The Great Resistance: The 400-Year Fight to End Slavery in America

Resistance to the Atlantic slave system constituted “perhaps the largest, longest-running, and most diverse ongoing insurrection the world has ever known,” according to this magisterial account from historian Gibson (El Norte). To highlight the continuous and singular nature of the struggle, she tracks it from beginning to end—starting with the initial resistance to the slave trade that took place in Africa, mutinies on slave ships (of “an estimated 36,000 voyages... at least 3,500” had on-board rebellions), and the first slave revolt in the Americas: the 1521 Christmas Day uprising on a plantation owned by a son of Christopher Columbus. The latter, Gibson remarks, “bore the hallmarks of rebellions to come, taking place on a holiday when officials were distracted.” This kind of focus on military strategy suffuses the book, as Gibson points to the ways the resistance learned and adapted. The most important such development was the emergence of “marronage,” wherein enslaved people would abscond to the wilderness, ally with Indigenous people, and launch raids on plantations. Gibson goes on to analyze the Haitian Revolution’s success and its significance to the resistance as a whole (it was a “volcanic explosion” whose “hot ash... ignit[ed] more blazes”), before tracking the arduous path to total abolition. Digesting vast amounts of information, 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. (Jan.)