Happy Thanksgiving. I appreciated a post on Bluesky this morning from the philosopher Jacob T. Levy: this is a Lincoln-era antislavery holiday, and one that celebrates the human community that was an alternative to genocide. A brief tour of 17th-century Atlantic history offers a lesson on on what embracing alternatives and fighting injustice requires– and on some of the most basic things we have to be thankful for.

(If you want some lighter Thanksgiving reading, I also recommend this piece I wrote last year).

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William Day wept before he died.  He had plenty of reasons to. Born in England some time around 1664, Day was like his father before him brough up to raise cattle. The land he and his immediate family owned was small, perhaps nothing at all. In generations past, this would not have been a problem: his forebears could graze their cattle on plentiful common land and feed their families by gleaning  in forests and fens.  

But in Day’s lifetime, this common land was rapidly being fenced in, and the nearby fenland drained. Without personal or common land to subsist on, English peasants were forced on the mercy of others: quickly they went from semi-autonomous rural life to a starving and precarious existence as tenant farmers, soldiers, or wage laborers in disease-choked cities. When Day’s finances fell into the red in the 1680s– perhaps when cattle prices or demand fell, or when his livestock became sick– he had to borrow money. 

At some point between 1689 and 1691, Day became a soldier and served in Ireland, where he helped “reduce” rebels, whose families had also lost land a generation earlier, “to their due obedience.”  When Day returned to England, he did so with the sights and scents of sickness, starvation, and violence burdening his memory: thousands died in the conflict. 

Misfortune followed William Day to England. After service in Flanders, he fell ill and was unable to continue his military career. Instead he fell in with “bad Company,” and around 1693 was involved in a robbery. His chief co-conspirator was a man named Lawrence Nozzel, twenty-nine years his elder, a former farmer and butcher who had faced similar economic problems as Day. Nozzel and unknown co-conspirators plotted to rob one Lady Allen. During the act itself, Day was reported to have convinced his fellow robbers not to kill Lady Allen – a choice that might have contributed to his own arrest by leaving a witness alive. For this, he was tried and executed in 1694. 

At his trial, Day pleaded with the Almighty for mercy for his sins. He confessed that he did not observe the Sabbath, that he “sometimes swore in passion,” and that he “drank in excess.” In contrast, Lawrence Nozzel refused to “acknowledge any sin” at all. The Court recorder claimed this was because of religious ignorance. But it is just as probable that Nozzel, staring down the end of his 59 years on Earth, believed he had little to apologize for. For the English poor in the age of enclosure and empire, there were few good options for survival. Long before the wealthy cut short Day’s life, they had cut off men like him from land, and with it, subsistence on their own terms.

This language- “cut off”- was how an unnamed group of Wampanoag people reportedly described their own circumstances in 1675. Spotted outside the Massachhusetts towns of Rehoboth and Swansea , near Rhode Island, the party was asked by frightened English settlers what they were doing. The answer was obvious: facing decades of encroachment and violence by rapacious land speculators and malicious colonial authorities, they were present “only on their own Defence for they understood that the English intended to cut them off,” according to settler commentator Nathaniel Saltonstall.  Rehoboth and Swansea represented a direct threat to the Wampanoags’ way of life: these settler towns were encroaching on Montaup, a Wampanoag center of power on excellent agricultural land.  

Not entirely unlike Day, the Wampanoag party and their families could remember a time when the land these towns now sat on was inhabited by the many, rather than owned by the few. They feared English settlement would one day be the fate of all the land around them. The ongoing siege of roaming livestock, armed militias, and conniving speculators had already claimed numerous lives, vast lands, and vibrant ecologies. 

Destruction and dispossession in New England was linked to exploitation and enclosure in old England, and even the names English settlers gave their towns demonstrate as much. Swansea was named for a town that had been conquered in Wales, while Rehoboth is a Biblical place-name that means open spaces in Hebrew– a sharp contrast to the closing space of England itself. Biblical Rehoboth was proclaimed triumphantly and with gratitude: “for now the Lord hath made room for us, and we shall be fruitful in the land.”  But what was a wide open space for settlers was a closed and shrinking nightmare for the Wampanoag. Their fears of being cut off proved accurate. Montaup is now known by the English bastardization “Mount Hope,” while the original name is emblazoned over a golf course and country club to the south in Portsmouth.

Alongside enclosure in England and colonization in New England, “cut off” describes the state of captives in the Atlantic slave trade. Captives were cut off from their families and their homes, then as they were taken further away, often from their languages and cultures, and finally from their continent and any familiar context at all. Every step in the slave trade was another forced severing of ties. This rupture helped enslavers achieve their goals by restricting the social bonds necessary for organized resistance, though enslaved people created new communities to fight back nonetheless. 

Enclosure, colonization, and slavery were simultaneous developments in European domination and early capitalism. They supported each other. Those pushed from England by the grasping hands of enclosers themselves became agents of conquest and colonization– like William Day fighting in Ireland. Enslaved people were forced to work stolen land. Elites had to make workers out of people before they could control workers; before they could control land, they had to transform the commons into private land, and Indigenous people’s carefully-engineered ecologies into barren small-farm wastelands. 

Against this kind of world-historical transformation, individual acts of conscience are not enough– people have always had consciences. There were critics of slavery and genocide and peasant expropriation from the moment they began– often before, and often critics from well outside the category of people being victimized. This was not enough. If you have ever been at a rally or a protest or given a good speech or posted something moving about current events you know this, because you probably didn’t get the results you wanted. 

Those actions matter, but only as part of a broader strategy to change the world at the vast and inhuman level it needs to be changed at. Every vast injustice has been the product of vast economic and political forces. This does not absolve participants of blame, but it does mean that those of us who want a better world need to change the structure of the world itself– laws, institutional policy, culture at its most fundamental, not just individual hearts.

If you want to protest injustice, you need to change not only how people feel, but what they can do– and what they believe they can do. William Day did not have the power we have in the present. Almost any of the organizing tactics I might recommend today were flagrantly illegal in the 17th century. They aren’t now. Above all, we have democracy. 

Injustice thrives when we can only make choices as individuals. If even a few individuals are willing to steal and kill, murder and theft continue unless we have a way to come together and stop them. In the 17th century, individual English peasants could become architects of colonialism, but they did not have a simple mechanism to collectively prevent it. Radical Levellers and Diggers tried to do so by force in the middle of the century– they fought valiantly, they were betrayed by their elite Parliamentarian allies, and they lost. 

Today, choosing a better America does not require you to fight to the death. The response to I had no choice should eternally be you always have a choice, but democracy makes that choice easier and more powerful. Centuries of hard work have given us the power to remake the world– not unilaterally or all at once, but to remake it all the same. This is something to be thankful for.