[Peace-discuss] Commons vs. racist divide

[C. G. Estabrook]

[This is an informal piece by Peter Linebaugh, one of the
presenters at the conference "Race, Roots, and Resistance:
Revisiting the Legacies of Black Power" at the UIUC this
weekend. Historian and poet, he now teaches at the University
of Toledo in Ohio; an old friend (we've been fired from the
same university), he was my guest on the WEFT program "From
Bard to Verse" this weekend.  --CGE] 

    Charters of Liberty in Black Face and White Face: 
    Race, Slavery and the Commons
    By Peter Linebaugh
    Published on Mute magazine - Culture and politics 
    after the net (http://www.metamute.org)
    Created 23/11/2005 - 3:29pm

{The Magna Carta is renowned as the 'Charter of Liberty' which
inspired modern constitutional safeguards against the power of
the State. But its smaller companion, the Charter of the
Forest, enshrining the customary rights of the commoners to
land and resources, has been overlooked. Cutting between the
political struggles of the early 1970s and the 1720s, Peter
Linebaugh shows how the struggle against enclosures in the
woods of England is inextricably linked with the struggle
against slavery in the Atlantic.}

I am thinking about revolution and constitution, where the
former means the overthrow of capitalism and the latter means
the ways we re-constitute our governance. Capitalism is the
accumulation of commodities, and the production of surplus
value by means of unpaid labour. Government concerns the rule
of the Many by the Few, a task solved by *divide et impera*
and named the Constitution.

The legal cliché is that the American is a written
constitution, while the English is unwritten. Yet strictly
speaking this is untrue inasmuch as both have stemmed from the
Magna Carta of 1215, 790 years ago.

The Norman and Angevin kings afforested as much as a quarter
of England, making game reserves, monopolising hydrocarbon
energy resources, in zones where the only law was the king’s
pleasure. They were crusaders, in world competition with Jews
and Arabs for the commerce of the Mediterranean, and to launch
such crusades they forced marriages among the barony and took
children hostage, pulled teeth of Jewish money lenders, as
well as squeezing the serfs and villeins dry. Civil war was
the result but cease-fire was obtained with Magna Carta. It
revealed the contradictions: between state and church, between
monarchs and barons, between them and merchants, between all
those three and the commoners who were dependent on forest
resources.

Magna Carta has 63 chapters. It is accompanied by a smaller
charter, the Charter of the Forest with seventeen chapters.
They belong together. They are the two documents printed first
in the book of English law for over five centuries. The most
esteemed commentators, Edward Coke who influenced the 17th
century English Revolution, and William Blackstone who
influenced the 18th century American Revolution, always
treated the two charters as one; the English charters of
liberty. We can follow their precedent.

A word about each. The Magna Carta used to be well known and
what was most well known in it was chapter 39, because four
principles of justice are sometimes derived from it, viz.,
habeas corpus, trial by jury, prohibition of torture, and due
process of law. All of these have been curtailed by the USA
Patriot Act. The Charter of the Forest assumes a notion of the
‘commons’ or a practice of subsistence commoning in the
hydrocarbon energy resources of the time. This important
presupposition is indicated by technical terms, viz., herbage,
assarts, pannage, chiminage, and estovers. Herbage means
grazing for cattle; assarts means clearing trees and grubbing
stumps for gardening or growing grains; pannage means letting
pigs into the woods for mast and nuts; chiminage means no
tolls on the roads and paths; estovers means getting wood for
fuel, for housing, and for tools and implements.

Now, to express these theoretically we might say that they
refer to use-rights rather than to exchange value and thus
they refer to particular, concrete labours rather than
abstract labour with its universal equivalent in money. From
this formulation we might then say they refer to a
pre-capitalist mode of production, or we might say they refer
to those classes of people whose goal in economic life is the
consumption of uses rather than the accumulation of money. In
short, they refer to the Many not the Few.

Considering the two charters, some of their provisions concern
subsistence and some concern government. Some are negative;
they prevent or prohibit arbitrary behavior by armed forces of
the king, such as bailiffs, sheriffs, knights and so forth.
Others are positive; they provide fuel, travel, food, milk,
clothing for commoners. So, like two baskets of law, panniers
on the back of a mule, they have trudged down the centuries,
sometimes hidden from view or apparently stuck in a slough, at
others times requiring a goad to get going again.

