For more than four centuries, enslaved people across the Americas, from the United States and the Caribbean to Brazil, fought any way they could to gain their freedom. For the first time, their dramatic stories are gathered in one sweeping narrative that offers a message of inspiration in our own time. “Among the emancipators are the millions whose stories will never be known. They lived the struggle. They were the great resistance.” Thus does acclaimed historian Carrie Gibson conclude her magisterial chronicle of four centuries of effort by enslaved people in the western hemisphere to gain their freedom. “Freedom is an idea,” she writes, and the actions of the thousands who fought to escape slavery made clear that “freedom had to be for everyone, otherwise it was a lie.” The horrific enslavement by Europeans of twelve million Africans taken to the Americas has been widely written about, and important individual slave revolts have been recorded; but Gibson tells a larger story, portraying the multitude of freedom struggles across the entire hemisphere—from North America to the Caribbean to Brazil—as one long-running quest for freedom. From the first African revolt in 1521 on the island of Hispaniola, to the 18 th -century Maroon Wars on Jamaica and the revolution that gave Haiti its independence, and thousands of smaller acts of defiance in between, Gibson vividly chronicles the continuum of resistance that eventually ended the slave trade and, with Brazil’s decision in 1888, the institution of slavery itself. This was the most diverse ongoing insurrection the world has ever known, and the way it was responded to shaped every nation in the Americas in meaningful ways. “If scholars were to emphasize the efforts of the enslaved more than the condition of slavery,” historian Vincent Brown has written, “we might at least tell richer stories about how the endeavors of the weakest and most abject have at times reshaped the world.” With its deep scholarship and rich narrative, The Great Resistance is a major contribution to the literature around slavery and freedom and, in our time, a tribute to the persistence of the human spirit to overcome even the darkest of circumstances. Praise for The Great Resistance : "Gibson [is] offering a new intellectual and political perspective on the emergence of freedom in the modern world. A generation ago, foundational works on the history of antislavery movements tended to focus on political thinkers and prominent abolitionists, figures who left ample written records behind. But over the past several decades, scholars have made headway in piecing together the ideas and actions of resistance leaders . . . In the U.S., debates about how to understand our experience of slavery and its ultimate demise are as intense as ever, and will continue to be at the core of broader questions about how to narrate our national story . . . Gibson invites us to see ourselves as inheritors of something much broader too: a powerful history of political thought and on-the-ground resistance—in many forms, always against seemingly insurmountable odds—that stretched across continents and centuries."— Laurent Dubois, Atlantic “Impressive . . . a narrative history brimming with action . . . [Gibson] places the history of Atlantic slavery into broader context by beginning her study in the ancient world . . . Those who made up what Ms. Gibson calls the great resistance ultimately drove the movement toward emancipation for the millions yearning to be free."— Wall Street Journal “ The Great Resistance , an expansive new book by author and historian Carrie Gibson, brings together often unheard narratives to tell the bigger picture of a difficult time . . . In the last 20 or 30 years there’s become a lot more interest in the movement by enslaved people to get their own freedom, versus white abolitionism, which for a long time, certainly in Britain, received a lot of attention. The Great Resistance recounts such attempts for freedom.“— Guardian " The Great Resistance isn’t yet another book about the conditions of slavery, but about slave resistance, mainly armed resistance, in the Americas . . . Academic historical writing for mass-market publication must maintain a balanced walk atop an intellectual fence—careful not to fall off into dry-as-dust academic minutiae on one side, or overly simplistic popularization on the other. Gibson steps carefully and doesn’t tumble into either excess . . . Though her research is vigorous and detailed, Gibson knows how to make complex topics and scenarios accessible to a general audience."— Winnipeg Free Press “Don't let its size scare you. Its comprehensiveness makes the time it'll take to read worth it.“— Philadelphia Tribune “[A] magisterial account . . . 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 , s