Patterns in Slave Resistance and Rebellion

“The era of Atlantic slavery began a decade after the arrival of the Spanish in the Caribbean in 1492, with the introduction of enslaved Africans into the island of Hispaniola.” Already, on page 2 of Sudhir Hazareesingh’s Daring to Be Free, the reader knows that we are far from the world of scholarship. There is a long history of slavery in the Atlantic world, from the Vikings to the Moroccans, and, nearer to the author’s targets, large-scale Portuguese-run African plantation slavery on Madeira in the fifteenth century. Furthermore, slavery and the slave trade were practiced in sub-Saharan Africa prior to the Europeans, and the trans-Saharan slave trade was extensive. If Hazareesingh were interested in context, he might have liked to compare, for example, the Spaniards in the sixteenth century with the Moroccan force that crossed the Sahara, overthrew the Songhay Empire in 1591, and, with its creation of the Pashalik of Timbuktu, strengthened one of the major axes of this trade. Unfortunately, this is not a book that grasps at context, possibly because the author does not wish to engage with the multiple strands of slavery in world history.

Instead, the preface has given us the template for the book: “The true abolitionists were the enslaved men and women in Africa and the Americas who refused their domination and fought for their freedom.” Well, no. The reality is much more complex, and Hazareesingh does not address the range of factors that led to the decline of slavery, for example in the largest slave state in the Americas, Brazil, a decline that anticipated abolition.

And just in case we were uncertain about the author’s position on past, present, and future, we can turn to the book’s conclusion: “The paradigm of democratic inclusion during the Age of Revolutions was neither America nor France, but Saint-Domingue.” We also learn that we can draw “on the rich tradition of African-American emancipatory writing” to “reflect on . . . the racism and dispossession experienced by the Palestinian people since 1948,” and we should struggle for “reparatory justice,” whatever that means apart from opportunities for aggrandizement by lobbyists and politicians.

There is of course an extensive and often excellent literature on slave resistance. I would particularly recommend Vincent Brown’s Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (2020). Hazareesingh draws also on much of his own work, and notably so for Saint-Domingue, which he discussed at greater length in his biography of Toussaint L’Ouverture, Black Spartacus (2020), which I reviewed for the British magazine The Critic in 2021. He emphasizes the extent to which revolution there had an impact elsewhere, presenting it as “a symbol of black empowerment.”

Hazareesingh also has an interesting discussion of uprisings on slave ships. They did not occur on most, but the prospect of uprisings ensured that the crew was considerably larger than on merchant ships of similar sizes. This requirement affected the profitability of the trade as, differently, did the high rates of death through disease that owed much to the terrible conditions.

There is also a critique of abolitionism as being underpinned by “a desire to safeguard British imperial interests, and a racialized view of African captives as biologically and culturally inferior beings.” To put it mildly, the approach is problematic.

Cuba and the American Civil War are discussed, followed by the different memorializations of abolitionism, presented according to a dichotomy between official commemoration and the reclaiming of freedom by slaves “in their own terms.” Instructive parallel developments against the slave trade and slavery in the Indian Ocean, Africa, and the Islamic world are neglected, as is the end of serfdom in Russia. This was also an aspect of the more general coercion of labor seen across much of the world for most of its history. To consider the practice of slavery, or indeed the New World slavery of those captured in Africa, as entirely separate from other forms of coerced labor worldwide is not helpful to our understanding of it and can lead to a misleading or even racialized reading of a complex subject.

There are parallels between Hazareesingh’s approach and those commonly taken in politicized discussions of imperialism or, indeed, of political change as a whole. In particular, there is a tension between emphases on “resistance,” however construed, and consideration of the pressures and opinions within the “metropole” or “regime” or “system.” Did, for example, empires end in 1946–75 due to “resistance,” including warfare, or as a consequence primarily of post–World War II exhaustion, the strains of the Cold War, and changing attitudes toward imperialism? And so on with the end of Communism and Soviet control in Eastern Europe and then of the Soviet Union. A scholar might well evaluate different propositions with care, but that seems not to be Hazareesingh’s forte. He is a tutor at Balliol College, Oxford, in politics, not history, but that should still come with a desire to understand the complexities of the past and a rigor in methodology. Certainly the research grants and two-term sabbatical he recorded do not appear to have taken him for long to the nearby National Archives to consider the relative impact of pressures on the British government, military, and economy, as opposed to relying on selective citations; the same could be said for other archives.

In his journeying and reading further afield, he might have liked to consider the extent to which the main form of resistance and of “African agency” was that of African polities, tribes, peoples, or kinship groups fighting others keen to enslave them. Indeed, I originally became interested in the subject in the 1990s during the reevaluation, by myself and others, of the limitations and deficiencies of what had been so glibly referred to as the “Early Modern European Military Revolution,” which suggested the need to reconsider the slave trade from that perspective. The Europeans lacked traction on land in West Africa until the nineteenth century and were checked in Angola, Mozambique, and North Africa as well. Hazareesingh might also have liked to have considered, and notably so for Brazil, the wider significance of the nature of indigenous evasion of enslavement.

Ultimately, this is an intellectually slight book, one written in a dated tradition of worlds in conflict, and without adequate consideration of processes of adaptation, however unequal. Such processes were very present in the slave trade and, more obviously, in the institution of slavery itself. Alongside resistance understood as insurrection, there could be complaints, limited protests, and a great variety in conditions, by individual, employment, and place, across the world of slavery. The transatlantic slave trade Hazareesingh discusses involved cooperation between African and European-American interests, as indeed did the different coordination of interests in the trans-Saharan slave trade.

Hazareesingh’s simplistic, partisan, and strident approach to his subject, past and present, is profoundly depressing as well as misleading. It would be instructive to know whether it went to academic readers before prepublication, but then again, this is not the first such folly produced by Allen Lane, the U.K. publisher that commissioned the work. It is as if the critical faculty traditionally regarded as an aspect of historical scholarship is now just too inconvenient. Hazareesingh is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Common University Fund Lecturer in Politics, a Coolidge Fellow and Senior Fellow at Balliol College, University of Oxford.

Note:  This review first appeared in The New Criterion, Vol. 44, No. 4, December 2025 (https://newcriterion.com/article/trade-gaps/), and is used by the kind permission of Prof. Black and the editors.

Our Reviewer: Jeremy Black, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Exeter, is a Senior Fellow of the Center for the Study of America and the West at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is the author of an impressive number of works in history and international affairs, frequently demonstrating unique interactions and trends among events, including The Great War and the Making of the Modern World, Combined Operations: A Global History of Amphibious and Airborne Warfare, and The War of 1812 in the Age of Napoleon. Works he has previously reviewed here include Empireworld: How British Imperialism Shaped the Globe, Why War?, Seapower in the Post-Modern World, Mobility and Coercion in an Age of Wars and Revolutions, Augustus the Strong, Military History for the Modern Strategist, The Great Siege of Malta, Hitler’s Fatal Miscalculation, Superpower Britain, Josephine Baker’s Secret War, Captives and Companions. A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World, War and Power: Who Wins Wars—and Why, The Pacific’s New Navies, No More Napoleons, Republic and Empire. Crisis, Revolution, America’s Early Independence, The Fate of the Day, The Maginot Line: A New History, and The Nuclear Age. An Epic Race for Arms, Power and Survival

Note: Daring to Be Free is also available in audio & e-editions.

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