Pax Emancipation Rulebook

Table of Contents

A. What Is This Game About?
B. Components
C. Setup (the real rules begin here)
D. Sequence of Play
- D1. Overview of a Player's Turn
E. Finance and Gunboat Diplomacy
F. Action Phase
G. Ops Phase (Operations)
H. Elephant Phase
I. Hate and Pogrom Roll Phase
J. Market Update and End of Game
Book 2 — Advanced Game, Tips, Glossary
K. Revolution Phase
L. Bonus Petitions
- L1. Red, Black, or Red-Black Petitions
- L2. Separation of Church & State⁸ (half-red, half-black symbol)
M. Impacts
N. Strategy Overview (Cooperative and Competitive Games)
O. Example of Play: An Advanced Cooperative-Competitive Game for 3 Players (1776–1836)
Glossary
What Are Freedom and Slavery?
- A Personal Journey

A. What Is This Game About?

A1. Historical Background

Imagine yourself as a typical serf (slave) of the 18th century. You suffer economic slavery: your labor legally belongs to a local warlord, you are bought and sold along with the land, and you are legally forbidden from non-agricultural work. Perhaps you enjoy small economic freedoms: working for yourself one day a week, or receiving a meager wage. But you have no freedom to quit — if you flee to find work in the city and are caught, you will be branded and put in chains. You are also enslaved intellectually, and must attend church, express your opinions, fight, marry, or have sex at your master's command.²

² ECONOMIC VS. INTELLECTUAL SLAVERY. A slave, as property, is enslaved in both body and mind. Under intellectual slavery, she is told which God to believe in, whom to vote for, and what she may say or express. Under economic slavery, everything she produces belongs to her master, as do her body, possessions, and her life. Both types of slavery are imposed by force: intellectual slavery through censorship of the right to protest, forced conversion, book bans, and conscription; economic slavery through "perpetual slavery" — coercion at gunpoint, chaining to the land, migration barriers, and state ownership of property.

Perhaps 90% of the Earth's population is you — enslaved on plantations or in the harems of the Ottoman Empire, Russia, China, India, Japan, Egypt, Mali, Zanzibar, the Congo, the American South, Mexico, Brazil, or the Caribbean. Slavery and serfdom were likewise universal in non-literate civilizations from Arizona to Papua New Guinea. Global maritime trade, chiefly English but practiced by every nation, consisted mainly of slaves and slave-produced goods. In the tribal lands of the New World, Africa, Central Asia, and New Zealand, warlords took slaves as a matter of course, as they had for millennia. Only in Western Europe was forced labor under feudalism replaced by a wage — a gift of the Renaissance.

Now imagine you are an English gentleman living in the Enlightenment³ at that very same time. Perhaps you are reading John Locke's treatise, in which he says that a man "ought not, unless it be to do justice on an offender, take away or impair the life, or what tends to the preservation of the life, liberty, health, limb, or goods of another"⁴, or you have heard of Locke's Bill of Rights, established by the Glorious Revolution⁵ of 1689. Perhaps you find his philosophy resonating with the Golden Rule of the Bible⁶. If you are inspired enough to question the ethics of slavery, you will be among the first in history to do so. Through all the millennia, warlords enslaved weaker neighbors, yet no significant political or religious thinker ever challenged slavery as an institution. Royalty and commoners alike assumed without dispute that civilization depended on forced labor. Occasionally a tyrant might free some slaves as a gesture of magnanimity, but without relinquishing the power to unilaterally demand obedience or labor from everyone.

³ The Enlightenment was the political discovery that liberty is a fundamental human virtue. It spawned the two most important revolutions in history: the industrial revolution and the abolition of capital punishment. Age of Reason thinkers established that all people share the same basic nature, identifiable through reason and science, and that this nature flourishes under a politics free of physical force. Montesquieu (#41), Voltaire (#43), Rousseau (#110), Diderot (#46), Smith (#49), and Condorcet (#50) were the first to challenge the legitimacy of forced submission. But isn't it reasonable to pursue happiness by enslaving others? No. Violating human rights undermines reason itself, the very foundation a person needs in order to flourish. It negates the motivation to think or to produce. Every compromise on the principle of liberty tears down the one barrier holding back the advance toward total tyranny. Moreover, slave traders are ignoble parasites, and every parasite knows, deep in its dark heart, that if the overburdened producer stops producing, the parasite is doomed.

⁴ JOHN LOCKE (#109). "The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions... every one, as he is bound to preserve himself, and not to quit his station wilfully, so by the like reason, when his own preservation comes not in competition, ought he, as much as he can, to preserve the rest of mankind, and not unless it be to do justice on an offender, take away or impair the life, or what tends to the preservation of the life, liberty, health, limb, or goods of another." Second Treatise of Government, 1689.

⁵ THE GLORIOUS REVOLUTION. "Great efforts were made ... to create an image of a ruling class that was itself subject to the rule of law, and whose legitimacy rested upon the justice and universality of those legal forms. And in a serious sense the rulers were, willingly or unwillingly, prisoners of their own rhetoric; they played power games by rules that suited them, but they could not break those rules, or the whole game would be thrown away." —E.P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters, 1975.

⁶ THE GOLDEN RULE. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," from Matthew 7:12. This Biblical passage, reinterpreted in the spirit of the Enlightenment, gave rise to the petition of 1688, which first argued that slavery is inherently immoral because of equal rights, regardless of race, color, or creed. It was drafted by Francis Daniel Pastorius and presented at the monthly Quaker meeting in Germantown, Pennsylvania. Nevertheless, the Bible also contains passages describing in detail the status of slaves in ancient Israel, including their legal classification, economic role, and inherent duties to their masters. Nowhere does the Bible condemn slavery in the abstract, as an institution. Slavery was so deeply bound up with society that its absence was unthinkable before the Age of Reason.

Abolitionism (the movement to end slavery) was especially unthinkable in the British Empire, which had brought the world into a universal slave trade across a quarter of the planet's territories. Nevertheless, the relentless efforts of ordinary people and Enlightenment-inspired petitions against slavery, bearing thousands of signatures, submitted to Parliament, culminated in Britain's historic 1808 ban on the slave trade. Britain fully abolished slavery in 1833–43, after which courageous activists resolved to end slavery worldwide, by force of arms if necessary. At enormous cost, even in the thick of the Napoleonic Wars, the British navy imposed anti-slavery blockades and applied political coercion, economic bribery, and "gunboat diplomacy" against every other nation in the world. For decades Britain acted alone, but the crusade against slavery gradually seized the moral conscience of Western civilization, so that by 1888 the last Western nation (Brazil) had freed its slaves. In non-Western nations the struggle continues to this day. Today, in the 21st century, the last holdout nations have finally declared slavery a crime. This game re-creates that mighty global struggle for freedom⁷ and individual rights⁸.

⁷ FREEDOM in this game means political freedom — that is, freedom from physical force at the hands of others. It does not mean freedom from the forces of nature. It is not valid to claim enslavement because you must obey the law of gravity, or cannot afford a Mercedes, or cannot fly to Alpha Centauri. Cheap transportation and spacecraft are only possible if every would-be entrepreneur is granted political freedom.

⁸ INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS are the moral principles sanctioning a person's freedom of action in a social context. This is the freedom to act on one's own judgment, for one's own purposes, by one's own voluntary choice, free from coercion by any weapon. It is the right to one's own life, and it provides for the legal punishment of anyone who violates this fundamental right. The source of this right, in John Locke's formulation, is "God or Nature" — that is, embodied in the nature of human beings as creatures possessing free will.

A2. Player Identity

Pax Emancipation is a card game in which 1 to 3 players represent one of three agencies for freeing slaves, in a cooperative effort to end slavery worldwide beginning in the 18th century:

The British Parliament (Red Player) and its agents, the colonial imperialists.⁹ Their monopoly on naval power lets them build Marines to fight slave ships, anarchy, and embargoes.
The Evangelicals (White Player) and their agents, the missionaries.¹⁰ Unlike the other players' Agents, missionaries are installed without a Barrier cost.
The Philanthropists (Green Player) and their agents, merchants and explorers out of London. They gain a financial advantage when installing Agents from their boards (e.g., when forming a Syndicate or making a Post appointment).¹¹

Remember: all 3 players are heroes for the liberation of slaves in this game. There are no "gotcha" cards here.

⁹ A GOVERNMENT is an agency holding a monopoly on the use of force within a given geographic area. Such agencies range from empires to neighborhood gangs. By definition a government holds exclusive authority to enforce the rules of social conduct within its territory, including slavery. The goal of Pax Emancipation's players is to compel or persuade the world's governments to recognize slavery as illegal. Illegality makes slavery impractical, since any slave who escaped would have grounds for a lawsuit and could testify against her enslaver.

¹⁰ EVANGELICALS. "Nowhere in Eurasia was there simply anything like the Western church — no religion that was politically autonomous and equipped with an organized clergy that could prevent rulers from becoming too powerful." Philip Hoffman, Why Did Europe Conquer the World?, 2015, p. 133.

¹¹ PHILANTHROPIC ABOLITIONIST COMPANIES included Quaker-owned shipping and banking firms, which most likely had profited from the slave trade. However, from 1758 onward they refused to engage in the slave trade.

A3. Meta-Rules (Rules About Rules)

The rules are divided into two parts: sequential processes and an alphabetical glossary. The sequential processes are arranged in the order you encounter them in a typical game: Setup (C), Sequence of Play (D), General Processes (E), Actions (F), Operations (G), Elephant Movement (H), Hate (I), and Market Update/Victory (J). Game terms and non-sequential processes are listed alphabetically in the Glossary, where they are easy to find during play without bogging down the sequential rules with unnecessary detail. These terms are necessary for understanding the processes.

Terms written with a capital letter (e.g., Viable, Liberated) are defined in the Glossary. Bold type means the term has a definition.¹²
Pronouns. In the footnotes I use feminine pronouns when referring to slaves and masculine pronouns when referring to slaveholders. This choice is not entirely arbitrary, since historically men were more often the aggressor in coercive operations (e.g., in sex slavery). Nonetheless, this pronoun choice is made for clarity, not as a political statement. Master and slave are defined by the application of physical force, not by sex.
Card Numbers. The "#" symbol in the rules refers to a card number from 1 to 120.
Golden Rule. If the text on a card contradicts these rules, the card takes precedence. If text on a player aid contradicts these rules, the rules take precedence.
Advanced Game. Text set in blue type is intended for the advanced game, to which are added Splays, Disease, the Industrial Revolution, Freedom Pairs, passing laws, court cases, plebiscites, impacts, Revolutions, and Modern States. See Book 2.

