The Great Resistance

By: Carrie Gibson

Narrated by: Leon Nixon

“[A] magisterial account . . . Gibson constructs a sweeping vision of resistance to slavery as a defining element of Western history that made “abstract concepts of freedom concrete.” Expansive and elegant, this is a marvel.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Among the emancipators are the millions whose stories will never be known. They lived the struggle. They were the great resistance.” declares Carrie Gibson in her epic chronicle of four centuries of effort by enslaved people in the western hemisphere to gain their freedom. “Freedom is an idea,” she writes, and the actions of the thousands who fought to escape slavery made clear that “freedom had to be for everyone, otherwise it was a lie.”

The horrific enslavement by Europeans of twelve million Africans taken to the Americas has been widely documented, and important individual slave revolts have been recorded; but Gibson tells a larger story, portraying the multitude of freedom struggles across the entire hemisphere as one long-running quest for emancipation. From the first African revolt in 1521 on the island of Hispaniola, to the eighteenth-century Maroon Wars on Jamaica and the revolution that gave Haiti its independence, among thousands of smaller acts of defiance in between, Gibson vividly chronicles the continuum of resistance that eventually ended the slave trade and, with Brazil’s decision in 1888, the institution of slavery itself in the Americas.

This was the most diverse ongoing insurrection the world has ever known, and the response to this movement shaped every nation in the Americas in meaningful ways. “If scholars were to emphasize the efforts of the enslaved more than the condition of slavery,” historian Vincent Brown has written, “we might at least tell richer stories about how the endeavors of the weakest and most abject have at times reshaped the world.” With its deep scholarship and rich narrative, The Great Resistance is a major contribution to the literature around slavery and freedom and, in our time, a tribute to the persistence of the human spirit to overcome even the darkest of circumstances."