There is a third point, the mule can turn around and go the
other way. Both charters were committed to disafforestation,
or the removal of the king’s sole law and the return to
conditions prior to the afforestation of the Norman Conquest.
Energy resources were to be returned or restored and
reparations made for harm done. The King took what did not
belong to him; two centuries later he was made to return it.
Thus, they reversed two hundred years of history making it, so
to speak, go backwards. So much for the self-serving bourgeois
doctrine of progress!

The important difference between English and American
constitutional development is not that one is unwritten and
the other is written. The difference is Africa. American
constitutional and revolutionary history depended, first, on
taking Indian lands, and, second, on maintenance and expansion
of unwaged labour on the plantation where slaves produced
surplus value. This is an 18th century problem, as references
to the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution
make clear, and as the references of the U.S.A. constitution
of 1787 as amended subsequently also makes clear.

In England the protracted struggle to maintain subsistence by
access to the commons, or (to express this dynamically) by
making commons, or commoning, had the unintended consequence
of closing England through the repressive response of the
Parliamentary Enclosure Acts passed between 1760 and 1830.
What was the relationship between, on the one hand, the
expropriation from Africans by the slave trade and the
resistance to enclosures and, on the other hand, the formation
of the working class? This was the problem some of us of ‘the
Warwick School’ set ourselves in the early 1970s. We saw it,
at first, as a problem of ‘crime’. Then we saw it as a problem
of ‘custom’. We did not see it as a problem of ‘colour’, nor
did we treat it as a problem of ‘capitalism’. Certainly, we
failed to see it constitutionally.

To see it as crime was easy enough. George Rudé taught us that
revolutionary crowds were criminalised by
counter-revolutionaries and their historians. E.J. Hobsbawn
taught us that the romanticised criminal, Robin Hood, appears
in the transition into capitalism but not during the
transition out of capitalism. Plus, were not the great
revolutionaries imprisoned, and did not the prisons – Siberia,
Kilmainham, Devil’s Island, Soledad, Robbin’s Island – become
seminaries of truth?

We were conscious of colour, because unpaid labour in America
depended on it. In 1963 James Baldwin published *The Fire Next
Time*, an essay whose wrath anticipated the municipal
rebellions of the future but with a title alluding to the
rainbow sign.1 In 1963 the English translation appeared of
Franz Fanon’s *The Wretched of the Earth* which expressed the
hurricane-like energy of the Third World in general and north
Africa in particular. It warned against black capitalism. That
was also the year of E.P. Thompson’s *The Making of the
English Working Class* whose version of the working class
saved it from Cold War dismissals and whose call to human
agency seemed to revive the nerve of change, as it showed the
autonomous self-activity of workers in the past in strike,
riot, mutiny, and commotion. These American, African, and
English voices were anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist.

Between 1963 and 1968 occurred the great municipal rebellions
in American ghettoes under the slogan of ‘Black power’. How
was a revolutionary class analysis to be made? Though we
understood Black, we were not yet aware of white. We did not
yet understand the DuBois principle of ‘the wages of whiteness’.2

In 1968 after ‘the summer of love’ I drove across the country
from Columbia University anti-war sit-ins to the Berkeley
commune and the bulldozing of People’s Park. We stopped in
Bloomington, Indiana, in whose rare books library I found a
scholarly key to the contradictions besetting the world. It
was yet another book by ‘anonymous’ who in my naiveté I
thought was the most frequently mentioned ‘author’ in the
library card catalogue. ‘Anonymous’ seems to have understood
the problem and here was the answer called The History of the
Blacks of Waltham in Hampshire (1723). I had it photocopied
and then protected by some cardboard covers I made and hinged
with band-aid tape, which I took with me to England where
‘criminality’, Black history, and the English working class
were going to join, I thought, in a grand revolutionary
project. Edward Thompson soon had us formed into a research
collective and I gave Edward my treasured copy of The History
of the Blacks which surely would introduce to England the
‘black power’ discussions which were rocking the USA. Some
years later he returned it, with his marginalia, after it had
helped him get started with Whigs and Hunters (1975) which was
published with Albion’s Fatal Tree (1975).

He wrote a brilliant book about law and the ruling class, but
it was not the book I had dreamed of. It did not lay the axe
to the root. I wanted a book about Africans and commoners. I
would put forward the fact that the poachers defended
commoning, not just by disguising themselves but by disguising
themselves as Negroes, and they did so at Farnham, near the
heart of what became the quintessence of England as Jane
Austen so gently wrote about it, or Gilbert White, the
ornithologist, so carefully observed it, or William Cobbett,
the radical journalist, so persistently fulminated about it.