¹² DEFINITIONS. It goes without saying that for a game to be playable, it requires unambiguous rules and definitions. Unfortunately, a politician usually finds it advantageous not to define terms such as "freedom" or "slavery," in order to better justify all manner of uses of force to consolidate his power. Rousseau (#110), a self-proclaimed champion of liberty, anticipated Orwell by redefining freedom to mean its opposite: social cooperation and submission to the "General Will." Since Rousseau claimed the state knows your true nature better than you do, he saw nothing contradictory in being "forced to be free." "There is no dictator in the West who, in the years after Rousseau, has not used this monstrous paradox to justify his conduct." — Isaiah Berlin, Freedom, 1969.

¹³ A SLAVE is any person who is initially under compulsion (force) or in a state of dependency serving another's interests. From the most wretched slaves, all freedoms are taken by force of arms: the right to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. The term "force" means coercion carried out by a physical person with a weapon, fists, or lynching. Force is the opposite of persuasion, the other means of resolving a dispute. The term "initiation" means beginning the use of physical force against another. Using force against a victim turns her into a slave to the extent that the force usurps her ability to make her own decisions. One who uses force may himself be imprisoned (e.g., as a prisoner of war, or a convicted rapist), and this justice is not slavery, since it is not the initiator.

A4. The Five Game Arenas

Finance Board. Move Finance Agents down to obtain enough gold to pay for each action with a cost. Move them up using the fundraising action. Divesting is moving Agents from another arena onto the Finance board (e.g., fundraising). Installing is moving Agents from the Finance board onto another game arena (joining a Syndicate, making a Post appointment, creating Marines).
Market. Choosing from the two columns of the East and West Idea Market, you join Syndicates of anti-slavery organizations to gain access to their Operations (Ops).
Map. On the 10-card global World Map, each square represents 2 million slaves. Liberate each square by placing a Freedman (meeple) there. Each circle represents a Post for placing colonial, missionary, or trading Agents, which activate Westernization, suffrage, or literacy. Warships on sea borders suppress slavers, anarchy, and blockades. Merchants establish and maintain slave escape routes.
Victory Pool. Any token or disk in your Victory Pool counts as VP at game end. Claim them via suffrage, impacts from passed laws, revolutionary laws, or Warships. Corruption can Regress (return) them to the map.
Splays¹⁴. The two shared boards are columns of overlapping cards called Splays. One is the Bill of Rights¹⁵, and the other is the General Will. Pairs of adjacent symbols in the Splays are called a "Freedom Pair" and indicate whether an Idea or Revolution is Viable (i.e., qualifies to be passed as a law in the Splay).

¹⁴ COMMON LAW is a body of precedent-based rulings, grounded in a country's foundational principles, which a common-law court weighs for applicability to the facts at hand. Common law arose in medieval England and developed over centuries. Without such precedent, a country's law is guided by the whim of the current judge or dictator rather than by principle. The game models common law as the Bill of Rights table, built up over generations.

¹⁵ THE ENGLISH BILL OF RIGHTS was signed by the English monarchs William and Mary in 1689, ending the Glorious Revolution. Notably, the judiciary became fully independent. "Judges' appointments could no longer be revoked except for misconduct — and that only by Parliament, which itself could be turned out by the voters... in the same spirit, freedom of the press from prior censorship was introduced in 1695. All these things, now so widely taken for granted, can be taken for granted only because the British pioneered them." Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures, 1998, p. 89.

A5. From Tyranny to Modernity, Using Four Cycles

The 10 World Spheres begin with millions of serfs under absolute monarchy. Four of them have 5 Barrier tokens (regulations), making them a Tyranny, where "everything not forbidden is mandatory." Everyone is miserable, but at least there is stability. Your task is to tear this down through the removal of Barriers, Liberation, Literacy, and Revolution.

Agent Cycle. Pawn figures represent Agents. Move them to your Finance board to generate gold, or install them on the Market as Syndicates or Revolutionaries, or on the World Map as Administrators. If lost, they are withdrawn back to Finance, as wealth. If they are lost on the World Map, they additionally create a Dissident meeple of the same color. Add extra Agents into the game via Shipbuilding.
Meeple Cycle. Meeples represent the population of free people. A square without a meeple is a slave/serf. Liberation places a meeple on that square, representing a free worker. If a meeple is killed in a Hate incident, it becomes a Dissident. If there are more Dissidents than spaces to place them, Anarchy is generated.
Anarchy Cycle. Anarchy is generated by frustration, pogroms, or a surplus of Dissidents. If there are too many Anarchy disks, the extras move as refugees to neighboring Spheres. Any Sphere at its maximum of 2 Anarchy must undergo a pogrom roll (try to avoid this).
Nation Cycle. If a Sphere has both Anarchy and Dissidents, a Revolution is born there. If a Revolution accumulates enough revolutionary Agents and is philosophically Viable, it succeeds, and the Sphere's map card is flipped to its modern side. The laws of the new nation reduce barriers, slavers, and Anarchy.

A6. Overview of Competitive and Cooperative Mode (Multiplayer Game)

The cooperative-competitive game is played in 2 eras: first a cooperative era (7–10 rounds, from 1776 to 1841), then an additional competitive era (4–5 rounds, roughly to 1877). Both eras use the same rules. The cooperative era ends when both decks are empty, after which a Counter-Enlightenment check is made (J3). If one or more players fail to avoid their personal Counter-Enlightenment, the game ends, and the players who did not fail jointly add up their cooperative VP to see how well they all did together (J4). But if all players avoid Counter-Enlightenment, new decks are prepared and the game moves into the competitive era. When these decks too run out, players individually tally their final VP to determine the ultimate winner.

Counter-Enlightenment. If there are more slavers than Red Agents (including Administrators by default, K8), then the Red Player scores no VP. If there are fewer than 15 Freedmen, the White Player scores no VP. If 26 or more Barriers remain on the Spheres, the Green Player scores no VP.
Your cooperative VP are essentially equal to the number of tokens of your color on the World Map, plus the number of tokens and disks in your Victory Pool.
Your final VP equal your cooperative VP plus 1 VP for each token in a Sphere that politically leans your way, plus a bonus for Revolutions of your color visible in the Splay.
The Banality of Evil.¹⁶ During the cooperative era of the game you may gain advantages through deliberate corruption, pogroms, murders, or nationalization. This threatens your victim with Counter-Enlightenment (J3), in which case the advantages mean nothing, since there will be no competitive era and no competitive winner. But you might also commit such evil not for competitive advantage, but simply so that the game has no winner at all. In the name of all the slaves left in misery, I sincerely ask you to refrain from this and to fight to the very end.

¹⁶ THE BANALITY OF EVIL. All players in this game fight for Good, following my view of Evil as something mundanely bureaucratic. Just as slavery occurs in the absence of freedom, evil is what happens when good people do nothing. I disagree with the portrayal of evil as all-powerful, as in typical horror films. Although it might seem that unprincipled people have more freedoms than principled people, only the latter is capable of both purposeful behavior and long-term happiness. "The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them." — Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, 1963.

B. Components

B1. Game Contents

3 Finance boards: one per player.
120 cards: 98 Idea cards, 10 World cards, 10 Revolution cards, and 2 starting Splay cards.
48 cardboard tokens: represent Barriers and Slavers, worth victory points (VP) in the cooperative and competitive scoring.
45 Agents (15 red, 15 white, 15 green), representing Agents and investments.
48 meeples: 16 red (Educated (literate) freemen), 16 green (free Entrepreneurs), 16 white (free Christians).
The "Elephant" represents a focal point for the media, in an age when communication by newspaper worldwide was only just beginning.
9 purple ship tokens. Place on Sea Borders to indicate anti-slavery squadrons or Merchants.
21 disks: 18 black (Anarchy), 3 yellow-green (Disease).
3 cubes: (1 red, 1 white, 1 green) represent factories in the advanced game.
4D6. Used for piracy, hate, and pogrom rolls.

B2. Structure of the World Cards (10)

There are 10 double-sided cards that make up the world map with ten Spheres. One side shows the starting (serf) side, and the reverse shows the modern (Westernized) side.

a. Name. The name bar of the Sphere indicates whether it is on its starting serf side (black) or its modern side (white). The letter in the corner indicates whether the Sphere is Eastern (E) or Western (W). b. No Mosquitoes. A crossed-out mosquito symbol in the center of some Spheres indicates that the Sphere begins with a yellow-green Disease disk in the advanced game. c. Borders are the gap between two cards. Some have a ship silhouette indicating they are a Sea Border, where Slaver tokens and ship tokens may be placed. Ship tokens can be either warships or Merchants, depending on whether they carry Marines or not. d. Ports. Each Sphere has one or two ports, marked by a named dot (London, etc.). Each port has one or more slaves (black squares) and an Administrator space (circle). e. Slaves. The black squares are called slaves. Each one represents about 2 million slaves¹⁷ or serfs (bondsmen)¹⁸ (and roughly the same number of slaveholders and non-slaves). If a square is covered by a meeple, the slaves are liberated and become Freedmen. Red Freedmen are also called citizens. f. Administrator. An Agent in this space is called an Administrator and represents colonial administrators (Red Agent), missionaries (White Agent), or legitimate-goods traders (Green Agent). Your Administrator is installed via the post-appointment action or by an impact from passing a law.¹⁹ The color of the circle's outline indicates the default color of the Administrator (K8) when the card is flipped to its Modern State. The colored dot indicates the color of the starting Administrator (C6). g. Dissent. The white squares above or below the Sphere's name bar are Dissident spaces. If all these squares are filled with meeples, any additional dissenting meeples become Anarchy disks. Excess anarchy spreads to neighboring Spheres. h. Token Limits. Each circle can hold one Agent, and each square can hold one meeple. Tokens are not placed on ports. Each Sea Border can hold one ship plus at most one Slaver. Each Sphere can hold any number of tokens, but only 2 black Anarchy disks and up to 5 Barriers, stored on one side of the card, placed to the north of each Sphere (in the northern hemisphere) or to the south (in the southern hemisphere).

