A people who do not believe land can be owned by individuals not only cannot contract to sell it, they cannot be said to have a government, because government only exists to protect property.

All men, Locke argued, are born equal, with a natural right to life, liberty, and property; to protect those rights, they erect governments by consent. Slavery, for Locke, was no part either of a state of nature or of civil society. Slavery was a matter of the law of nations, “nothing else, but the state of war continued, between a lawful conqueror

Archbishop Isidore of Seville, writing an encyclopedia called the Etymologiae that circulated widely in manuscript—as many as a thousand handwritten copies survive—had drawn the world as a circle surrounded by oceans and divided by seas into three bodies of land, Asia, Europe, and Africa, inhabited by the descendants of the three sons of Noah:

Twenty Englishmen were elected to the House of Burgesses. Twenty Africans were condemned to the house of bondage.

Artists working for the sixteenth-century mestizo Diego Muñoz Camargo illustrated the Spanish punishment for native converts who abandoned Christianity.

To build his case against the king, Coke dusted off a copy of an ancient and almost entirely forgotten legal document, known as Magna Carta (literally, the “great charter”), in which, in the year 1215, King John had pledged to his barons that he would obey the “law of the land.”

But if James’s divine right to rule was questioned by dissenters who fled his authority, it was being questioned, too, on the floor of Parliament.

the whole body of a people, in the same boat—they signed a document in which they pledged to “covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic.”25 They named their agreement after their ship. They called it the Mayflower Compact.

Nature takes one toll, malice another. History is the study of what remains, what’s left behind,