ABSTRACT
From the moment the institution of slavery established its first toeholds in the Americas, the enslaved engaged in struggle against it. Their struggles were guided by personal and group histories, by their places of origin, their ages and genders, their work skills and regimens, their spiritual practices, the alliances they could fashion, the temperaments and resources of their owners, the geopolitical location of their captivity, and, of course, the wider historical context. The historian Hilary McD. Beckles can therefore write, in reference to the British West Indies, of the slaves’ “two hundred year war” against slavery (Beckles, 1988).