¹⁷ CHATTEL SLAVERY is a form of slavery in which the slave is treated as a commodity that may be lawfully bought and sold. A slave's status as property says nothing about the degree of slavery she suffers: a serf, who is not property, is often more thoroughly enslaved. Serfdom is a form of chattel slavery in which the serf (slave) is sold and bought together with the land, and is forbidden to flee. Because feudalism is a loose confederation of warlords under conditions close to anarchy, where no warlord bears any social cost for cruelty or caprice, a serf often finds himself worse off than other chattel slaves. Chattel serfdom prevailed worldwide until it first disappeared in Western Europe between the 16th and 18th centuries. Even there, freedmen still suffered from the lords, taxes, and labor obligations into which they were born.

¹⁸ ARE BONDSMEN (SERFS) SLAVES? Yes. A serf is a laborer, typically a field laborer, held in forced servitude to a lord vested with full or partial legal authority over his agricultural production. He differs from a chattel slave only in that he is bought and sold together with the land, rather than on the open market. His economic slavery is expressed as the percentage of his labor he must render as corvée to his lord. Because he has no freedom to quit or to rebel, he remains a slave even if he is compensated for his work, for example with wages or protection from marauders. He is also usually an intellectual slave, deprived of freedom of conscience and speech. It makes no difference to him whether his master is a private lord or a public socialist, or whether his labor is demanded out of selfish motives or "for the good of society." All he knows is that his life and labor are not his own, and that he lives under compulsion for the sake of others.

¹⁹ WESTERN COLONIALISM AS A PAINFUL FIRST STEP TOWARD FREEDOM. The urge to condemn colonialism ignores the illiteracy, tribal slavery, and warlord anarchy that the colonies replaced. Slave conditions would have continued for centuries until native literacy or Enlightenment values were independently discovered. Whatever vices and abuses occurred under the name of Western imperialism, it was the one winding path to freedom. "...what destroyed slavery in the non-Western world was Western imperialism... Nothing is more troubling, and more at odds with the vision of today's intellectuals, than the fact that it was businessmen, devout religious leaders, and Western imperialists together who destroyed slavery throughout the world. And if that doesn't fit their vision, for them it's as if it never happened." — Thomas Sowell, The Real History of Slavery and Racism, 2005.

B3. Structure of the Finance Board (3)²⁰

Agents of your color begin in one of the 3 fields on your Finance board. From top to bottom, these fields are Capital, Wealth, and Debt. You generate one gold by moving an Agent down your board (i.e., from Capital to Wealth, or from Wealth to Debt).

a. Wealth Management. Divesting and accumulating Capital during fundraising actions (F1) is so important that perhaps 40% of your turns may be fundraising. Adding Agents via an impact after passing a law (M1–4), or from the appearance of a Popular Hero (K1), plays a major role in the advanced game. b. Agents are not gold — moving them generates gold. Gold cannot be directly saved from turn to turn, or even from action to action. Gold generation must always be sufficient to carry out an Action with a cost, or an Operation. c. Divest. It's fine if, at the start of fundraising, you find you've allocated resources inefficiently, and you voluntarily divest (F1.1) Agents deployed on the World Map or the Market (e.g., an Administrator or Syndicate member). Return the divested Agents to your Finance board's Wealth field, for use in other ways (e.g., fundraising).

²⁰ ECONOMICS was founded as a science by Enlightenment thinkers such as Smith, Ricardo, and Mill. They founded economics as the study of the allocation of resources to produce wealth in a society with a division of labor and limited resources. There are three levels: Debt (obligations undertaken to consume wealth), Wealth (any human value, from food to freedom), and Capital (wealth used to produce wealth). Capital is spent to produce wealth, and wealth is spent to create debt.

B4. Structure of the Idea Cards (98)

All market cards in the decks are "Ideas." In the upper right and lower left of the card are two Freedom symbols. This pair of symbols is used to see whether an Idea is Viable (may be legislated, given the political situation).²¹

a. East vs. West. The back of an Idea card indicates whether it belongs to the West or the East. This matters only during setup. b. Cultural Diffusion Arrow. This arrow is used to shift the card after a cultural diffusion (H3). c. Operations (Ops). The symbols in the right-hand column denote this Idea's or Revolution's operations. d. Impacts. The symbols in the left-hand column indicate this Idea's impact (M) if it is legislated. e. Freedoms. Each Idea or Revolution has two Freedoms, used to determine Viability.

²¹ IDEAS OF FREEDOM can be regrouped to form new ideas. Moral premises can be based on reason, on the supernatural, or on nothing at all. Activity can be aimed at freedom of thought or freedom of labor. They can be combined in various ways, and the Enlightenment thinkers tried them all. Structure of an Idea card (a Western Idea), example above: Freedom symbols: 2 comets. Operations: Manumission, Literacy. Impact: + Post appointment in Bahia. Firebrand: 26. Cultural Diffusion Arrow.

B5. Structure of the Revolution Cards (10)

These cards represent Revolutions on the path to Modernity. There is one Revolution for each Sphere. They have 2 features not found on Ideas:

a. Engagement Spots. Each Revolution has 1–4 round spaces for placing Revolutionaries (F6, K1). b. Sphere and Preview. On the left side of the card is the Sphere associated with the Revolution, and below it a preview of the two Freedom symbols on the reverse of the card.

Anatomy of a Revolution card (the Satsuma Civil Rights Rebellion): Freedom symbols: candle-feather (preview: unlock-candle). Operations: Manumission, suffrage. VP: 1 for green or 3 for red. Revolutionaries: 3 engagement spots.

B6. Structure of the Barrier Token (Hate Roll, 39)

These tokens, called Barriers, are worth 1 VP each if they remain at game end. The information on them is used during setup (C5) and during hate rolls (I1) or piracy rolls (E6).

Sphere. Each Barrier belongs to its Sphere: America, Europe, Ottoman Empire, China, Japan, Brazil, W. Africa, E. Africa, India, or East Indies. This indicates placement during setup (C5) or Regression.
Leaning. Barrier names are color-coded as follows: Red = a Barrier of the left²², White = a Barrier of the right²³, Purple = an embargo.
Blood cubes. Colored dice show which color token dies. Red dice kill a red token, white dice kill a white token, green dice kill a green token, yellow dice cause a loss of gold, purple dice sink a Merchant, and black dice regress a Barrier (corruption, E7).
Frustration. Die symbols with a black outline indicate frustration hate (I3).
Reverse side. Indicates the starting number of Barriers in that Sphere, useful during setup (C5) or corruption (E7).

²² LEFT-WING SOCIALISM is the doctrine that a person's life and labor do not belong to himself but to society. "From each according to his ability," as Marx (#65) put it. Chattel slavery differs only in that the owner is a lord and master rather than a representative of society.

²³ RIGHT-WING CONSERVATISM proclaims freedom in the material world, opposing state ownership and control of a person's life and labor, but imposes intellectual control over his mind for the sake of a unified society.

Anatomy of a Barrier token (the Embargo Barrier): Sphere is Europe (or the First French Empire, if Europe is modern). Blood cubes (green), embargo cubes (purple), frustration (black outline).

C. Setup (the real rules begin here)

C1. Choose a Game Variant

Players decide among themselves which game variant to play. Any variant, when played as the basic game, skips all rules on a blue background. If you are playing a two-player game, one of the players must be Red:

a. Cooperative-Competitive Game. Players agree that the game will continue into the competitive era if all players avoid Counter-Enlightenment (J3)²⁴. If one or more fail the check, the non-failing players tally VP according to J4. b. Cooperative Game. Players agree that the game will end at the close of the cooperative era (J3), and the non-failing players tally VP according to J4. The game is played without Tyrannies (I3b). c. Solo Game. One player controls the Red and White, or Red and Green Players, and the game ends at the close of the cooperative era (J3). Play either the basic or advanced game. No Tyranny (I3b). Victory according to J4. d. The 1865–1917 Variant. This game begins with a modern West and a feudal East. Choose variant C1a, C1b, or C1c. During world map formation (C4), flip the 13 Colonies, Europe, and India to their modern side, keeping all tokens. Remove all Barriers in Europe and the fugitive slave law in the USA. The Elephant begins in Edo. e. The Malthusian Variant.²⁵ This is a fully competitive game. The game ends at the close of the cooperative era, and all players score according to J4. Ignore Counter-Enlightenment (J3), so all players receive VP.

²⁴ FEUDALISM is an agricultural system of forced labor in which noble warlords act as the government and serfs form its lowest and most numerous component. Serfs are legally permitted to engage only in agricultural work, and only on the land assigned to them. Feudalism prevailed across Eurasia for centuries, alongside similar extractive hierarchies in the agricultural regions of the Americas and Africa. Feudalism declined in Europe during the Renaissance but revived in Eastern Europe during the "second serfdom." By the start of the game, serfdom had vanished in England, France, Spain, Austria, Greece, Italy, Switzerland, and Scandinavia, but remained dominant across the rest of the agricultural world.

²⁵ MALTHUS (#57) was a behaviorist, meaning he believed that people lack free will and, therefore, the capacity to avoid catastrophic population growth during a surplus of resources. All of these conclusions have been proven to be Malthus's error.

C2. Assign Player Roles

Randomly assign each player a color. Up to three may play:

Parliamentary Left (Red).²⁶ (e.g., a left-wing abolitionist MP). Historical example: Lord Palmerston (#84).
Evangelical Right (White).²⁷ (e.g., a right-wing anti-slavery religious zealot). Example: David Livingstone (#25).
Philanthropists (Green). (e.g., a wealthy abolitionist businessman). Example: William Wilberforce (#9).

²⁶ WAS BRITAIN THE FIRST ABOLITIONIST STATE? With the possible exception of the 1256 Liber Paradisus of Bologna, the historical record shows that every instance of abolition in Asia and Africa, as well as in Europe and the Americas, was tied to "pressure from European abolitionist movements, the expansion of capitalist relations or production, the concerns and self-image of the colonial state, and efforts by non-Western elites to modernize their culture.... There is no evidence that slavery came under serious attack anywhere in the world before the 18th century." — Martin A. Klein, Breaking the Chains, 1993.

²⁷ QUAKERS (the Society of Friends) is a dissenting Christian sect founded in England in 1650 (#20). Among the most secular of Christians, they were natural capitalists and individualists. Quakers founded banks and financial institutions such as Lloyds of London, Barclays, and Friends Provident, and, like every institution worldwide, invested in the slave trade. As late as 1705, most Quaker leaders in Philadelphia were slaveholders. And they were Christians who had gone nearly 2,000 years without challenging slavery. And yet, perhaps as a result of the prevailing Enlightenment spirit combined with their own history of breaking with tradition, the Quakers became the first known group to consider slavery a threat to their own eternal salvation. They were the first to forbid their members from owning slaves (Philadelphia, 1758), and the first organization to petition Parliament (1783) and Congress (1790) to abolish slavery. Since Quakers were barred by law from Parliament, they persuaded wealthy Anglican evangelicals such as Granville Sharp, Thomas Clarkson (#10), and William Wilberforce (#9) to plead the case. Gradually more and more Christian denominations came to regard slavery as morally unacceptable, and the religious right came to lead abolitionism.

C3. Starting Finance Boards

Each player receives a Finance board and 6 Agents of their color. Finance Agents. Place 3 Agents in Capital (top field), 3 in Wealth (middle field). These spaces are marked with gold dots. Reserve Pool. Place the remaining Agents and meeples in a shared pool holding the unused tokens of all players.

C4. Form the World Map

Place the ten starting World cards, serf side up, in a 2×5 matrix. Each of these cards depicts one of the ten empires on the map: the 13 Colonies, Europe, the Ottoman Empire, Qing China, Tokugawa Japan, Brazil, Congo, Zululand, India, and the East Indies.

Borders. Leave a small gap (10 mm) between cards.

C5. Place the Barrier and Slaver Tokens

Place the Barriers face up next to the space marked on their token, as shown.

Northern Hemisphere. America (3), Europe (3), Ottoman (5), China (5), and Japan (5).
Southern Hemisphere. Brazil (3), W. Africa (3), E. Africa (4), India (5), and East Indies (3).
Slavers. Place ship tokens on each of the 9 sea borders, matching the blood product²⁸ shown on the world map (cotton, sugar, rubber, etc.).

²⁸ BLOOD PRODUCTS are produced by slave labor and fraudulently sold on the open market. Their history traces back to the Kingdom of Congo, an illiterate, warlike state whose economy had depended on enslavement ever since the Bantu peoples conquered Africa. The Congolese king welcomed the Portuguese, converted to Christianity, and intensified the seizure of slaves for export. Europeans were confined to a few slave ports, while the actual abductions were carried out by local Imbangala mercenaries during war or raiding. This devastated neighboring villages along the eastern frontier of Congo and Angola. As the export trade surged, the local population was enslaved as well, and the entire structure of law came to center on slavery: whatever the offense, the punishment was slavery. After 330 miserable years, the export slave trade was abruptly halted under British pressure in 1839. The royal slavery monopoly no longer had any income, and had thousands of unsold slaves on its hands. These slaves were forced to produce "legitimate" blood products for export: kola nuts, copper, ivory, and later rubber. When Congo finally lost its independence in 1890, this royal monopoly was seized by King Leopold II of Belgium. In Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad described the brutal conditions in the royal Congo Free State, including illegal enslavement enforced by terror and atrocities. (This novel inspired the notorious film Apocalypse Now, in which the setting was changed to Vietnam.) When a photojournalist exposed the story, the king was ousted, and Congo fell under civilian colonialism and relative sanity. Hundreds of thousands of commoners and freedmen began transporting goods from the interior to the coastal ports, creating a new class of wealthy merchants. Unfortunately, immediately after gaining independence in 1960, Congo again fell under petty tyrants, civil war, and anarchy, which continue to this day. "The horror!"

C6. Place the Starting Tokens on the World Map

Elephant. Set the Elephant token with its trunk pointing at London.
Anarchy. The 18 black disks are divided evenly among the players, each of whom places them in their Victory Pool (disks and tokens here are worth 1 victory point at game end).
Starting Administrators. Wherever indicated by colored dots, place an Agent of the matching color (the British Parliament in London, the British colony in Virginia, the Jesuit Reductions in Brazil, and the East India Company (EIC) in Mughal India). Place these even if that color is not in the game.
Freedmen. Wherever indicated by colored squares in Europe, place a meeple of that color (1 red, 1 white, and 2 green meeples).²⁹
Disease (advanced game only). Place one yellow-green disk wherever indicated: in Congo, Zululand, and the East Indies, see B2. This disk indicates that the Sphere has Disease.
Reserve Pool. All remaining tokens go into the shared pool.

²⁹ LONDON'S MERCHANTS. "Despite the absence of any single institution to govern and oversee it, [London's] urban savvy helped London's practitioners successfully investigate nature, ... seek financial backing from civic and judicial figures, and overcome hardship ... to be heard over the din of market stalls on nearly every street, working in cramped backyards over forges and furnaces, and working beyond the storefronts of the Royal Exchange and other trading quarters — hundreds of men and women of every nationality were engaged in the work of science, medicine, and technology in London." —Deborah E. Harkness, The Jewel House, 2007, 8–9.

C7. Prepare the Decks

Cooperative Era Decks. For all advanced-game variants (C1a, b, or c), shuffle the Western Ideas and place 16 into the deck (1- or 2-player game) or 22 (3-player game).³⁰ If you are playing the basic variant (C1a, b, or c), remove 3 cards from each deck, i.e. 13 for the basic 1- or 2-player game, or 19 for the 3-player game. Then shuffle the Eastern Ideas into a deck with the same number of cards as the West. Place the decks side by side, with the East to the right of the West. The remaining cards will not be used.
Applying "Astrology" (mandatory). Both decks lie face up, not face down, so players can see one card in the "future."

³⁰ WESTERN IDEAS became the benchmark by which the whole world is now judged. Take a moment to review the Western Idea cards — freedom of speech, trial by jury, human rights, separation of church and state, consent of the governed, habeas corpus — today all of these standards are taken for granted. For example, torture was a legal and widely accepted practice until the Enlightenment treatise on cruel and unusual punishment (#8). Political progress has stalled since the Enlightenment, as the principles that made it possible have been forgotten or rejected. The very concept of "principle" has been substantially reworked. Rather than being an objective truth independent of culture, it is now an opinion, biased by culture.

Starting Splays. Place the two starting Splay cards (Bill of Rights and General Will) side by side, leaving enough room below for the two Splays to grow. The orientation of the cards doesn't matter yet, since this will be decided by the Founding Father for each column.
Shared Deck. The ten double-sided cards are the Revolutions. One side has a white border, the other a red border. Place them in an open shared deck. You may inspect the shared deck at any time during the game.

C8. Form the Market

Deal 6 cards from the Western deck to form a column of six face-up cards. Do the same for the Eastern deck, to the right of the Western column.

Orient all cards in the same direction (the Cultural Diffusion Arrow (H3) of cards in the Western column should point toward the Eastern column).
Start the first round with the Red player (order is shown at the top center of your board).

D. Sequence of Play

In every round (including the first), players take their turns in the following order: Parliament (Red player), Philanthropist businessmen (Green player), and finally the Evangelicals (White player). Then proceed to the next round.

D1. Overview of a Player's Turn

Each turn of a game round represents about 8 years of history. During your turn, perform the following 5 steps:

Action Phase (F). Perform up to 2 per turn. You may perform the same action multiple times. Choose from this list:
- Fundraiser lets you Divest Agents from the World Map or the Market and increase Capital on your Finance board.
- Syndicate (with cost) moves a Finance Agent onto a Market card, e.g. forming an abolitionist organization with special Operations (Ops).
- Shipbuilding (with cost) creates a ship token for 3 gold. Only 1 ship per action.
- Post Appointment (with cost and the Elephant) installs an Administrator on the map. This is needed to make local populations literate or Westernized.³¹
- Legislate applies a Viable Idea with a Syndicate on the Market into one of the two Splays (after which other Ideas may become Viable). This gives an Impact (M) in your favor.
- Join a Revolution (with cost) to overthrow an outdated feudal nation and establish a modern, Westernized one (K).
Ops Phase (G). You may perform one Operation for each of your Syndicate members or Revolutionary Agents. Choose an Operation from those listed on the Syndicate cards:
- Maritime — move Marines from one ship to another and carry out Gunboat Diplomacy (E5).
- Manumissions (with cost and the Elephant) — pay for slaves' freedom.
- Westernize (with the Elephant) — free slaves in a legal Theocracy or Republic.
- Suffrage (with cost and the Elephant) — claim Barriers, if in a British colony or a legal democracy.
- Literacy (with the Elephant) — create Dissidents.³²
- Lawsuits and Plebiscite (with cost) — churn the market and create new, favorable mechanisms for legislating Ideas in a Splay. This grants bonus Petitions (L).
Note. Actions and Operations marked "Elephant" must be performed in the port with the Elephant. Actions and Operations marked "with cost" may require payment in gold. Pay the cost (E3) before performing the action or operation.
Elephant Phase (H). Make one 1D6 roll to determine where the Elephant moves (H2) and which Market card is discarded (H3).
Hate and Pogrom Roll Phase (I).
- Hate Roll. Roll one or more dice, causing attrition in the port with the Elephant (I2).
- Pogrom Roll. For each Sphere with 2 Anarchy disks, roll 1d6 (I4).
Revolution Phase (K). If a Sphere has both Anarchy and Dissidents, start a Revolution (K1) on the Idea Market in the corresponding column, if not already started. If a Revolution is Viable and has enough Revolutionaries, it succeeds (K4).
Market Update. Close up all gaps on the market (J1) and return all market Agents from occupied option spaces to any location on the map (J2). Perform the end-of-game check (J3, J5).