Round about Farnham timber was wanted for the construction of
men-of-war and East Indiamen which stopped in Portsmouth for
repairs, or were built there from scratch for the purpose of
the globalisation of commodity trade characteristic of the
time. Here’s how a flashpoint in the episodes of the Waltham
Blacks began: ‘Mr. Wingfield who has a fine Parcel of growing
Timber on his Estate near Farnham fell’d Part of it: The poor
People were admitted (as is customary) to pick up the small
Wood; but some abusing the Liberty given, carry’d off what was
not allow’d, which that Gentleman resented; and, as an Example
to others, made several pay for it. Upon which, the Blacks
summon’d the Myrmidons, stripp’d the Bark off several of the
standing Trees, and notch’d the Bodies of others, thereby to
prevent their Growth; and left a Note on one of the maim’d
Trees, to inform the Gentleman, that this was their first
Visit; and that if he did not return the Money receiv’d for
Damage, he must expect a second from … the Blacks.’ This is
not exactly tree-hugging or Indian chipko, though it did have
warrant among local antiquarians in the nineteenth century who
searched for a charter of such commoning. The leader of the
Blacks and ‘15 of his Sooty Tribe appear’d, some in Coats made
of Deer-Skins, others with Fur Caps, &c. all well armed and
mounted: There were likewise at least 300 People assembled to
see the Black Chief and his Sham Negroes….’

Charles Withers, Surveyor-General of Woods, observed in 1729
‘that the country people everywhere think they have a sort of
right to the wood & timber in the forests, and whether the
notion may have been delivered down to them by tradition, from
the times these forests were declared to be such by the Crown,
when there were great struggles and contests about them, he is
not able to determine.’ The Waltham Blacks, they said, ‘had no
other design but to do justice, and to see that the Rich did
not insult or oppress the poor.’ They were assured that the
chase was ‘originally design’d to feed Cattle, and not to
fatten deer for the clergy, &c.’ The central common right was
pasture, ‘common of herbage’ as the Forest Charter says.
Keeping a cow was possible on two acres, and less in a forest
or fen. Half the villagers of England were entitled to common
grazing. As late as the 18th century ‘all or most householders
in forest, fen, and some heathland parishes enjoyed the right
to pasture cows or sheep.’3 So, the Waltham Blacks were class
conscious. There was also an awareness at the time that the
keeping of a cow, essential to the material constitution of
the country, was backed up by charter.

Timothy Nourse denounced commoners at the beginning of the
century. They were ‘rough and savage in their Dispositions.’
They held ‘leveling Principles.’ They were ‘insolent and
tumultuous’ and ‘refractory to Government.’4 In September 1723
Richard Norton, the Warden of the Forest of Bere, wished to
‘put an end to these arabs and banditti.’ The commoner
belonged to a ‘sordid race.’ The commoner was compared to the
Indian, to the savage, to the buccaneer, and to the Arab.

The ‘Blacks’ defended the customs of the commoners; the
commoners were both criminalised and racialised in the
discourse of the enclosers, the privatisers, and the big wigs.
There was even the suggestion that attacking them was a sort
of crusade. The Waltham Black Act of 1722 thus became, among
other things, a means of drawing a colour line and
criminalising common right.5

We can put forward as evidence what was neglected in Thompson,
the fact of the African slave trade. Blacking, wrote the
anonymous historian in that treasured pamphlet history,
commenced ‘about the times of general confusion, when the late
pernicious schemes of the South Sea Company boure all things
down before them, and laid waste what the industry and good
husbandry of families had gather’d together.’6 The South Sea
Company was a slave trading company, formed a few years
earlier, to take advantage of the asiento or licence to trade
to Spanish America. On September 11, 1713, Royal African
Company congratulated itself on obtaining ‘such advantageous
terms, as never were before granted to the people who
undertook the furnishing of negroes to the Spanish West
Indies.’ The crisis of the commons began as a financial crisis
which itself arose from slaving.

