The People Left Out of the Count Understood the Rules Best

The War of the Spanish Succession ended in 1713, throwing tens of thousands of privateersmen and navy sailors out of work overnight. The merchant-ship order they knew ran like this: the captain held near-absolute power over wages, rations and the lash, and once at sea no institution could check him. Bartholomew Roberts, a Welshman, was third mate on a slave ship until pirates captured him in 1719 — six weeks later his captors elected him captain.

His articles survive because the 1724 General History of the Pyrates (published under the name Captain Charles Johnson) copied them down, and they are startlingly specific: every man has a vote in affairs of the moment; of the plunder the captain and quartermaster take two shares each, the gunner and boatswain one and a half, everyone else one; a man crippled in action draws 800 pieces of eight from the common stock first. Two provisions are the real machinery: the captain wielded absolute command only in chase and battle, while the division of spoils and all discipline fell to a quartermaster elected by the whole crew — and the captain could be voted out at any time.

The benevolent dictator for life and the right to fork in open source; early-stage startups buying trust with vesting, veto rights and exit clauses. Divided power is not a virtue. It is collateral.

The Black Death of 1348–49 took thirty to forty percent of England's population. Labour turned scarce overnight and wages shot up. In 1349 Edward III issued the Ordinance of Labourers: every landless person under sixty had to accept work at pre-plague rates, and could not leave the parish to seek a better price elsewhere. These are the earliest laws in English that criminalized movement itself.

Edward VI's Vagabonds Act of 1547 pushed it to the extreme: an able-bodied person found idle for three days was branded with a V on the chest and enslaved for two years, and for life if he ran. It was repealed within two years — local justices simply refused to enforce it. Elizabeth's Poor Relief Act of 1601 then set the framework for the next two centuries: a poor rate levied by parish, with the poor sorted into three categories — relief for the impotent, compulsory work for the able-bodied, the house of correction for those who refused. The Settlement Act of 1662 added the last piece: a parish could return anyone lacking local settlement rights to their place of origin. Relief and removal were always two faces of one system. Speenhamland tied wage subsidies to the price of bread from 1795; the New Poor Law of 1834 replaced it with the workhouse.

Locality-bound social insurance and public services, out-of-province medical reimbursement, points-based residency; platform gig workers whose coverage evaporates when the place they pay into and the place they work come apart.

Between 1400 and 1775 roughly 90,000 people across Europe were tried for witchcraft and 40,000 to 60,000 executed (Brian Levack's estimate, far below the millions of popular legend). The peak fell between 1560 and 1630 — not in the "dark" Middle Ages but between the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution. Wolfgang Behringer's Weather, Hunger and Fear lines that curve up against the failed harvests of the Little Ice Age.

A late frost on 27 May 1626 destroyed the vines and grain of Franconia. Over the next five years the prince-bishop of Bamberg, Johann Georg II Fuchs von Dornheim, built a purpose-made witch prison, the Drudenhaus, and executed roughly a thousand people; neighbouring Würzburg killed some nine hundred. The accused began as poor widows and quickly reached councillors and the mayor himself, Johannes Junius — the letter he smuggled to his daughter from prison in 1628 survives: every confession was invented, he wrote, because he could not bear the torture. In 1631 the Jesuit Friedrich Spee, who had heard the confessions of many condemned prisoners, published the Cautio Criminalis anonymously. His argument was not theological but formal: under torture, silence is read as the Devil's assistance, confession as self-incrimination, and naming accomplices manufactures the next batch of defendants — a procedure that returns "guilty" for every possible input proves nothing at all.

Any accusation structured so that denial is itself evidence — from trial by public opinion to internal investigations that reverse the burden of proof. The technical version is the same: a detector that scores every rebuttal as a suspicious signal has stopped being a detector.

From 1596 the Ming court dispatched eunuch tax commissioners across the empire to collect commercial and mining levies, bypassing local magistrates and reporting straight to the imperial privy purse. Suzhou was the silk-weaving capital of China, where workshop owners and hired weavers lived day to day on daily pay — no work today meant no food today. The commissioner Sun Long imposed a surcharge per loom and per bolt of silk and hired local toughs to man street checkpoints. Looms fell idle by the thousand, and thousands of weavers lost their income.

In the sixth month of 1601 an ordinary weaver named Ge Cheng raised a banana-leaf fan as a signal and gathered several thousand men. The action was tightly self-limited: they struck only the commissioner's enforcers, killing the tax bully Huang Jianjie and others, and looted no shops, entered no homes, burned no government offices. After three days the crowd dispersed on its own. When the authorities began hunting for ringleaders, Ge Cheng turned himself in — I am the one who started it, he said; charge no one else. He spent thirteen years in prison, was released in 1614, and Suzhou remembered him as "General Ge," later building him a shrine.

Self-limitation and legitimacy framing in protest; and the classic problem of who goes first in collective action — the first person carries all the risk and everyone after pays less. Internal dissent works the same way.