³¹ JOHN COMPANY is a board game designed by Cole Wehrle and published by me in 2017. It is the story of the East India Company, a joint-stock company that began operations with trading posts in India (1611). It was not fully private, given that its maritime monopoly was backed by the guns of the British navy. But on land the Company counted barely a hundred guards, and so existed only at the whim of local authorities. The situation changed during the Seven Years' War with France, when the Company was staffed with troops and by 1757 governed parts of the subcontinent. Any institution with a monopoly on force is a government, not a business, and this was made explicit in 1765 when Robert Clive obtained the Diwani (the legal right to collect revenue by force of arms in Bengal and Bihar). In 1793 the Permanent Settlement was signed, an agreement granting the zamindars — landowning aristocrats who collected taxes for the Mughal emperor — a similar tax-collecting monopoly for the John Company. This dependency of the Company on slaveholding zamindars was thrown into crisis after the abolition of slavery in Britain in 1833. The crisis was resolved by delaying passage of the Slavery Abolition Act in India by a decade, and then ruling that all those enslaved under the pariah caste system would be reclassified under the euphemism "agricultural laborers." "It seems quite likely that slaves, whose masters treat them fairly well and who are paid in kind, are in fact happier ... than free men struggling to survive under competition." — the Collector of Tanjore, 40 years after the legal abolition of slavery in India in 1843.

³² THE EDUCATED VOTER AS THE ESSENCE OF FREEDOM. Thomas Jefferson wrote that "enlightened people and a vigorous public opinion" were necessary to keep "the aristocratic spirit of government" in check. Printers such as Benjamin Franklin used newspapers to teach the population the moral virtues he considered necessary for the survival of the new republic.

E. Finance and Gunboat Diplomacy

Your Finance board tracks your funds for performing costly Actions (with cost) or Operations. Gunboat Diplomacy is a bonus action that follows from Actions or Operations involving Marines.

E1. Paying for Costly Actions or Operations

During your turn, you perform costly Actions or Operations (i.e., those that cost gold) by moving Agents on your Finance board to obtain the gold needed. One gold is generated by moving an Agent from Capital to Wealth, or from Wealth to Debt, in either order. You may do this multiple times to generate as much gold as you need.³³

a. Finance Tokens. Your Finance board may hold only Agents, and can never hold meeples or other tokens. b. Transparent Financing. The information on your Finance board is public.

Example: Your Finance Agents are 2 in Capital, 2 in Wealth, and 4 in Debt. You perform a Syndicate action that costs 5 gold. You move 2 from Capital to Wealth (generating 2 gold), then 3 from Wealth to Debt (generating 3 gold). At this point you have 1 in Wealth and 7 in Debt. To finish performing the Action, you still need to install your last Wealth Agent, to use it as your Syndicate participation.

³³ LABOR is a precondition for producing wealth, but it is not itself wealth. Owning slaves has a market value, but it would be a mistake to regard slaves as wealth. Slavery fundamentally reduces the production of wealth by removing people's incentive to produce. In the end, any slaveholder would be better off employing freedmen than slaves. The economic differences between the antebellum American North and South were partly due to the Southern plantation owner's mistake in regarding slaves as wealth or capital. If he considers himself wealthy merely because laborers exist, then he feels no need to accumulate or own genuine capital. The industrialist of the North regarded capital as his factory and machines, as well as his stock of materials and finished goods. — George Reisman, Capitalism, 1998.

E2. Nationalized Agents³⁴

Using a bonus Petition (L) after Globalization from a court case or plebiscite, the Red Player may seize and use an opposing color's Agent on their own Finance board. The seized Agent, called a Nationalized Agent, is moved from the Syndicate of the globalized Idea (bearing the red Freedom symbol) into the Red Player's Wealth.

No Installing. A Nationalized Agent cannot be installed (E3).
Privatized Debt. If the Red Player moves a Nationalized Agent into Debt, pass it to its owner's Finance board (it returns to their Wealth).
Privatization. As a bonus Petition (L), you may free your Nationalized Agent from the Red Player (upon globalizing an Idea with the black Freedom symbol).

Example: Using the Plebiscite operation, as the Red Player you globalize an Idea card that already has a Syndicate formed on it by the White Player. To gain the bonus, you Nationalize their white Agent in the Syndicate into your Wealth. You still have another operation left, and you move the Nationalized Agent into Debt to pay for it. This returns the Agent to Wealth on the White Player's Finance board.

³⁴ NATIONALIZATION is the lawful theft of property by a government official. After the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, the EIC (East India Company) was nationalized and the British Raj assumed direct rule of India.

E3. Installing Agents from Your Finance Board

Some Actions or Operations (e.g., Syndicate) install Finance Agents onto Market cards (as Revolutionary Agents or Syndicate members) or onto the World Map (as an Administrator or Marines). If this Operation or Action has a cost, first move Agents down to generate the gold to pay for it, and then install the Agent.

Placement Hierarchy, Red and White Players. When placing Agents from your board onto the World Map or a Market card, remove them from your board top to bottom. In other words, install from Capital first, then from Wealth if there is no more Capital, then from Debt.
Placement Hierarchy, Green Player. The Green Player has a financial advantage that lets them ignore the above restriction, and may install Agents from anywhere on their Finance board, as they choose.

E4. Divesting

An Agent moved onto your Finance board for any reason is placed in your Wealth field.³⁵ This is called Divesting.

Circumstances. Return to Wealth happens if your Agent is voluntarily Divested from a Syndicate (F1.1), or if your Administrator suffers a Coup (F4) or is Hate Killed (I2).
Advanced Game. Return to Wealth also happens if your Revolutionaries succeed (K4), or if you Privatize (L1.1) your Nationalized Agent.

³⁵ WEALTH is the material goods necessary to attain human value. For an abolitionist, that value is political freedom. The capital for producing this wealth is warships and armaments capable of stopping slavers and slaveholding warlords, together with colonial, missionary, and trading posts capable of establishing the values of a free mind, a free body, and free trade, respectively.

E5. Gunboat Diplomacy³⁶

Whenever you install (F3) or move (G1) Marines onto a ship token, you may immediately perform Gunboat Diplomacy. Marines are a Red Agent, so only the Red Player may install or Divest them, but any player may move them once installed. For each instance of Gunboat Diplomacy, you have 3 options:

Claim Anarchy. Choose one of the 2 neighboring Spheres and take one Anarchy disk from it. It goes into your Victory Pool.
Claim an Embargo. Choose one of the 2 neighboring Spheres and remove one embargo token (purple Barrier) from it.
Make a Piracy Roll (with cost). See E6.

³⁶ GUNBOAT DIPLOMACY is the use of force to open up free trade, as in the Barbary Wars (#80), the Opium Wars (#82), and Commodore Perry's Black Ships at Edo (#85). Since the use of force here is directed against a government that is suppressing the free transactions of its own merchants, gunboat diplomacy (as defined here) is a form of benevolent imperialism.

E6. Piracy Roll (with cost)

If during Gunboat Diplomacy you decide to pay for a piracy roll, follow this procedure:

Cube-Squared Cost. Choose how many dice to roll, from 1 to 4, and pay the Cube-Squared Cost: D6 count 1/2/3/4 = Gold 1/4/9/16.
Roll the dice and sum the results.
Sink the Slaver. If the rolled total is greater than the number of slaves (combined) in the two Spheres adjacent to that border, place the Slaver in your Victory Pool.
Corruption. If you roll only a single die, and the value rolled matches one of the black die values shown on the Slaver token, corruption additionally occurs (E7).³⁷

Tip: Besides lowering the cost of suffrage, there are two other reasons to make a piracy roll: either you want to meddle in politics with corruption, or you want to sink a Slaver and make sure no one else can meddle in politics.

Example: You move a Marine onto a ship at the same sea border as the Pacific tea traders. You decide to pay one gold and roll a single die. There are 2 Japanese Freedmen, and one slave each remains in Edo, Korea, and Batavia.³⁸ This means you need to roll higher than 3 on a single die to sink the Slaver. But you roll a "1" and fail. Since the Slaver has a black die value of "1," corruption occurs (continued in E7).

³⁷ The WEST AFRICA SQUADRON was formed a year after Parliament passed the Slave Trade Act of 1807. This Royal Navy squadron shut down the African triangular slave trade, capturing 1,600 slave ships and freeing 150,000 Africans between 1808 and 1860. Most of the freed slaves chose to settle in Sierra Leone, the first British colony in West Africa, fearing they would otherwise be re-enslaved. The cost to Britain included not only naval and resettlement expenses, and the cost of maintaining up to a sixth of the British marine corps, but also bribes paid for cooperation from Spain and Portugal, and the cost of dangerous friction with France, the United States, and others. Additional squadrons were established in the Pacific, Indian Ocean, Red Sea, and Persian Gulf, but chasing shallow-draft dhow slavers into shoal water proved difficult. Despite mounting costs and a complete absence of financial gain for Britain, this crusade was steadily pursued to eventual success. — David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823, pp. 68–69; —R.W. Beachey, The Slave Trade of Eastern Africa, pp. 87, 100–101; —W.E.B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870, p. 141.

³⁸ THE VOC (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie) SLAVE TRADE. The Dutch East India Company prospered on spices imported to Europe from Batavia, its East Indies colony. The route to Europe ran around the Cape of Africa, where the Dutch colony served as a waystation. The Governor of Cape Town, suffering from a chronic labor shortage and unable to draw workers from the local Khoi peoples, pressed sailors and soldiers from passing ships into service. Beginning in 1685, slaves were imported into the Cape Colony, chiefly from India/Ceylon, but also from Madagascar, Kilwa in East Africa, and the East Indies. The slave trade did not spread into the Atlantic, owing to an agreement between the East and West India Companies, and later to the threat posed by the West Africa Squadron. In 1792 a final resolution of the Council of Policy renounced the slave trade entirely, but otherwise the Dutch were slow to pursue emancipation, and plantation slavery remained legal in the Dutch East Indies until 1862.

E7. Corruption³⁹

Corruption Regresses one Barrier (if possible) from a Victory Pool to the target Sphere. The plundered Victory Pool may be anyone's, as long as it holds a suitable token.

Corruption from a Single-D6 Piracy Roll. Corruption occurs if the die value rolled in a 1D6 piracy roll matches one of the black die values shown on the Slaver token. If no Barrier can be Regressed, because both Spheres are already at their full Barrier quota (these quotas are shown on the back of each Barrier token), Regress an Anarchy token instead. The target Sphere must be one of the two neighboring the Sea Border where the piracy battle takes place.

