ABSTRACT

Major slave revolts, such as those led by Spartacus or Nat Turner or the successful uprising of eighteenth-century Haitian slaves have a prominent place in our thinking about slave resistance. But their very rarity in world history explains the attention given to them. Much more typical were slave societies in which massive and unified slave revolt did not occur, but instead smallscale, day-to-day resistance of the unfree against their owners was endemic. And if more concerted revolt did break out it was usually on a smaller scale and less successful than these well-known examples.