Out of the House of Bondage, first published in 1986, focuses not on slave rebellions, which were of crucial importance but not common occurrences, but on the day-to-day patterns of resistance that directly affected the lives of slaves. It examines acts of resistance in both the Americas and Africa, and widens the study of runaways and resistance and uses runaways as a means to further analyse slavery and the wider slave population.

Slave rebellions have been studied in considerable detail, but this volume examines other patterns of slave resistance, concentrating on runaway slaves and the communities some of them formed. These essays show us who the runaways were, suggest when and where they went, and who harboured them.