The South Sea Bubble was the wreck of a kind of capitalist
commoning. Thirty years earlier, this new form of commoning
had been produced through developments within English
constitutional governance. During the 1690s sovereign legal
authority (King-in-Parliament) united with the financial form
of value resulting in the Bank of England, Lloyd’s Insurance
Company, the Coinage Act, &c. Money and other financial
instruments liquefied the clumsy, cumbersome form of wealth as
private property which was presented as use values in
warehouses, docks, ships, shops, etc., and moreover placed it
directly under fiscal state command. The creation of monetary
liquidity permitted the distribution of surplus value as
investment in various commercial and industrial enterprises
according to the needs of capital as a whole without regard to
rates of exploitation in individual enterprises. Investment
and speculation appeared insubstantial, disembodied,
atmospheric or gaseous. The South Sea ‘bubble’ popped owing to
cupidity which seemed infinite and to anonymous Atlantic
obstacles, namely, resistance, recalcitrance, and revolt.

The decade between 1716 and 1726 was the golden age of piracy,
Marcus Rediker informs us.7 The significance of piracy during
these years was twofold – it was multiracial and it was
against the slave trade. They blockaded ports, disrupted the
sea lanes. The pirate ship ‘might be considered a multiracial
maroon community.’ Hundreds were African. Sixty of
Blackbeard’s crew of a hundred were black. Rediker quotes the
Negro of Deptford who in 1721 led ‘a Mutiny that we had too
many Officers, and that work was too hard, and what not.’ They
also prevented the slave trade from growing. This was the
complaint of Humphrey Morice, MP, Governor of the Bank of
England, owner of a small fleet of slavers, who led the
petitioning to Parliament and who suffered severe losses in
1719, the year that serious blacking commenced. A naval
squadron was sent to west Africa. Four hundred and eighteen
pirates were hanged. The conjuncture of apparently very
distant forces, struggle for common rights and the Atlantic
slave trade, in fact met in intimate proximity.

Daniel Defoe, the most prolific prose writer in the English
language, was preoccupied with the issues of Atlantic labour
power. Coincidently, his writing transpired during the
privatisation of the printed word by means of Queen Anne’s
Copyright Act. He precisely combined the intimate conjunction
of opposites with a trans-Atlantic background. *Robinson
Crusoe, Mariner* was published in 1719. The book dramatises
the labour theory of value, glories in the intricacies of the
division of labour, and puts the European foot (Crusoe) on the
African neck (Friday). Alexander Selkirk, the actual person
who was the prototype of Robinson Crusoe, died in February
1721 as a sailor in a naval squadron that was sent to west
Africa to extirpate the piracy interrupting the slave trade.
*The Adventures and Misadventures of Moll Flanders*, published
in 1722, treats the issues of criminalisation of the commons
and large scale cooperative labour. Upward social mobility was
not accomplished by ’affirmative action’ but negative
criminality, as Moll Flanders hooked up with highwaymen on the
first step of the ladder of success and whose final rung she
at last attained – a Virginia tobacco plantation – so she too
could put the boot to the African enslaved.

These are the classic fictional disquisitions on subsistence,
survival, and surplus in that era of off-shore and homeland
plunder; they also present heroic prototypes of the ‘white’
worker. Indeed, these novels coincided almost to the year with
‘the invention of the white race,’ to give the title of Ted
Allen’s compelling thesis.8

A buffer stratum was to be created by offering material
advantages to white proletarians to the lasting detriment of
black proletarians. When and how did the ‘wages of whiteness’
originate? The first date DuBois gives in the protracted
process is 1723 when laws were passed in Virginia making
Africans and Anglo-Africans slaves forever. The bonded people
objected in 1723 to the Bishop of London and the King ‘and the
rest of the Rullers.’ ‘Releese us out of this Cruell Bondegg’
they cried. In the same year Richard West, the Attorney
General, objected to the same law, ‘I cannot see why one
freeman should be used worse than another, merely upon account
of his complexion….’ But the Governor of Virginia understood
the necessity of ‘a perpetual Brand’ – skin colour, or the
phenotype, which marked the person as surely as the burnt
flesh caused by the golden brands used by the South Sea
Company. In this way, Ted Allen tells us, a ‘monstrous social
mutation’ occurred, namely, that stratum within the American
class structure which derives its hopes, security, and welfare
from white skin privilege. It has been essential to the
constitution of American class relations ever since.

