Daring to Be Free

An Amazon Best History Title of the Month

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 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. In Daring to Be Free, Sudhir Hazareesingh recasts the story of slavery's end by showing that the enslaved themselves were at the center of 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, which involved entire communities, with women often at the heart of the story as warriors and organizers of radical change.

Daring to Be Free shows how the struggle for freedom was shaped less by Western Enlightenment 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 history reclaims abolition for those who fought to liberate themselves.