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, the 40th anniversary of the Revolution’s beginning.

As I detail in my book The Bonds of Freedom, 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 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 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York; Allen Lane, London 2025). Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture (Allen Lane, 2020).