How have enslaved peoples been able to resist slavery and what forces have shaped the forms of that resistance?

Résumé du document

The institution of slavery was particularly humiliating and dehumanizing for those who had to endure it, therefore slaves have constantly resisted throughout history. Resistance can be defined as "an organized collective action, which aims at affecting the distribution of power in a community.? This phenomenon may have taken various and different forms that were either more or less active and violent. Among the "non-violent? forms of resistance, one can notice lies, breaking of tools, acts of sabotage, runaways, and protests against the overseer or ignorance of the rules. Some slaves are thus famous for having resisted to their masters

Extraits

[...] Such movements were not always easy to organize since slaves were not often educated. Many of them did not know how to read or to write: “given the gross imbalance of power in slave societies, historians tend to regard the formation of slave plots and especially slave revolts as remarkable achievements.”[7] This last aspect certainly explains why the revolts leaders were often domestic slaves or privileged ones: “Many of the leaders who emerged during the [Haïtian] revolution came from the privileged slave strata.”[8] Bibliography -Herbert Aptheker, American Negro and Slave Revolts New York, International Publishers -Eugene D. [...]

[...] After many campaigns headed by the Dutch or the Portuguese in order to destroy it, the Quilombo dos Palmares finally fell in 1696. Nevertheless, other quilombos were luckier and, nowadays, there are still communities that come from former quilombos in Surinam. Armed revolts were also frequent and they frightened the slaveholders since they could have been very violent[2]. Important rebellions occurred in 1816 in Barbados, in 1823 in Demerara and in 1831 in Jamaica. Revolts in the Caribbean or in South America involved many more people than those in the United States. [...]

[...] The main factors they stressed were: divisions within masters, dense concentration of slaves, an advantageous terrain, a master absenteeism and openings for the creation of effective leaderships. The terrain may actually explain why slave revolts occurred more often in South America than they did in the United States. Free land became scarce very early in the US and slaves had thus nowhere to go. It was much easier for them to hide in the Amazonian forest and to found quilombos there. [...]

[...] However, there is historical evidence that, even in the US, the Southern States dealt with that problem because South needed new lands in order to lessen the danger of revolt by checking the concentration of Negroes within a limited area.”[5] It was indeed a very important issue in the minds of the local leaders at that time. Furthermore, the divisions among the Europeans and the slave owners are said to have been a major factor in the success of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804). This movement has been the single successful one: Haitians managed to free themselves from the European domination and the slaveholders' one. They also established an independent state, which banned slavery. [...]

[...] It occurred between 73 and 71 BCE within the Roman Empire. One can notice two other important revolts that occurred during the History: the Revolt of the Zanj between 868 and 883 and the Domingue revolution between 1791 and 1804. Many rebellions occurred in the Americas but were less successful than the Haitian revolt. In South America, on the other hand, one could find communities gathering escaped slaves: they were usually called quilombos. If slave resistance has taken various forms, some specific factors such as divisions within masters, dense concentration of slaves or an advantageous terrain may explain their diversity. [...]