How come the Age of Liberty was also the Age of Slavery? Greg Grandin, an American historian, wrestles with a paradox: the way slavery expanded after the Enlightenment and at a time when cries of freedom were still reverberating from the American and French revolutions. His new book, "The Empire of Necessity", is inspired by Herman Melville's "Be-nito Cereno", an imaginative account by the man who wrote "Moby Dick" of a bloody slave revolt aboard a Spanish ship in the South Pacific in 1805. Led by a man called Babo and his son, Mori, the slaves murdered many of the Spanish crew and took control of the ship. When the vessel subsequently got into distress, the west Africans deceived their rescuer, Captain Amasa Delano, an American seal-hunter and a distant relative of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, pretending they were still slaves. They forced the ship's captain and the few surviving members of its crew to play the role of their masters.
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