This was not known to Thompson. The experience within England
(though not Ireland) was different, where the policing of the
wage relationship, or the exploitation of the Many by the Few,
did not depend upon the colour line, and where therefore it
was unnecessary to constitute that structure of white
supremacy. Thompson wrote the famous ‘rule of law’ coda to
*Whigs and Hunters*. ‘As the last imperial illusions of the
twentieth century fade, so preoccupation with the history and
culture of a small island off the coast of Europe becomes open
to the charge of narcissism. The culture of constitutionalism
which flowered here, under favoured conditions, is an episode
too exceptional to carry any universal significance.’ Yet,
even smaller than England was the island where Robinson Crusoe
met Friday and that story spread world-wide.  

The colonists of the north American mainland, even at the time
of Robinson Crusoe (1719), the Waltham Black Act (1722), and
the South Sea Bubble (1722), had begun to graft some of that
English constitutionalism to their own purposes. For example,
The New-England Courant in its summer issue of 1722 sought to
be rectify the stupidity of the colonists by quoting chapter
39 of Magna Carta and commented, ‘No Freeman shall be taken,
&c. These words deserve to be written in letters of gold, and
I have often wondred that they are not inscribed in Capitals
in all our Courts of Judicature, Town-halls, and most publick
edifices; they being essential to our English Freedom and
Liberties…’ ‘No man ought to be put from his Livelyhood
without answer’ rings hollow to the unemployed, or to the
Indians who were proclaimed rebels in the same newspaper for
attacking fifteen commercial vessels intruding on their
fishing grounds and whose women and children were taken in
captivity to Dunstable. ‘No man can be exiled or banished out
of his native country’ is hypocrisy to the men and women and
children from the west coast of Africa enslaved in America.
The New England Courant’s sole advertisement reads ‘A likely
Negro Woman to be sold by Mr. Thomas Selby at the Crown
Coffee-House, the lower end of Kingstreet.’

Thompson, however, did not accept a ‘South Sea’ or Atlantic
perspective, much less a planetary one in his references to
constitutionalism. He reversed himself, moving from a mood of
postcolonial narcissism to one of praise for the English
ruling class as a whole: ‘… the inhibitions upon power imposed
by laws seem to me a legacy as substantial as any handed down
from the struggles of the seventeenth century to the
eighteenth, and a true and important cultural achievement of
the agrarian and mercantile bourgeoisie, and of their
supporting yeomen and artisans.’ And when Thompson writes of
the culture of constitutionalism, why does he exclude the
charters of liberty?

Dorothy Thompson, many years later, attributed this coda to
heated arguments that she had with her husband and co-worker,
Edward, arguing that ‘he was leaning too far in the direction
taken by some of the contributors to *Albion’s Fatal Tree* in
dismissing the law simply as an instrument of class power.’9

The context of the discussions about these books took place in
1970 and 1971; when for instance Howard Zinn in November 1970
said ‘The Problem is Civil Disobedience’, and he ran down the
law, how the bill of rights is publicised but not enforced,
how the property laws are enforced but not publicised. He
showed how decorum and propriety fool us and cause us to
revere the law. He reminded us that often we have to go
outside the legal framework – the Civil War, the Union drives,
the American Revolution. He said ‘people in all countries need
the spirit of disobedience to the state….’ 

The American and the English experiences were different. The
Attica revolt was in September 1971, and the trial of the
Mangrove Nine was finished in 1971. Internment without trial
was introduced in 1971, and ‘Bloody Sunday’ was in January
1972. These events of state terrorism were not yet answered by
similar violence of those taking an anti-imperialist stand.
Furthermore, they still seemed part of an ancient constitution
in which ‘race’ played trumps.

Our books were not published until 1975. During the interval
the world changed direction. The PLO assassinated Israeli
athletes at the Munich Olympics. The IRA brought the war to
England. The Guildford pub bombing of October 1974 left five
dead, a month later the Birmingham pub bombing killed
twenty-one. While the political climate became more violent,
the intellectual climate became more academic, more
legalistic, more obscure. Critical Legal Studies (formed in
1977) stuck to the high theory of Frankfurt School and French
post-structuralism, obtusely reluctant to engage English
social history, or to raise the constitutional issues of race
or the commons.

