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“The seamen rarely depicted themselves or their companions as agents of an imperial system. They were consumed with their own daily struggles, ambitions, and ultimately with their own survival. It was precisely such unthinkable 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 so many of them rarely question.”
― David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder