturned the legal basis for slavery. The enslaved of Daring to be Free weren’t passive victims but fought collectively against their bondage whenever possible and found solidarity in their shared resistance.

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