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HOW SLAVES’ RESISTANCE SECURED LIBERAL DEMOCRACY  
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Jake Subryan Richards
May 1, 2026
Project Syndicate
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_ The history of slavery in the Americas is one of rebellion,
solidarity, and democratic invention. A recent book traces the depth
and creativity of enslaved people’s resistance, whose legacy
continues to inspire social-justice movements. _

, Leo Correa/AFP via Getty Images

 

LONDON—In the early 17th century, deep within the palm forests of
northeastern Brazil, a group of people escaped slavery and founded an
independent settlement. They named it Palmares and welcomed others
fleeing bondage to join them.

The settlers described their community as a _kilombo_, meaning
“refuge” or “war camp” in Kimbundu. In Portuguese, the term
became _quilombo_ and was used to designate self-governing communities
formed by people who escaped slavery. At its height, Palmares
comprised a network of villages with a population of roughly 20,000,
supporting themselves through subsistence agriculture and hunting.

One of Palmares’s principal settlements was Serra da Barriga
(“Belly-Shaped Mountain”), whose contours resemble a reclining
pregnant woman. The name also carried a symbolic meaning: resistance
itself had given birth to a society capable of surviving repeated
assaults by Portuguese and Dutch colonial forces. As the Oxford
political theorist Sudhir Hazareesingh writes in his remarkable 2025
book Daring to Be Free: Rebellion and Resistance of the Enslaved in
the Atlantic World
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Palmares “became a magnet not only for African-born men and women
seeking to escape from servitude, but also for Amerindians and poor
whites fleeing from the violence of colonial society, destitutes,
family outcasts, and those—such as Jews and African
priestesses—persecuted for their spiritual beliefs.”

From that first quilombo came many. After Portuguese forces eventually
invaded Palmares, other communities popped up across Brazil, often
named after Palmares’s leaders. In 1929, the Brazilian poet Jorge de
Lima captured
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this enduring symbolic power:

_Serra da Barriga!_

_I see you from the house where I was born._

_What damned fear of a fugitive black person!_

Nearly six decades later, in 1988, Serra da Barriga became a national
heritage site, and the newly adopted Brazilian Constitution guaranteed
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quilombo residents have “definitive property rights [to their
lands], obliging the State to distribute respective titles to them.”

Today, the legacy of Palmares and other quilombos remains as alive as
ever. Drawing on traditions of sustainable living and collective
autonomy, it continues to inspire movements advocating land
redistribution and environmental justice around the world.

RESISTANCE REIMAGINED

_Daring to Be Free_ brings to life places like Palmares, where
enslaved people resisted every aspect of the Atlantic slave system. As
in his 2020 book _Black Spartacus_: _The Epic Life of Toussaint
Louverture_
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biography of the Haitian Revolution’s leader Toussaint
Louverture—Hazareesingh pays close attention to what enslaved people
said and did, revealing the depth and creativity of their resistance
strategies.

Earlier generations of scholars tended to classify slave rebellions as
either “reconstructionist,” aimed at restoring African traditions,
or “modern” political movements inspired by Enlightenment ideals.
More recent scholarship, however, has moved beyond this dichotomy.
Historians now recognize the limits of Euro-American commitments to
liberty and racial equality—apparent in the defense of slavery by

Scholars today also use new methods of reading archival sources to
highlight the dynamic connections between Africa and the Americas in
shaping resistance. For example, Akan captives from what is now Ghana
played a central role in Tacky’s Revolt in Jamaica in 1760.
Likewise, soldiers displaced by the collapse of the Oyo Empire in the
Bight of Benin between 1817 and 1836 were sold into slavery and
transported to Brazil and Cuba, where they organized several major
plantation uprisings.

Building on this new scholarship, Hazareesingh offers an alternative
to the reconstructionist-modern dichotomy. As in _Black Spartacus_, he
portrays enslaved people as both pursuing and realizing universal
values such as freedom, autonomy, collective dignity, solidarity, and
democracy through rebellion and resistance. As they moved across the
Atlantic world—whether as captives aboard ships during the notorious
Middle Passage or as workers traveling between plantations, cities,
and ports—they carried these practices with them.

Enslaved people also created an imaginative and political world that
could not be contained by slaveholding or by emancipation schemes
proposed by anti-slavery movements in metropolitan capitals. For
Hazareesingh, such schemes were compromised by gradualism and
entrenched racial hierarchies. Many emancipation laws delayed legal
freedom for years, during which formerly enslaved people were required
to continue working in the same sectors, often under conditions that
bound them to their former enslavers. These laws also drew a sharp
line between de jure freedom and political rights, restricting where
formerly enslaved people could live, what they could own, and their
right to vote.

