‘There’s This Whole Other Story’: Inside the Fight to End Slavery in the Americas | books

TThe Great Resistance is Carrie Gibson’s third book, and the third on the history of the Americas, plural. It follows Crossroads of Empire: A History of the Caribbean from Columbus to the Present Day, from 2014, and El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America, published five years later. The subtitle of the new book refers to its roots in the first two books: The 400-Year Struggle to End Slavery in the Americas.

“I was guided by my curiosity and my frustration as well,” Gibson said of how she was able to retell that four-century-long battle in more than 500 engaging pages.

“A lot of what is known about the rise of slavery, the slavery system, the end of slavery, tends to be in the English-speaking world. So Anglophone historiography looks at the United States, it looks at Jamaica, but there’s a whole other story.”

“I’ve spent a lot of time in Cuba, so I write about the Spanish-speaking world and the Spanish Empire, and then there’s slavery in Brazil, which is a whole other thing. And when you’re in scholarship, it’s linguistically divided. I wanted to bring it all together. I wanted to see what it looked like.”

Gibson has traveled extensively: from the American South, she moved to London, wrote and edited for The Guardian, then went to Cambridge for a doctorate centered on the Haitian Revolution of the late 18th century, a landmark event in the struggle for freedom. She now resides in South Korea, and refuses to stick to the usual paths.

“There has been a huge, historic shift,” Gibson said. “In the last 20 or 30 years, there has been much more attention paid to the movement by enslaved people to gain their freedom, versus white abolition, which has received a lot of attention for a long time, certainly in Britain.”

The Great Resistance recounts such attempts for freedom. Most of them involve desperate acts of violence. The book begins in a nightmare.

“The road to freedom is strewn with corpses,” Gibson writes. “Some of them lie in the dark depths of the sea, like the ‘Hundred Men Slaves’.” [who] From the Prince of Orange “I jumped overboard” during a quiet evening in March 1737… “I decided to die,” and after at least 33 ships had succeeded, “I sank straight down.”

It happened in the Caribbean near the island of St. Kitts, which was disputed by Britain and France. 360 enslaved people were on board the ship, bound for Virginia, from Bonny in what is now Nigeria.

“It’s definitely a dark book,” Gibson said. “But I didn’t want to delve too much into the violence that enslaved people endured, because I feel like there’s a lot of that in other books, and there’s also criticism about white voyeurism, and violence against black bodies.

“If you read books about the history of the plantation, or the rise of slavery, it’s a terrible, violent story. But so is the story of freedom. What I’ve tried to do is focus on the actions and reactions of enslaved people trying to reach freedom. So jumping ship — that’s their choice. Or a conspiracy, or a revolution that’s violently suppressed, show that in the context of what they’re trying to do, rather than the arbitrary, horrific violence of the slaves.” order.”

Gibson studies the history of the transatlantic slave trade but does not focus on it. She notes that her closing comments “could direct people to more detailed books about the horrors of the Middle Passage,” the horrific voyages that transported slaves from Africa. She points out that when the Prince of Orange took the route, the ship’s captain did not record the names of the people he transported or those who jumped to their death.

This “really sticks” to Gibson, because in “contemporary accounts of the resistance, they might mention the leader of the group or a few other people, and then it’s just numbers: it’s just, ‘hang 16 slaves,’ a lot of times.”

“Sometimes they put in names so they can make up for the enslaved, but I was always really amazed because in academic practice now, there’s so much discussion about archival silence. And I felt in this story that the silence was really loud. Here are these people rebelling against the system and no one knows their names. No one can bother to record their names. They don’t even know what their names are. They don’t even know the names they were given.”

Some names We are Well known. Nannie, the woman who led runaway slaves (“maroons”) into Jamaica and forced a treaty with the British, in 1740. Denmark Facey, who rebelled in South Carolina in 1822. Nat Turner, who fought in Virginia in 1831. Black activists are also present: US giants like Frederick Douglass, and lesser-known names like Robert Wedderburn and Olauds Equiano, activists in 18th-century Britain And the nineteenth.

Notable figures outside the Anglosphere include Lourenço da Silva Mendonça, “a member of the royal family of Bongo-Andongo, part of what was then the Kingdom of Kongo”, who in the 1680s became, under his European name, “one of the first abolitionists in Africa”. After Mendonça was forced to return to Brazil, he returned to Europe to fight for freedom, eventually presenting his case at the Vatican in Rome, “anticipating”[ing] The contemporary struggle for human rights.

Among the violent conflicts, there is of course Haiti and its successful revolution against French rule, led by Toussaint Louverture, a great figure in black history. Born enslaved, as a free man, Louverture “purchased at least one slave, and while renting the coffee plantation owned by his brother-in-law, he supervised another 13 slaves.” As Gibson points out, the war against slavery was never clean, and “noble sentiments” often “gave way to economic realities.”

Less well-known cases include that of Mahoma Gardo Bakakwa, who was transported from modern Benin to Brazil in the 1840s, brutalized, then transported to Rio “and almost bought by a colored man.” In an account of his life published in New York in 1854, after his escape, Pacaqua said he related this close sale “to shew that the possession of slaves is born of power, and any one who has the means of purchasing another creature of petty malice, may become a slave-owner, whatever his color, creed, or country.”

Gibson found Paquaqua “in the course of researching this book. He’s not well known, like Frederick Douglass, like Nat Turner… We don’t have any records of his life. We don’t know what this guy was doing.” Like many of the people she studied, he proved “very difficult to track.”

Well aware that readers “want simple novels”, Gibson said the challenge of explaining terribly complex facts was “really frustrating being a historian at the moment. Publishing is grappling with the loss of nonfiction to ‘romanticism’ and escapism and so on. If you want this book to be a really happy story, it’s not. I haven’t even gotten into the afterlife of slavery. Only that the practice and the institution is over.” [with abolition in Brazil, in 1888] We live with an afterlife and that’s not quite resolved.

Gibson believes that one of the lasting effects of slavery in the United States is societal violence.

“You needed a culture of violence to suppress slave revolts, to force people to work, to stop runaways. I think there is a legacy that has not yet been dealt with. Why do you think there are guns in America?” from Do you think she was used to? At first, it wasn’t about killing bears in the West. The goal was to suppress and maintain order in the East. First, it was obviously the killing of Native Americans. Then the need for weapons to keep the British away [founding myth of US gun-rights lobby] It was the least of the worries.

“One thing I learned in writing this book is the castle in South Carolina [a leading military college] It was the result of fear of Denmark’s Vesey revolution. There is a statue of Denmark Vesey in this park in Charleston which is not too far from the castle. “The whole point of founding the castle was, ‘Oh, we can never let this kind of conspiracy happen again.'”

Another enduring factor in the history of slavery, in the Caribbean and South America in particular, is sugar: it was grown by Europeans using the forced labor of Africans and indigenous people every bit with the same brutality with which slaves were treated in the cotton fields of the southern United States.

For Gibson, sugar was “cocaine at the time. No one needed sugar. Cotton, well, it was a staple. Clothes were made of it. But no one needed sugar. Arguably, no one really needed the staples of the Caribbean: sugar, coffee, chocolate, cocoa, on some islands, and in Mexico and South America, indigo. Indigo had industrial uses or was used in death, but if you look at the staples, most of them were strictly luxuries.”

“This intersects with knowledge and increased awareness of commodities throughout history, luxury goods, and the rise of consumer society. Sugar is really toxic, and we’re all addicted to it, and the world is obese because of it, and that’s what I find so extraordinary: all these people who suffered so much for something that no one needed. For me, if there was a starting point for the modern world, it’s this.”