Daring to Be Free - by Sudhir Hazareesingh (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A revelatory history of enslaved people's resistance and self-emancipation, across the Atlantic world and beyond.

In the 1720s, the West African chief Tomba was abducted for organizing the local resistance against slave raiders and imprisoned on a British ship, where he promptly led a revolt using a smuggled hammer. In the early nineteenth century, a pregnant woman named Solitude rallied laborers and soldiers to resist Napoleon's efforts to reimpose slavery on Guadeloupe. A few decades later, Frederick Douglass fashioned his own template for self-emancipation. In Daring to Be Free, the acclaimed historian Sudhir Hazareesingh recasts the story of slavery's end by showing that the enslaved themselves were at the center of the action--their voices, their resistance, and their extraordinary fight
for freedom.

Throughout, Daring to Be Free portrays the struggle for liberation from the perspective of the enslaved and, wherever possible, in their own words. It highlights the power of collective action, stressing the role of maroon communities, conspiracies, insurrections, and spiritual movements, from Haiti and Brazil to Cuba, Mauritius, and the American South. These acts of resistance involved entire communities, with women often at the heart of the story as warriors, organizers, and agents of radical change.

Employing written archives and oral history, Daring to Be Free shows how the struggle for freedom was shaped less by Western Enlightenment or Christian ideals than by the enslaved's own spiritual, martial, and cultural resources. Emancipation wasn't handed down by benevolent reformers--it was seized, again and again, by those who demanded freedom. This vital, eye-opening history reclaims abolition for those who fought to liberate themselves.

About the Author

Sudhir Hazareesingh was born in Mauritius. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and has been a fellow and tutor in politics at Balliol College, Oxford, since 1990. His books include The Legend of Napoleon, In the Shadow of the General, How the French Think, and Black Spartacus (winner of the Wolfson History Prize and the American Library in Paris Book Award). In 2020, he became a Grand Commander of the Order of the Star and Key of the Indian Ocean, the highest honor of the Republic of Mauritius.