num_pages: 266
description: If We Must Die examines nearly five hundred shipboard rebellions that occurred over the course of the entire slave trade, directly challenging the prevailing thesis that such resistance was infrequent or insignificant. As Eric Robert Taylor shows, though most revolts were crushed quickly, others raged on for hours, days, or weeks and, occasionally, the Africans captured the vessel and returned themselves to freedom. In recounting these rebellions, Taylor suggests that certain factors, like geographic location, the involvement of women and children, and the timing of a shipboard revolt, determined the difference between success and failure. The author also explores issues like aid from other ships, punishment of slave rebels, and treatment of sailors captured by the Africans. If We Must Die expands the historical view of slave resistance, revealing a continuum of rebellions that spanned the Atlantic as well as the centuries. These uprisings, Taylor argues, ultimately helped limit and end the traffic in enslaved Africans and also served as crucial predecessors to the many revolts that occurred subsequently on plantations throughout the Americas.
language: English
title: If We Must Die: Shipboard Insurrections in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade
titlecomplete: If We Must Die: Shipboard Insurrections in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade (Antislavery, Abolition, And the Atlantic World)
genres: History
ratings_count: 34
series: Antislavery, Abolition, and the Atlantic World
publisher: Louisiana State Univ Pr