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“These eleven Indians, with a resolution perhaps without example, possessed themselves almost in an instant of the quarterdeck of a ship mounting sixty-six guns, with a crew of near five hundred men,” the report noted. It was one of hundreds of documented slave rebellions and indigenous insurrections that had taken place in the Americas—true mutinies. As the historian Jill Lepore has noted, occupied peoples had “revolted again and again and again,” asking the “same question, unrelentingly: By what right are we ruled?”
But it is precisely such unthinking complicity that allows empires to endure. Indeed, these imperial structures require it: thousands and thousands of ordinary people, innocent or not, serving—and even sacrificing themselves for—a system many of them rarely question.