Note: Corruption occurs even if the pirate is sunk.

Corruption from Revolutionary Law #4: see K6.

Example: In the 1d6 piracy roll from the example in E6, you are subject to corruption. You are the Red Player and would prefer to reinstall red Barriers of the left, if possible. Unfortunately, only 2 Barriers are available, and both are white Barriers of the right. You return the Sonno jōi rōnin (a rallying of rōnin against foreigners) to Japan.

³⁹ CORRUPTION is a payment made by a person engaged in business, in exchange for the freedom to earn a living. It is a transaction under the dominance of force, in which the aggressor is always the government and the victim is the merchant. This hierarchy necessarily follows from the definition of "government" as an institution holding a monopoly on the use of force. Contrary to Marxist claims, the right to buy and sell is a fundamental right, and "bribes" paid at gunpoint are simply illegal taxation. However, a business may buy enough weapons and mercenaries to become a government itself, as was the case with the John Company in India or a modern-day drug lord in Colombia. If so, it is no longer a business.

F. Action Phase

Choose up to two Actions to perform.

Order. You may perform your Actions in any order, or the same Action twice.
Elephant Action. Determines the port with the Elephant for your turn. Assuming you haven't already performed an Elephant Action this turn, the Elephant will move from its starting location.
Action with Cost. Pay the cost by generating gold before performing the action.

F1. Fundraiser

This three-step process improves your financial position on your Finance board:

Divest. You may freely divest any number of Agents (but not meeples) of your color that are in play (i.e., as Syndicate members, Revolutionaries, Marines, or Administrators) onto your Finance board's Wealth field.
Collateral.⁴⁰ If you have Agents in both Debt and Capital, spend one Agent from Capital to Wealth for every Agent moving from Debt to Wealth, until you have no more Debt or no more Capital left.
Capital Accumulation.⁴¹ Move all Agents from your Wealth field into your Capital.
Red Player Bonus Step. If you did not divest Marines in F1.1, perform a free Maritime Operation (G1).⁴²

Example: You have 5 Finance Agents: 2 in Capital, 0 in Wealth, and 3 in Debt. For divesting, you move 1 Agent from a Syndicate on the market into your Wealth. For collateral, you move 2 Agents from Capital to Wealth and 2 Agents from Debt to Wealth. For capital accumulation, you move all 5 Agents from Wealth into Capital. You end up with 5 in Capital and 1 in Debt.

⁴⁰ COLLATERAL is the possession of capital that proves to a lender you are capable of repaying a debt.

⁴¹ CAPITAL ACCUMULATION occurs when an economic system devotes more effort to producing capital goods than is needed simply to replace capital goods that are worn out or consumed. Consider a subsistence farmer whose own harvest, in the form of seed, is the source of capital for further production. If he can only produce 2 bushels of crop from 1 bushel of seed, then he must use half his harvest as seed for next year's crop. His family, producing nothing, consumes the other half. But if, through some improvement in efficiency — say, tools — he can produce 3 bushels of crop from one bushel of seed, then he can accumulate capital and become a grain exporter, rather than a subsistence farmer.

⁴² BRITANNIA RULES THE WAVES. A government is an institution holding a monopoly on the use of force within a territory, and on the sea trade routes that institution was often the British Parliament (or one of its bureaucratic arms, such as the EIC). Accordingly, the Red Player commands maritime anti-slavery operations, while the other players serve in supporting or advisory roles.

F2. Syndicate (with cost)

Take one of the topmost Agents on your Finance board (E3) and install it onto a Market Idea card. This Agent now counts as a Syndicate member and lets you choose one of the Operations listed on the card to perform during each Ops Phase (G) of your turn. This Agent is also the required first step for Legislating (F5) that card.

a. Market Price. The purchase price of joining a Syndicate depends on the Idea's position on the Market, counted from the bottom up. The lowest Idea costs 0 gold, the next costs 1 gold, then 2 gold, 3 gold, 4 gold, and 5 gold for the most expensive, nearest the deck.

Example: John Brown is in the second row from the bottom. The market cost of joining this Idea's Syndicate is 1 gold.

b. Agents-Squared Cost. In addition to the market Syndicate cost, you must pay additional gold equal to the square of the current number of Agents (of any color, including your own) on the Idea [0, 1, 4, 9 respectively]. c. Shared Operations. If several players are in the Syndicate of the same Idea, all of those players gain access to the card's Operations (one Operation per Syndicate member).

Example: For the John Brown card from the previous example, suppose it already has 2 Agents, each belonging to a different player. So the Syndicate costs 1 + 4 = 5 gold. All three players now have access to the Manumission operation on this card.

F3. Shipbuilding (with cost)⁴³

This Action costs 3 gold and places 1 new ship token on any Sea Border that has no ship token. This Action additionally adds 1 Finance Agent, taken from the pool and placed into your Debt (this represents shipbuilding increasing the size of your capital). For the Red Player, this Action may additionally, and optionally, install Marines onto any ship and perform Gunboat Diplomacy (E5).⁴⁴

Tip: The Red Player is the key to installing Marines, and moving Marines is the key to sinking pirates (E6). Move Marines with a Maritime Operation (G1).

a. Underground Railroad. Shipbuilding immediately establishes an Underground Railroad between two Spheres, whenever one of them contains the Elephant.⁴⁵ b. Industrial Revolution Cost. If you have an Industrial Revolution Factory (K6.7) in any Sphere, then Shipbuilding costs only 2 gold, instead of 3.⁴⁶

Example: As the Red Player, you build a warship in the Pacific for 3 gold. You get an additional Agent in your Debt field. You decide to perform Gunboat Diplomacy in Japan, removing the Sakoku seclusion (a purple embargo token).

⁴³ THE BLOCKADE. "In 1849 and 1850 ... the British government took decisive measures against slave traders in Brazilian territorial waters, entirely disregarding Brazil's sovereignty, with the intention of wresting from the Brazilian government a commitment to enact and enforce an effective anti-slave-trade law. Thoroughly humiliated by British incursions into the Empire's harbors, by the seizure and destruction of Brazilian slave ships even in Brazil's territorial waters, and facing threats to the Empire's legal shipping, armed conflict, and even a blockade of Brazilian ports, the Imperial government was compelled in 1850 to agree to Britain's demands in exchange for a promise to suspend the naval attacks." —Robert Conrad, The Destruction of Brazilian Slavery: 1850–1888, 1972.

⁴⁴ PAX BRITANNICA was a period of general peace, in which Britain ruled the waves through a global police force of unchallenged naval power. This benefited the civilized world by suppressing slavery and piracy, and, after 1840, by embracing free trade. Moreover, Pax Britannica also globally suppressed the endless cycles of warlord aggression, wars of succession, and random violence, as compiled in the massive 832-page volume by Harvard sociologist Steven Pinker. "On average, non-state societies kill about 15% of their people in war, whereas today's states kill a few hundredths of a percent." The decline of intertribal warfare in the colonies was in part due to top-down state control, as Thomas Hobbes advocated, to prevent the imminent war of all against all otherwise demanded by basic human wildness. Yet the Enlightenment was the culmination of a bottom-up process as well: "Starting in the 11th or 12th century and reaching maturity in the 17th and 18th, Europeans increasingly suppressed their impulses, anticipated the long-term consequences of their actions, and took other people's thoughts and feelings into consideration. A culture of honor — a readiness to avenge — gave way to a culture of dignity — a readiness to control one's emotions. These ideals arose in explicit instructions that cultural arbiters gave to aristocrats and nobles, letting them distinguish themselves from villains and boors. But then they were absorbed into the socialization of the younger generation and of children, until they became second nature." — Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (Viking, 2011).

⁴⁵ UNDERGROUND RAILROADS carry fugitives to independent havens for escaped slaves. Such havens existed in Jamaica, Liberia, Argentina, and Brazil, and were created as a result of the emancipation of the British colonies in 1834. American slaves followed hidden paths to Canada, slaves of Dutch Borneo fled to Sarawak under the rule of the abolitionist White Rajahs (#83), and sugar, coffee, and tobacco slaves from Dutch Suriname escaped to British Guiana.

⁴⁶ QING CONQUEST THEORY explains how China stagnated while Europe underwent the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Restrictions imposed on trade and industry, and the persecution of unorthodox views following the Manchu conquest of China, caused the country to fall behind the West. The Manchus (1) restricted foreign trade to a single federal monopoly at a single port, Canton, (2) expropriated vast tracts of land, turning millions of tenant farmers into hereditary serfs, (3) established slave markets for those enslaved during the conquest, (4) set new standards of literary inquisition, including executing hundreds of intellectuals for minor offenses and burning thousands of ancient texts, and (5) abandoned the laissez-faire policy of the previous Ming dynasty in favor of widespread economic regulation of trade and investment in cash crops and mining. In this way, nascent entrepreneurial capitalism was suppressed. —Zhang and Mao, 2008.

F4. Post Appointment (with cost and the Elephant)⁴⁷

This action adds an Administrator to the administration area of the Sphere with the Elephant. This Agent is installed from your Finance board according to the installation hierarchy (E3).

Cost. For the Green and Red Players, the amount of gold spent equals the Barrier Cost. For the White Player, this costs no gold at all (missionaries are quite abstemious).
Coup. If the space is occupied by an Administrator (yours or an opponent's), they suffer Martyrdom — they return to their owning player's Wealth, and a Dissident of their color appears (if no free space is available, the player Regresses an Anarchy token instead).

Note: The Post Appointment action and certain Impacts are the only ways to add an Administrator.

⁴⁷ COLONIALISM (often called imperialism) is the expansion (usually by sea) of a government's monopoly on power into territory that is unoccupied or in a state of anarchy (e.g., warring tribes or states). It is thus distinct from territorial wars between states, such as the Russo-Ottoman Wars (#84) or Napoleonic France (#101). European colonies in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Americas beginning in the 16th century are often cited, but other seafaring powers of the period, such as the Maori, likewise established colonization of weaker peoples. At first, governments followed mercantilism, a type of economy that allowed a colony to trade only with its home government. By the mid-19th century, however, the British government abandoned mercantilism and introduced the Smithian principle of free trade with few restrictions and duties.

