Enemy of All Mankind Quotes

“If the pirate articles were clear about anything, it was that the act of dividing up the booty was as close to a sacrament as anything else in the code.”
― Steven Johnson, Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt

“Ancient history is always colliding with the present in the most literal sense: our genes, our language, our culture all stamp the present moment with the imprint of the distant past.”
― Steven Johnson, Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt

“Even in the best of times, life aboard a seventeenth-century privateering ship was a challenging and claustrophobic experience. The fact that a community of a hundred or more people could survive on the open seas for months at a time, in a vessel with dimensions not much larger than a tennis court, should go down as one of the great achievements in our long history of creating life-sustaining habitats in fundamentally inhospitable environments.”
― Steven Johnson, Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt

“You have to jump around in time to get the facts right. Linear chronology makes for good popular storytelling, but it doesn’t always capture the deep causes that drive history. Some causes are proximate, in the moment. Some are echoes of distant shock waves, still reverberating a hundred—or a thousand—years later.”
― Steven Johnson, Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt

“Islam’s imperial ambitions to resist. From 1 CE to 1500 CE, no region in the world—including China—had a larger share of global GDP. Its copious supply of pearls, diamonds, ivory, ebony, and spices ensured that India ran what amounted to a thousand-year trade surplus.”
― Steven Johnson, Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt

“We tend to think of grand organizations like corporations or empires coming about through deliberate human planning: designing the conceptual architecture for each imposing structure, brick by brick. But the shape an institution ultimately takes is not so much designed in advance by a master engineer as it is carved away by challenges to its outer boundaries, the way a coastline is partly formed by an endless battering of much smaller waves.”
― Steven Johnson, Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt

“But the innovation that would most transform the subcontinent—and its economic relationship to the rest of the world—did not involve separating the seeds from their fibers; every society that domesticated cotton for textile use ultimately developed some kind of mechanical gin. What made Indian cotton unique was not the threads themselves, but rather their color. Making cotton fiber receptive to vibrant dyes like madder, henna, or turmeric was less a matter of inventing mechanical contraptions as it was dreaming up chemistry experiments. The waxy cellulose of the cotton fiber naturally repels vegetable dyes. (Only the deep blue of indigo—which itself takes its name from the Indus Valley where it was first employed as a dye—affixes itself to cotton without additional catalysts.) The process of transforming cotton into a fabric that can be dyed with shades other than indigo is known as “animalizing” the fiber, presumably because so much of it involves excretions from ordinary farm animals. First, dyers would bleach the fiber with sour milk; then they attacked it with a range of protein-heavy substances: goat urine, camel dung, blood. Metallic salts were then combined with the dyes to create a mordant that permeated the core of the fiber. The result was a fabric that could both display brilliant patterns of color and retain that color after multiple washings.”
― Steven Johnson, Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt