Sublime

Even the chiefs who sold Africans into slavery could not have had any idea that this slavery was meant to endure forever, or for at least a thousand years. Nothing in the savage experience could have prepared them for such an idea, any more than they could conceive of the land as something to be bought and sold.

They are making the discovery that no amount of dollars can remove the inherent destructiveness of welfare institutions, once the professional hierarchies of these institutions have convinced society that their ministrations are morally necessary.

In a groundbreaking 2010 study,

a feat of exploration that would win him the Patron’s Medal from the Royal Geographical Society.

every culture teaches us to honor its way while subtly denigrating other cultures.

The white man behind it was Elihu Embree, an iron manufacturer and former slave owner who had evolved, at age thirty, into an abolitionist. Elihu mailed his newspapers to Southern politicians, intent on persuading them to end the horrors of slavery.

Hawthorne was more worried about whites than blacks, but he understood the larger political problem that would become true: you can outlaw slavery, but not enslavement.

Over the course of the twentieth century, Haitians, escaping poverty and unrest, sought refuge in the Bahamas as well. It was and remains a deeply stratified place, sitting at a crossroads, with the global elites and their tax havens at the top and poor Haitians living in shanties at the bottom. It is one of the tragic ironies of global history tha

The weakest and most opportunistic people in a wild tribe were those who prospered under the white man—a fact no less true because Lewis Moon, in their conversation that night in Madre de Dios, had made this point.