There is a vast amount of English social history since 1975
(and before) recording the importance of customary rights to
common forest resources. Moreover, that story is now clearly
understood to have happened all over the world. J.M. Neeson
produced a great book about the commons from earlier
discussions concerning custom. Called Commoners, it showed
that subsistence use-rights remained a material basis of many
English agrarian workers. Meanwhile, others of us adduced the
evidence that the wage relation arose from the process of
criminalisation and the process of criminalisation arose from
custom. The irrationality of the wage concealed the unpaid
labour. But could these aperçus attain constitutional
importance or were they destined to dismissal as un-theorised
ditty?

   The law locks up the man or woman
   Who steals the goose from off the common
   But lets the greater villain loose
   Who steals the common from the goose

The violence and the terror, ‘the military option’ as the
Italian Red Brigades put it, made it harder to see the
Charters, or the commons, as anything other than a wild goose
chase. Looking back now we can see that the issue was not the
rule of law against terrorism: the issue was the preservation
of commoning against new enclosures.

We could use some theory of the kind that transformed Magna
Carta for the Levellers, of the kind that transformed Magna
Carta for the abolitionists. In 1774 the former
African-American slave, Olaudah Equiano, put on white face in
London in order to obtain a warrant of habeas corpus. This is
among the first actions by which Magna Carta was appropriated
for the trans-Atlantic movement to abolish slavery. In the
same year Granville Sharp wrote ‘The wisdom of ages has made
[Magna Carta] venerable, and stamped it with an authority
equal to the Constitution itself, of which it is, in reality,
a most essential and fundamental part; so that any attempt to
repeal it would be treason to the State! This glorious Charter
must, therefore, ever continue unrepealed: and even the
articles which seem at present useless, must ever remain in
force.’10 Granville Sharpe used the charters against slavery,
racial and otherwise, but, despite an obsession with the
gothic frankpledge, he did not take his stand with the
commons, unlike Thomas Spence or Gracchus Babeuf. Similarly
with Frederick Douglass who said in 1854, ‘Let the engine of
the Magna Carta beat against the Jericho walls of Slavery, and
no seven days blowing of ram’s horns would be necessary,’ a
reference to the jubilee which, while emancipating slaves,
also restored the commons.

Edward Thompson failed to mention Magna Carta and more
strategically he omitted the Charter of the Forest. There was
an opportunity to link the constitution to the commons at that
point in time (Walpole 1720-1723) when some English and
African commoners could be found together on the seven seas
and in the wild wood. The moment passed: privatisation and
slavery advanced together. We hear Blackstone crow as he
defined private property as ‘that sole and despotic common
which one man claims and exercises over the external things of
the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other
individual in the universe.’ (He admitted in his Commentaries
that there are elements such as light, air, and water which
‘must still unavoidably remain in common.’)

Today, the commons comes back to us from the South!
Subcommandante Marcos provided the voice of the Zapatistas and
the indigenous people of Chiapas calling for the return of
Article 27 and the ejidos, or common land, while reminding us
of the Magna Carta. As the Many demand water, energy, and
wherewithal against the surplus value hogged by the Few, we
must reprise those moments when the act of constitution showed
not racist divide et impera but that old, old friend of all,
the commons. This enterprise calls for our contemporary
appropriations of both of the Charters of Liberty.

FOOTNOTES

1 The title alludes to a slave song: ‘God gave Noah the
rainbow sign, / No more water, the fire next time’. Editor’s note.

2 David Roediger, *The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making
of the American Working Class* (Verso: New York, 1991). In the
preparation of this essay I thank David Roediger and his
colleagues at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana

3 J.M. Neeson, *Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure, and Social
Change in England, 1700-1820* (Cambridge, 1993), p. 317

4 Timothy Nourse, *Campania Foelix, Or a Discourse of the
Benefits and Improvements of Husbandry* (1700), pp. 15-16

5 ‘The Black Act was instituted in 1723... in response to the
Waltham deer poachers. It made it a felony (that is, a hanging
offence) to appear armed in a park or warren, or to hunt or
steal deer, with the face blackened or disguised...’,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Act [1]

6 *The History of the Blacks of Waltham in Hampshire*,
Anonymous, (1723)

7 Marcus Rediker, *Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates
in the Golden Age* (Beacon Press: Boston, 2004)

8 Ted Allen, *The Invention of the White Race*, volume two,
"The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America" (Verso, 1997)

9 Daniel H. Cole, ‘“An Unqualified Human Good”: E.P. Thompson
and the Rule of Law’
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=169264 [2]

10 *A Declaration of the People’s Natural Right to a Share in
the Legislature* (1774), pp. 202-3

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