Agency of the Enslaved

In Agency of the Enslaved: Jamaica and the Culture of Freedom in the Atlantic World, D.A. Dunkley challenges the notion that enslavement fostered the culture of freedom in the former colonies of Western Europe in the Americas. Dunkley explores the importance of the agency displayed by enslaved people and argues that this formed the real basis of the culture of freedom in the Atlantic societies. These struggles were not for freedom, but for the acknowledgment of the freedom that enslaved people knew was already theirs. This view inspired their attempts to undermine the slave system that the British had established in Jamaica shortly after they captured the island in 1655.