المقاومة الكبرى .. الكفاح الذي دام 400 عام لإنهاء العبودية في الأمريكتين

For more than four centuries, enslaved people throughout the Americas, from the United States and the Caribbean to Brazil, fought tooth and nail for their freedom. For the first time, their poignant stories are gathered into one comprehensive narrative with a message of inspiration for our time. “Among the liberators are millions whose stories have never been told. They lived the struggle. They were the Great Resistance.” Thus distinguished historian Carrie Gibson concludes her fascinating chronicle of four centuries of the efforts of enslaved people in the Western Hemisphere to gain their freedom. “Freedom is an idea,” she writes, and the actions of thousands who struggled to escape slavery made clear that “freedom must be for all, otherwise it is a lie.” Much has been written about the horrific enslavement inflicted by Europeans on the twelve million Africans transported to the Americas, and significant individual slave revolts have been recorded; But Gibson tells a broader story, depicting multiple freedom struggles across the hemisphere—from North America to the Caribbean to Brazil—as a long-term journey toward freedom. From the first African revolt of 1521 on the island of Hispaniola, to the eighteenth-century Maroon Wars in Jamaica and the revolution that granted Haiti its independence, and thousands of smaller acts of defiance in between, Gibson vividly chronicles the continuity of resistance that eventually ended the slave trade and, with the Brazilian Decision of 1888, the institution of slavery itself. This was the most diverse and sustained uprising the world had ever known, and how it was dealt with greatly affected every nation in the Americas. “If scholars had focused more on the efforts of the enslaved than on the condition of slavery itself,” historian Vincent Brown wrote, “we would at least be able to tell richer stories about how the endeavors of the weakest and most miserable people sometimes reshaped the world.” With its in-depth research and rich narrative, The Great Resistance is a valuable addition to the literature on slavery and freedom and, in our time, a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit in overcoming even the darkest of circumstances.