Across Africa, communities developed a range of techniques to resist
slaving armies. Some militias were skilled not only in fighting but
also in poisoning invaders; others used the landscape itself as a form
of defense. When the Tofinu people sought to escape Dahomeyan forces
in the 18th century, for example, they moved into the watery terrain
of southern Benin. As Hazareesingh writes, they defended their
settlement at Ganvié—“whose name is widely accepted to mean
‘safe at last’”—through canoe-based warfare.

Captive Africans took their values and practices with them aboard
slaving ships. In 1839, the Spanish slaver _Amistad_ was transporting
49 men, three girls, and a boy off the coast of colonial Cuba.
Although they came from at least 16 different ethnic groups, diversity
did not prevent solidarity. Some of the men belonged to the Poro, an
all-male secret society that played a key role among many peoples on
the Upper Guinea Coast, resolving disputes, investigating crimes, and
making decisions regarding war and peace.

Aboard the _Amistad_, the captives initially disagreed about whether
to fight the crew. “The final decision was only taken when everyone
had reached ‘unity,’ the key Poro principle of _ngo yela_,”
writes Hazareesingh. Here, his innovative approach to universal
political concepts becomes clear: in his telling, _ngo yela_ was a
form of “democratic consensus.” The rebels ultimately seized
control of the ship and steered it toward the US, where the Supreme
Court ruled that they had been enslaved illegally and could return to
Sierra Leone as free people.

WOMEN’S REVOLTS

Though the _Amistad_ uprising was led by adult men, _Daring to Be
Free_ highlights the vital role women played as leaders and organizers
of major revolts. Nowhere is this more evident than in the
insurgencies that swept Cuba in 1843–44, led in part by women like
Fermina and Carlota.

In the summer of 1843, Fermina escaped from a sugar plantation and
spent five months in iron shackles as punishment. Upon her release,
she led a major uprising at the Triunvirato sugar mill, urging fellow
enslaved people to “hit [an enslaver] with your machete, for he is
the one who puts [us in] shackles.” Hazareesingh situates the
actions of Fermina and Carlota not only within the immediate colonial
backdrop but also within their broader historical context. Speaking at
a monument honoring Carlota in Matanzas in 1991, he notes, Nelson
Mandela explicitly linked South Africa’s anti-Apartheid struggle to
Cuba’s earlier fight for freedom.

During the American Civil War, enslaved women in the Confederacy
escaped in large numbers. One census of 24,000 “contraband” people
in Virginia found that nearly half were women. These desertions had a
tangible effect on the course of the war: by leaving plantations en
masse, self-liberating women undermined the labor system that
sustained Confederate troops. As nearly a half-million enslaved people
fled north, they opened an additional front against the Confederate
army while supporting the Union war effort.

In European colonies across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean, including
Mauritius and Réunion, the legal doctrine of _partus sequitur
ventrem_ (“the child follows the womb”) dictated that enslaved
status was inherited through the mother. The book does not explore the
importance of this principle to both enslavement and resistance, yet
scholars have shown how central it was to the expansion of
slavery-based economies, as women’s productive and reproductive
labor directly increased enslavers’ wealth.

While free white families could pass down property—including land
and people—to their descendants, enslaved Black women could bequeath
only their status. But they did not accept this condition passively.
Studies have consistently found that enslaved women, particularly in
Spanish colonies and Portuguese Brazil, secured liberty through legal
means more often than men, whether by saving earnings from skilled
work or side hustles to purchase their freedom or by suing to enforce
agreements promising manumission. Such strategies were often aimed at
ensuring that their children would be born free.

THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION

The slave uprising as a form of popular democratic revolution found
its clearest expression in the Haitian Revolution, the only instance
in the Atlantic world in which a slave revolt succeeded in
establishing a new independent nation-state. Jean-Jacques Dessalines,
who rose from slavery to become a revolutionary leader and later
emperor of Haiti, inspired Hazareesingh’s title when he declared:
“We have dared to be free, let us have the audacity to remain so by
ourselves and for ourselves.”

The revolution, Hazareesingh points out, drew on a long history of
fugitive communities—known as _marronage_—in Saint-Domingue, the
Caribbean’s leading sugar producer in the 18th century. François
Makandal, a maroon leader who organized a far-reaching resistance
network in the 1750s, epitomized this tradition.

Combining his knowledge of Islam and expertise in botany and healing,
Makandal launched a campaign to poison slave owners, livestock, and
water supplies across plantations, with the aim of weakening colonial
control and preparing the ground for a broader revolt. He also held
nocturnal gatherings where fellow travelers danced and listened to his
speeches. As Hazareesingh recounts, Makandal used “colored scarves
to convey [his] thoughts,” including “olive or yellow to evoke the
experiences of the [Indigenous] Taíno people.”

