Anka’s Reviews > There Never Was a West > Status Update

Democratic innovation, and the emergence of what might be called democratic values, has a tendency to spring from what I’ve called zones of cultural improvisation, usually also outside of the control of states, in which diverse sorts of people with different traditions and experiences are obliged to figure out some way to deal with one another.

The colonists who came to America, in fact, found themselves in a unique situation: having largely fled the hierarchy and conformism of Europe, they found themselves confronted with an indigenous population far more dedicated to principles of equality and individualism than they had hitherto been able to imagine

Pirate democracy: island enclaves of what Linebaugh, Rediker (1991) have called “the Atlantic proletariat,” the motley collection of freedmen, sailors, ships whores, renegades, Antinomians and rebels that developed in the port cities of the North Atlantic before the emergence of modern racism, and from whom much of the democratic impulse of the American—and other— revolutions seems to have first emerged.

While accounts of pirates and their adventures circulated widely, having much the same popular appeal as they do today… this would be about the very last influence a French, English, or colonial gentleman would ever have been willing to acknowledge. This is not to say that pirate practices were likely to have influenced democratic constitutions. Only that we would not know if they did.