A longread (at, er, Longreads) on pirates and maroons and freedom in the Caribbean during the time of the triangular trade. Like someone went out and did the research legwork on Hakim Bey’s Pirate Utopias.
I like the following paragraph in particular, partly (of course) because I agree closely with its analysis, but also because it’s a fine bit of writing, using Drake as a gateway to the system-of-the-world, and then stepping through the scales in one neat and logical paragraph, all the way out to the abstracts of ideology and economics. Good stuff.
The age suited [Francis Drake]. He exemplifies that entrepreneurial energy unleashed by Queen Elizabeth’s new, partially meritocratic society — energy that had lain dormant for generations under rigid hierarchies. Capitalism was walking on the lanky, jointy, and clumsy limbs of its adolescence, running wild all over the globe, round the Horn of Africa, across the mysterious Atlantic, and finally round South America’s treacherous wave-raising windy cape into the Pacific. Those historians of class conflict, Marx and Engels, thought that these oceanic explorers triggered the modernization of Europe. Capitalism “sprouted from the ruins of feudal society” only when ships opened up trade routes — and markets — between societies hitherto isolated from each other. One does not need to be a Marxist to agree that these bold mariners had to come before factory owners. Before new commodities and new means of producing commodities could be invented, the explorers had to open markets.