Makandal’s wife, Brigitte, and several other women played key roles
in the conspiracy as poisoners and spiritual practitioners. Although
French forces ultimately uncovered the plot, it left a lasting mark.
When a new uprising began to take shape in 1791, it bore the hallmarks
of what Hazareesingh calls “Makandalism.”

In August of that year, rebel leaders Dutty Boukman and Cécile
Fatiman held a ceremony at Bois-Caïman to mobilize insurgents.
Hazareesingh traces the extraordinary growth of these revolutionary
forces: the insurgents initially numbered around 1,500; within six
weeks, their ranks had swelled to 50,000, and by late November, to
80,000.

Among the leaders of the uprising was Toya Montou, a Dahomean warrior.
While enslaved on a plantation, she mentored a young man named
Jean-Jacques. Toya led a group of rebels into battle until she was
captured. And her protégé? He later became known as the fearsome
Jean-Jacques Dessalines.

THE COSTS OF EMANCIPATION

The Haitian Revolution and War of Independence marked a turning point
in the struggle against slavery in three key respects. First, the
revolutionaries proved that resistance could achieve liberation and
give rise to a sovereign state with a constitutional commitment to
anti-colonialism and anti-slavery.

Second, the Revolution inspired enslaved people far beyond Haiti. News
of it spread as an “oral and visual tradition,” carried by
sailors, soldiers, and print across the Atlantic, prompting plans for
uprisings. Nat Turner’s rebellion in southeastern Virginia, for
example, was set for August 21, 1831
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40th anniversary of the Revolution’s beginning.

As I detail in my book _The Bonds of Freedom_
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similar patterns emerged in Brazil, where widespread insurgent
planning in 1848 included “observations about the current state of
Brazil, disapproving of slavery, and pondering its consequences,”
such as a Saint-Domingue-style revolt. During the US Civil War, the
54th Massachusetts Regiment—nearly one-quarter of whose Black
soldiers were formerly enslaved—included a company known as
Toussaint’s Guards. Its officers included the sons of the
abolitionists Martin Delany and Frederick Douglass. Delany, fittingly,
named his son Toussaint.

Third, Haiti provoked an imperial backlash that set a template for
undermining freedom that persists to this day. In 1825, with French
warships off its coast, Haiti accepted France’s terms for diplomatic
recognition, including a 50% reduction in customs duties for French
merchants and an indemnity of 150 million francs to compensate former
colonists for lost land, capital, and enslaved people.

Although the indemnity was eventually negotiated down to 60 million
francs in 1838, it remained an intolerable burden. Haiti’s current
predicament can be partly attributed to individual and institutional
failings, including corruption, but it primarily stems from the way
the French empire kneecapped it from the outset. What country could
function when one-third of its budget is devoted to compensating its
former enslavers and imperial overlords?

Resistance, Hazareesingh argues, calls on us to “honor our debts,”
and France’s debt is substantial. The French, of course, were not
alone: no slaveholding polity compensated enslaved people or their
descendants for the centuries of violence and subjugation they
endured.

While no financial sum could repair that harm, it is becoming
increasingly untenable for institutions to ignore demands for systemic
redress. _Daring to Be Free_ concludes by highlighting a range of
recent and ongoing reparative efforts, from museum exhibits to
activist campaigns. To these we might add affirmative-action quotas
and hard-won constitutional recognition achieved by quilombolas and
their allies in Brazil.

Legal emancipation was achieved only when political authorities,
however reluctantly, acknowledged enslaved people’s demands.
Rebellion forced legislators to confront a stark choice: enact
emancipation by law or risk enslaved people enacting it by force and
triggering all-out war in the colonies.

THE LIMITS OF GRADUALISM

The question, then, is how we should understand the relationship
between resistance and rebellion in slave-based societies and
political movements for legislative change in metropolitan centers.

To be sure, white metropolitan abolitionists had their blind spots.
They tended to favor incremental approaches over immediate
emancipation, seeking first to abolish the slave trade and only later
slavery itself. As Hazareesingh argues, “both the strengths and
limitations of mainstream abolitionism came down to the gradualist
approach” of figures like British abolitionists William Wilberforce
and Thomas Clarkson. While their campaign to abolish the transatlantic
slave trade succeeded, they were “unable to adapt their strategy to
the rise of enslaved resistance in the colonies, and to the
captives’ demands not just to be freed from slavery but to be
empowered.”

Abraham Lincoln followed a similar path, campaigning for the
presidency on a gradualist platform and initially hoping to end the
Civil War by “relying on Northern patriotism” while seeking
“some sort of compromise with the rebels.” He turned to
emancipation only once it became clear that the Confederacy would not
relent, even as thousands of enslaved people were escaping to Union
lines. The Great Emancipator was, in this sense, a reluctant one.

