Sublime

Recent scholars have argued that the pirate crews that terrorized the West Indies were surprisingly multiracial in their composition, with Africans constituting more than 20 percent of the onboard population.

All these elements combined—an onboard democracy, with separation of powers; equitable compensation plans; insurance policies in the event of catastrophic injuries—meant that a pirate ship in the late 1600s and early 1700s operated both outside the law of European nation-states and, in a real sense, ahead of those laws. The pirates were vanguards a

they committed most of those acts in international waters, where legal jurisdictions were by definition blurry. Declaring that pirates were “enemies of all mankind” gave local authorities on land the legal justification to try them for their crimes, even if those crimes had taken place on the other side of the world.

The Gullah Geechee worked in tandem and in mutual aid. The owners who had had them chained and stacked left them on the island on their own. Owners distanced themselves from the evidence of the fetid hold, the salt-soaked death on their skin, satisfied with the proceeds of their labor: indigo, rice, cotton. This absenteeism was common on the Sea Is

What the White South confronted in the movement era was a paradigm shift. There was a model for sustaining White supremacy: terrorizing Black folks, the dispassionate acquiescence of the White North and the federal government, economic control, and an ideological hold on its ranks managed by humiliation and cruelty. But a model only holds as long a