Women, resistance, truancy

In this video, Dr Tara Inniss of the University of the West Indies explains how enslaved people could resist slavery by refusing to work, making themselves absent and ‘going-slow’. These seemingly minor or ‘passive’ forms of resistance were one way a community of enslaved people could work together to hinder the system of slavery in the British Caribbean.

Dr Tara Inniss is one of the leaders of a project examining the history of ‘Barbados Runaways’ through newspaper advertisements, community engagement workshops and artistic interventions. The project has digitised and made publicly available hundreds of pages of the newspapers, Barbados Mercury and Bridgetown Gazette (1783-1848) and The Barbadian (1822-1861) through a British Library Endangered Archives Grant.