Yet metropolitan campaigns were often innovative. British
abolitionists pioneered activist tactics like mass boycotts and
door-to-door petitioning, while their American counterparts developed
new print cultures and democratic practices. Both movements, closely
connected from the late-18th to the mid-19th centuries, helped forge
long-lasting interracial coalitions.

It may be more useful to see metropolitan abolitionists as aspiring to
the same universal values that drove enslaved people’s resistance,
but at a distance that often led to wildly inconsistent proposals.
Within a few short years, for example, the British abolitionist
Granville Sharp both advocated enforced apprenticeship for enslaved
people to prepare them for liberty and devised a republican
constitution grounded in popular sovereignty for a settlement of freed
people in Sierra Leone.

Nor was metropolitan abolitionism simply paternalistic. Sharp
personally rescued 11 people from slavery, while the Quaker
abolitionist Elizabeth Heyrick argued that compensation should go
“in the first instance… to the slave, for his long years of
uncompensated labor, degradation, and suffering.” Such arguments
drew on ideas of justice and the rule of law that British radicals had
articulated since the mid-17th century and contributed to the growth
of modern liberalism. Some rebels were prepared to accept these
terms—equality before the law and government by consent—but others
demanded more.

As Hazareesingh observes in the book’s final chapter, the
“symbolic connection between slave insurgency and post-colonial
independence” reverberated throughout modern history. While such
links can be traced to 16th-century uprisings against Portuguese
colonialism in São Tomé, they became truly global in the mid-20th
century.

A USABLE PAST

_Daring to Be Free_ covers a breathtaking range of historical
examples, from the “rich mélange of patriotism and
pan-Africanism” in Haitian vodou songs to activist organizations
like Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association and the
Pan-African Congresses, as well as national commemorations in Brazil
and the US. Fittingly, the chapter ends with the story of Le Morne
Brabant in Mauritius, once known as a “maroon republic” and now a
UNESCO World Heritage Site.

One of Hazareesingh’s most striking insights is the divide between
former imperial metropoles and colonies in how slave resistance has
been taken up as a “usable past.” In many post-colonial societies,
it serves as a foundation for sovereignty and a lens through which to
understand ongoing injustices. By contrast, in former metropoles like
France and the United Kingdom, the significance of this history is
often downplayed.

By moving beyond the reconstructionist-modern dichotomy, Hazareesingh
offers a richer, more pluralistic account of how universal ideals can
be achieved, rooted in political practices developed by enslaved
people that realized the values of democracy, equality, and fairness
espoused by modern nation-states. As he puts it, “anti-slavery
arguments advanced by captives rested on claims that their subjugation
was based on coercion rather than free choice, and that their freedom
stemmed from their right to full membership of the societies in which
they lived—essential democratic principles.”

Crucially, the struggle did not end with legal emancipation. Freed
people and their descendants continued to face exclusion through
segregation, economic deprivation, and delayed political independence.
They responded by insisting on full equality, demanding the same
rights and protections as other citizens.

Hazareesingh traces this struggle through anti-colonialist
intellectuals such as Aimé Césaire and George Padmore, as well as
through acts of public memory. Discussing the Paris statue
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of the captured Guadeloupean insurgent Solitude, believed to have been
executed the day after she gave birth in 1802, he highlights how the
monument reconfigures public space and calls attention to the ongoing
pursuit of universal values.

But the true radicalism of resistance and rebellion lies beyond the
limits of formal state recognition. It can be found in the highly
decentralized, egalitarian structures pioneered in places like
Palmares, which rejected the assumption that universal ideals required
either a coercive state or a capitalist global economy. It endures in
the radical imagination that forges solidarity across boundaries of
race, religion, gender, language, and nationality, and in the
struggles for reparations and restitution. It also lives in artworks
that place Black figures at the center rather than the margins, and in
the clave rhythms that captive people carried from Africa to the
Americas and used to create music genres like salsa and hip-hop.
Listen closely, and you can still hear it calling.

_SUDHIR HAZAREESINGH, _DARING TO BE FREE: REBELLION AND RESISTANCE OF
THE ENSLAVED IN THE ATLANTIC WORLD
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(FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX, NEW YORK; ALLEN LANE, LONDON
2025). _BLACK SPARTACUS: THE EPIC LIFE OF TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE
[[link removed]] _(ALLEN
LANE, 2020)._

_JAKE SUBRYAN RICHARDS, Assistant Professor of International History
at the London School of Economics and Political Science, is the author
of __The Bonds of Freedom: Liberated Africans and the End of the Slave
Trade_
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University Press, 2025)._

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