F5. Legislate⁴⁸

Action:

Removes the Idea from the Market.
Triggers the Idea's Impacts (the card's left-hand column).
Divests all Syndicate members.
Globalizes the Idea into whichever Splay(s) the Idea is recognized as Viable in.⁴⁹

Conditions:

You must have a Syndicate on the Idea (F2).
The Idea must be Viable. To be Viable, an Idea must have a Freedom Pair in one of the Splays matching its two Freedoms on the card (candle/feather, feather/comet, etc.).

An Idea or Revolution is Viable if its two symbols appear in a Freedom Pair⁵⁰ — that is, in any two adjacent cards in either of the two Splays. Each new Idea added to a Splay (after being legislated, or from a court case or plebiscite) creates a new Freedom Pair and may make other Ideas on the Market Viable.⁵¹

Note: At the start of the game each Splay has only one card, so nothing is Viable yet. Only a court case or plebiscite can grow a Splay.

Impact. Legislating triggers Impacts (M), from top to bottom.
Globalization upon Legislating. Choose which Freedom (via its orientation) you want visible when it is globalized into the Splay. Move the legislated Idea to the bottom of the appropriate Splay (Bill of Rights or General Will, depending on where it is Viable), and orient it so that only the chosen Freedom is visible. This creates a new Freedom Pair.⁵²
Tyranny of the Majority. If Legislating adds a 6th Idea to the General Will, the first Idea in the Splay is discarded.

Tip: Legislating will trigger Impacts that either remove Barriers, adding them to your Victory Pool, or add Agents of your color to the World Map or Market. On the other hand, once an Idea enters a Splay, it becomes public law, and you lose its Syndicate Operations.

Example: You are in the Syndicate for the Liberty Party Idea, which bears "candle-unlock" symbols. This matches a Freedom Pair in the Bill of Rights (see the example in G6). You perform the Legislate action, entering the Liberty Party into the Bill of Rights so that its unlock side is visible. This forms an "unlock–unlock" Freedom Pair. The Liberty Party's Impact is "Claim a Red Barrier," so, with the Elephant in West Africa, you Claim the Imbangala Slavers. Your Syndicate member is Divested.⁵³

⁴⁸ NATURAL RIGHTS are universal and inalienable rights that cannot be abolished or restricted by human laws. They are objectively authoritative because they arise from the nature of humanity and society, as discovered by science. They differ from legal rights, which are granted to a person by a given legal system within a given culture. Enlightenment thinkers were the first to challenge the divine right of kings, replacing it with the natural rights of man as the sole valid foundation of Law.

⁴⁹ A MIXED ECONOMY is a compromise between a bill of rights and democracy. However, any compromise on moral questions such as freedom and slavery means that common law loses its fundamental foundation, and a rudderless nation drifts further and further from capitalism toward statism. Almost by definition this drift is one-directional, since no totalitarian institution has ever voluntarily relinquished its powers. Modern examples of "little tyrants" in the United States' mixed economy are the "alphabet agencies": the SEC, EPA, FCC, EEOC, and so on. These agencies issue far more law than Congress does, tens of thousands of minutiae per year, with minimal constitutional oversight. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is a typical example of tyranny, because: (1) it is a legal monopoly. (2) It does not pay for its own mistakes. (3) Like any frontier judge, it keeps a share of the fines it levies. (4) The legal costs of contesting fines and pointless rules are borne by the victims, while OSHA's own legal costs are borne by the taxpayers. (5) OSHA has nothing to lose from delays and installation costs, and everyone else bears them. (6) By combining executive, legislative, and judicial roles, OSHA violates the constitutional (and Enlightenment) separation of powers. (7) OSHA's damage is proportional to human suffering, ruined careers, and enormous delays in technology and progress achieved.

⁵⁰ FREEDOM was, and for many remains, not at all an obvious or desired goal. Other values and ideals mattered, or matter, far more to them — values such as the pursuit of glory, honor, and power for oneself or one's family and clan, nationalism and imperial grandeur, militarism and valor in war, filial piety, the harmony of heaven and earth, the spread of the "true faith," nirvana, hedonism, altruism, justice, equality, material progress — the list is endless. But almost never, outside the context of Western culture and its influence, did they include freedom. Indeed, non-Western peoples thought so little about freedom that most human languages did not even have a word for the concept before contact with the West." —Orlando Patterson, Freedom, Vol. I, p. 8, 1991.

⁵¹ WHEN IDEAS HAVE SEX. A pair of ideas, combined in a new way, undergoes a kind of Darwinian natural selection — but selection among ideas, not genes. No other animal has "sex between ideas," or memes, the way genes do. This did not change human nature or morality, but it revolutionized human culture. —Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist, 2010.

⁵² RIGHTS are properly defined so that they cannot violate anyone else's right to life, liberty, or property. Contrary to this Lockean principle, politicians often gain political advantage by promising to hand out the services of professionals for free. Such promises of free loans, housing, medical care, education, and so forth, imposed unilaterally, contradict the principle that no one has the right to demand another person's services at gunpoint. You have no right to food, because someone must labor to grow that food, and forcing a serf to grow it for you makes you no better than a medieval lord. Instead, you have the right to negotiate for, or trade for, food, using the trader principle. You have no right to receive medical care on demand, because medical workers (such as myself and my wife) are not slaves, and deal with others on mutually agreed terms.

⁵³ BEYOND AFRICA. Why Africa? As the world consolidated from tribes into nation-states, it became harder and harder for slave traders to find regions where they could raid without resistance. As Russia came to dominate the Caucasus and the Balkans, the Islamic world, and later the Western world, turned to Africa as the last unconsolidated source of slaves. Africa was already enslaved internally, with the principal slaveholding empires being the Zulu in the East and the Asante in the West. The transport of slaves across the Sahara to the Ottoman Empire soon averaged 7,000 slaves a year, with another 6,000 arriving via the Red Sea and the Swahili coast. The annual transport of slaves westward, in the notorious Atlantic slave trade, was even higher — 24,700 slaves a year. By Ralph Austen's estimate, the total number of slaves moved eastward is 17 million, and westward, 11.5 million (the reason the Eastern figure is higher is that it occurred over a longer period, 650–1920, compared to 1450–1870 for the West).

F6. Join Revolution Action (with cost)⁵⁴

With this action, an Agent from the topmost position on your Finance board is installed (E3) as a Revolutionary on a Revolution card on the Market.

Engagement Spots. Each Revolution has 1 to 4 Engagement spots. Place the Revolutionary in the leftmost open circle. You may join even if all spots are filled.
Agent Cost. Joining a Revolution costs an amount of gold equal to the Agents-Squared cost (any color) already participating in the Revolution [0, 1, 4, 9 respectively].
Counter-Revolution. If you join a Revolution, you have the option to flip its card to the other side, keeping the location of all Agents. This costs the Dissident-Squared Cost, counting only opposing Dissidents (so 2 White Dissidents would cost you 4 gold if you are not the White Player).

Example: You decide to join the Satsuma Rebellion, where you already have a Revolutionary. The cost is 1 gold to add a 2nd Revolutionary. You decide to stage a counter-revolution, flipping the card to the side of the Senmin Haishirei Edict. There are 2 opposing Dissidents in Japan, so the cost is an additional 4 gold.

⁵⁴ REVOLUTIONS that overthrew (to some degree) serfdom or slavery in favor of Western ideas of freedom include the American Revolution of 1765–83 (#102), the French Revolution of 1789–99 (#101), the American Civil War of 1862–65 (#102), the Japanese Meiji Restoration of 1868–69 (#108), the Chinese Xinhai Revolution of 1911 (#107), and the Russian Revolution of 1917–1922 (#106). These were not ordinary, thoughtless power grabs by some new warlord or successor; they were the culmination of a long philosophical development of the yearning to breathe free, ultimately liberating vast numbers of people.

G. Ops Phase (Operations)

Perform as many Operations as you have Syndicate members or Revolutionary Agents. Each Agent may only be used for one of the Operations listed on the card. After you use a Syndicate member to activate an Operation, move the token to cover that Operation's symbol, to show that the Agent has performed Operations this turn. It will be returned to its starting position on a later turn (J2).

Order. You may perform your Operations in any order.
Elephant Operations. Determine the port with the Elephant for your turn.
Operation with Cost. Pay the cost with generated gold before performing the action.

G1. Maritime Operation

This Operation activates any number of Marines, which may either move from one ship to another, or from a ship to that same ship. This lets you perform one instance of Gunboat Diplomacy (E5) at each destination.

Install Marines. The Red Player may instead use this Operation to install Marines onto an existing merchant ship, taking them from the topmost position on their Finance board. This lets that ship perform Gunboat Diplomacy (E5).

Remember: This Operation can "move" Marines onto the very same ship, performing Gunboat Diplomacy without changing its location. Simply gather up the red tokens from all warships into your hand at the start of the Operation, and redistribute them onto any available ships.

Example: You are in the Syndicate for the Barbary Wars Idea. You use your Maritime Operation to move a Marine from a warship in the North Atlantic to a Merchant in the Pacific, and another Marine from the Mediterranean to the Sea of Japan. For your first Gunboat Diplomacy, you make a piracy roll (E6) to try to sink the VOC Slavers. For the second, you Claim Anarchy in China.

G2. Manumission (with cost and the Elephant)⁵⁵

This Operation liberates a slave, placing a meeple of your color, taken from the pool.⁵⁶ You cannot perform this Operation if there are no slaves to free in the port with the Elephant.

Barrier Cost. The gold to pay equals the number of Barriers remaining in the Sphere.

Example: As the Red Player, the Elephant is in the port of Luanda, where Congo has 3 Barriers. You pay 3 gold for Manumission, then move a red meeple onto the slave square in Luanda.

⁵⁵ MANUMISSION is the freeing of a slave by her master. After British emancipation, since slaves were legal property, their owners had to be compensated for their release. This cost £20 million, roughly 5% of British GDP in 1833. Although this was an enormous sum, the United States would have done well to imitate it. The monetary cost of the American Civil War would have been enough to buy every last Southern slave (and give each one 40 acres and a mule). In Gran Colombia, the cost of emancipation bankrupted the government, and abolition was delayed by more than a decade, contributing to civil war.

