How enslaved people fought for freedom across the Atlantic

Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. From armed uprisings to the hidden power of ritual song and solidarity, the story of enslaved peoples' resistance is far richer and more radical than has often been told. In this episode, Sudir Hazari Singh speaks to Danny Bird about his new book Daring to Be Free, which draws on fragmentary archives and oral traditions to highlight the forgotten people who resisted their enslavers, explored the global reverberations of the Haitian Revolution, and revealed the central role of women in shaping struggles for freedom. Sidir, your book begins with the story of Solitude in Guadeloupe. Why did you choose to start with her and what does she represent about the wider history of resistance among enslaved people?

Thanks, Danny. So Solitude inaugurates the book, as it were, for a number of reasons. One is that hers is the first statue of a black woman to be put up in Paris and relatively recently, it's just a few years ago. But I think I also chose her because her role in the struggle, in the anti slavery struggle in general, and in the even in the anti slavery struggle in Guadeloupe, in her native island, was long ignored. So she was a very good symbol of the story that I was trying to tell, namely,

Slave resistance was something that was long, that was ongoing, and that it had many anonymous unsung heroes and and heroines, and she's a very symbolic figure, because like many of the people that I write about in the book, we don't know very much about her, we don't know her exact date of birth, we know that her mother was was raped by a sailor during the Middle Passage. So she was born in Guadeloupe sometime in the second half of the eighteenth century. She then became emancipated. Guadeloupe, I should say, was a French colony, so in 1794 all French colonies abolished slavery, so solitude became a free woman.

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