The Great Resistance
The 400-Year Fight to End Slavery in the Americas
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The Great Resistance
Narrated by:
Leon Nixon
Pre-order for $26.99
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Narrated by:
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Leon Nixon
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By:
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Carrie Gibson
About this listen
For more than four centuries, enslaved people across the western hemisphere, from the United States and the Caribbean to Mexico and Brazil, fought any way they could to gain their freedom: 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. In The Great Resistance, acclaimed historian Carrie Gibson recovers their dramatic stories in one sweeping narrative. Focusing on the thousands of acts of defiance that kept the flame of freedom alive, Gibson vividly chronicles the resistance that eventually ended the slave trade and, with Brazil's abolition in 1888, the institution of slavery itself.
Intertwined with this quest for emancipation were the political revolutions that gave rise to the modern nation-state. At a time when all post-slavery societies face serious questions about social and racial inequality, Gibson provides a radical new interpretation of abolition set amid a sweeping global landscape.
With its deep scholarship and rich narrative, The Great Resistance is a tribute to the persistence of the human spirit to overcome even the darkest of circumstances.©2026 Carrie Gibson
Critic Reviews
Magisterial . . . 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)
Marvellous. Gibson completely rethinks the history of resistance to Atlantic slavery as equivalent in its scale and intensity to slavery itself. Rather than a patchwork of intermittent rebellions, she narrates an unremitting four-hundred-year campaign for freedom, with all the heroism and the compromises that entailed (Alan Lester, Professor of Historical Geography, University of Sussex)
Gibson insists on the primacy of the enslaved themselves as agents of their own liberation, "the true instigators of liberty." A solid contribution to the literature of the New World slave trade (Kirkus Reviews)
Superb! Meticulously researched yet incredibly readable, this is slavery in the Americas as a state of war from beginning to end. The buried histories uncovered in this gripping book centres the story on the enslaved - their agency, dignity and furious resistance. A hugely impressive achievement (Matthew Parker, author of THE SUGAR BARONS)
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