ABSTRACT
During the period that stretched from 1770 to 1830, European empires in the Americas suffered a series of remarkable powerful blows. During this period, enslaved people consistently played pivotal roles in the shape and definition of political change. Of course, resistance to slavery was a permanent feature of slave societies in the Atlantic world and, despite the frequent claims of pro-slavery advocates, they needed neither outside instigators nor radical revolutionary ideas to inspire them to revolt and resistance. But to be successful, slave resistance had to be extremely careful and very strategic. Before the Age of Revolution, some of the most successful forms of resistance involved taking advantage of conflicts between empires, as in the case of slaves who escaped Georgia for Spanish Florida, where they often gained freedom. Starting with the American Revolution, however, the enslaved found a bounty of new opportunities through which they could confront and contest their situation. Abolitionists, meanwhile, also found the changing institutional and political situation propitious for the pursuit of attacks on slavery. For many of those who came to embrace the radical and egalitarian ideas that circulated during this period, slavery increasingly came to seem indefensible and untenable.
