Available From UC Press

Voices of Liberty argues that Black revolutionaries' fight for freedom directly challenged the ideological architects of British imperialism, whose narratives of liberty endeavored to silence Black people by defining abolitionism as a white enterprise. The book privileges the voices of Black people who rejected both chattel bondage and colonial authority in their radical pursuit of emancipation. In recounting the context, progress, and consequences of enslaved rebellions across the West Indies, Latin America, and Africa in the nineteenth century, Lewis Eliot spotlights the human struggles at the intersection of abolitionist and imperialist ideologies in the Atlantic world.

“Lewis Eliot establishes very convincingly that, even at their best, British abolitionists paid scant regard to the views of enslaved people, and that in the post-emancipation period abolitionism became a tool of British foreign policy. Eliot's exploration of this important phase of British antislavery is articulated with admirable clarity and a wealth of new information and presented in a compelling historical narrative.”—Brycchan Carey, author of The Unnatural Trade: Slavery, Abolition, and Environmental Writing, 1650–1807“Voices of Liberty brings into relief the several organized rebellions across the Americas that contributed to the ending of the colonial slavery system. Whilst each rising was defined by the specifics of geography and chronology, together they were part of the same cord of Black freedom, an argument satisfactorily made in this accessible study on the foundations of Black radical traditions.”—Matthew Smith, author of Liberty, Fraternity, Exile: Haiti and Jamaica After Emancipation