⁵⁶ THE FREEDMAN. The gulf between "slave" and "almost a slave" is enormous. "Few workers proved more vulnerable than the newly freed blacks in the United States after the Civil War. They were desperately poor, wholly uneducated, unorganized, and unfamiliar with the principles of a market economy. Nevertheless, organized attempts by white employers and landowners in the South to hold down wages for them, and to limit their choices, broke down as all the sharecroppers went to market amid bitter mutual recriminations between white employers and landowners. When the wage scale set by organized white employers fell below the annual productivity of black laborers, it became profitable for any given employer to offer more than others were paying, so long as his higher offer still did not exceed the black laborer's level of productivity. As for agricultural workers, the pressure on each employer mounted as planting season approached…" — Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics, 2015.

G3. Westernize (with the Elephant)⁵⁷

This Operation liberates a slave, placing a meeple of your color from the pool. You cannot perform this Operation if there are no slaves to free in the port with the Elephant.

Condition:

The Administrator in the port with the Elephant is your color, or
There are no red (left) Barriers. You may use an Underground Railroad to satisfy this option.⁵⁸

Tip: Westernize is a cheaper way to free slaves than Manumission, but it has more preconditions.

Example: The Elephant is in the Ottoman Empire Sphere. Although this Sphere still has a Barrier of the left (timar feudalism), there is a Merchant to the south (in the Red Sea) leading to Zululand, which has no Barriers of the left. This lets you perform the Westernize Operation, provided you have a Syndicate there. You place a meeple to free a slave in the Ottoman Empire.

⁵⁷ THE WEST, in this game, means any person, idea, or government that upholds Enlightenment principles of individual liberty. Any violations of individual liberty, regardless of whether they were perpetrated by an agency located in the Western world, are not Western by definition (for example, concentration camps during the Anglo-Boer War). Western ideas established the standards by which actions and regimes are judged today, including abolitionism. An example of a mixed compromise between freedom and slavery is the U.S. Constitution, the world's first (and last) founded on Enlightenment principles. There, slavery was an obvious and irreconcilable contradiction, one that came under ideological attack from the very first draft of the Declaration of Independence. For the first time in history, a number of Northern states historically banned slavery immediately upon gaining independence.

⁵⁸ Michael Clemens compares FREEDOM OF MIGRATION to a trillion-dollar bill lying on the sidewalk: "A modest reduction in barriers to labor mobility would add more value than the complete, global elimination of all remaining political barriers to trade in goods and all barriers to capital flows, combined." Trillions picked up off the sidewalk already include the fall of the Berlin Wall and of China's hukou system. Still to be torn down are the walls around North Korea and along the U.S.–Mexico border. —Brad Gardner, China's Great Migration: How the Poor Built a Thriving Nation, 2017.

G4. Suffrage (with cost and the Elephant)⁵⁹

This Operation Claims one Barrier, choosing one of the tokens in the Sphere with the Elephant. Alternatively, it may Regress one Barrier back into the Sphere with the Elephant.

Condition:

You have a Majority — i.e., there are more tokens (meeples and the Administrator) of your color in the port with the Elephant than slaves + opposing tokens, or
The Administrator in the port with the Elephant is a Red Agent⁶⁰, or
There are no white (right) Barriers⁶¹. You may use an Underground Railroad to satisfy this option.

Slavers-Squared Cost. This Operation is paid for in gold equal to the square of the number of Slavers on the Sea Borders adjacent to the Sphere with the Elephant.

Tip: Stopping the sale of blood products, achieved by sinking Slavers during piracy rolls (E6), makes removing Barriers via Suffrage cheaper.

Tip: Since Suffrage tends to be expensive, it is usually cheaper to remove an embargo (purple Barriers) via Gunboat Diplomacy (E5) rather than Suffrage.

Example: As the White Player, you move the Elephant to Edo for Suffrage. Edo has a mission, one White and one Red Freedman. Unfortunately, there is a Japanese Barrier of the right. If there is a ship to the south, you can use it as an Underground Railroad to the East Indies, which has no Barriers. But if there is no ship, you must Manumit one slave to gain a Majority before you can use Suffrage.

⁵⁹ CITIZENSHIP AND SUFFRAGE are hallmarks of democracy, but incidental to a republic. Citizenship — vesting politicians with special powers — is out of place in a republic, where castes are illegal, and everyone who manages to swim or crawl to its borders enjoys equal rights. Suffrage is used in a republic to elect civil servants, but since these officials are not leaders (the population governs itself) and are tightly constrained, their identity hardly matters. Indeed, in a country like Switzerland, voter turnout is dismal, and most people neither know nor care who their prime minister is. This is a mark of a free nation. Voting in a republic, unlike votes in a democracy, cannot be used to gain favors or power over your neighbors, since freedom is defined precisely as the exclusion of such powers, and is not subject to a vote.

⁶⁰ THE PRIME DIRECTIVE forbids interference in the internal development of alien civilizations in the Star Trek universe. In 19th-century Africa, two such "Captain Kirks" who violated the Prime Directive were Stanley (a reporter) and Livingstone (a missionary), immortalized as "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" The dilemma they faced was that slavery in Africa had been commonplace for millennia, and colonization seemed the only alternative to leaving the locals to work out literacy and Enlightenment values on their own. To secure abolition in Africa, Dr. Livingstone championed a series of Peace Corps–style missions (i.e., the White Player), while Stanley collaborated with the King of Belgium to establish indirect civilized rule in the Congo Free State (i.e., the Red Player) — tragically exploiting the existing enslavement to export blood products.

⁶¹ DEMOCRACY, in this game, is a nation with no right-wing barriers to freedom, such as censorship or a state religion. Nevertheless, left-wing barriers aimed at minorities, such as mercantilism (protectionist regulated prices and wages), are often upheld by a majority. The dark side of democracy is that human rights are not protected if the majority wishes otherwise.

G5. Literacy (with the Elephant)⁶²

This Operation places one Dissident of your color, taken from the pool, into the Sphere with the Elephant. If the Dissident squares are full, this Operation instead Regresses one Anarchy.

Condition. The Administrator in the port with the Elephant must be your color.

Example: As the White Player, you move the Elephant to Brazil to start a revolution using Literacy. There are already two White Dissidents there, so instead you must Regress an Anarchy taken from your Victory Pool, into Brazil.

⁶² LITERACY is a prerequisite for valuing any political idea more sophisticated than "might makes right." And yet, without Western imperialism, the illiterate tribal lands prevailing across the Americas, the Pacific, Australia, and Africa would have needed centuries to become literate. It is no coincidence that Britain, the world leader in political and industrial ideas, was also the most literate country (53% in 1650, compared with a few percent for the rest of the world). Literacy connects you to the lessons of history and everything discovered by Western culture since Aristotle. In an age when most slaveholders could not read, literate slaves were a rarity. Nevertheless, slaves taught by missionaries led numerous uprisings (#02, #12, #13, #14, #16, #19, #21, #23, #28, #33), and so slaveholders persecuted missionaries who tried to teach slaves to read and write. One literate slave, Joseph Knight, who had read about the Somerset case (see the footnote "DID SLAVES SUE THEIR MASTERS?"), filed and won a freedom suit in his own name (Knight v. Wedderburn, 1778). Freed slaves who became literate citizens fastest were in the United States, where more than half were literate within 50 years of the Emancipation Proclamation. This was higher than in most countries, against a world average of 26% in 1915. Robert Higgs called this "an achievement rarely seen in human history."

G6. Lawsuit (with cost)⁶³

This Operation lets you Globalize one Idea into the Bill of Rights Splay. It is the only way to enter a card into the Bill of Rights without a Viability check. The Idea being Globalized must lie somewhere below (i.e., be cheaper than) the Lawsuit Idea card that carries your Syndicate, in the same Market column. This represents a court battle in a test case over the abolition of slavery.⁶⁴

a. Agents-Squared Cost. The gold cost of the Lawsuit equals the square of the current number of Agents (any color) on the card being Globalized [0, 1, 4, 9 respectively]. b. Court Ruling. Choose which Freedom (via its orientation) you want visible when it is placed in the Splay. Move the legalized Idea to the bottom of the Bill of Rights Splay, oriented so only the chosen Freedom is visible. This creates a new Freedom Pair.⁶⁵ c. Founding Father. If you are the first to Globalize an Idea into the Bill of Rights, you become the Founding Father. d. No Impact. Globalizing an Idea via a Lawsuit or Plebiscite triggers no Impact (M) — the card's left-hand side is not played. e. Divest. All Syndicate members (of any color) on the Globalized Idea are Divested. If you are the Red Player, you have the right to Nationalize a foreign Syndicate member by filing a Petition (next item). f. Bonus Petition. Immediately after you perform a Lawsuit or Plebiscite, file one bonus Petition (L).

If the court ruling was red (a red symbol was left visible, G6b), perform the red bonus (Nationalize/Privatize an Agent) (L1.1) or the red-black bonus (fundraising) (L1.3).
If the court ruling was black, perform the black bonus (Legislate) (L1.2) or the red-black bonus (fundraising).

⁶³ DID SLAVES SUE THEIR MASTERS? Only in Britain, with its long tradition of common law and its Enlightenment-era discoveries. In Somerset v Stewart, a test case sponsored by the abolitionist Granville Sharp, the defendant was James Somerset, an escaped Jamaican slave who had fled to England. His advocates argued that, although colonial laws might permit slavery, it was unlawful in England, because neither Parliament nor English common law said anything on the subject. The opposition argued that property was of paramount importance and that it would be dangerous to free all the slaves in England. The judge ruled that Somerset must be freed: "The state of slavery is of such a nature that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political, but only by positive law, which preserves its force long after the reasons, occasion, and time itself from whence it was created is erased from memory. It is so odious that nothing can be suffered to support it but positive law. Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from the decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England; and therefore the black must be discharged." — Lord Mansfield, Somerset v Stewart, 1772.

⁶⁴ THE BRITISH LEGAL TRADITION. "... the British landed aristocracy, unlike the landed aristocracy in some European countries such as Russia, was based at the local level, both economically and politically. This meant that the landed gentry supported the decentralization of power, especially since these local elites themselves exercised much of that power as justices of the peace and in other roles. By contrast, the Russian nobility derived its economic support and political power from its role as either a military or civil agent of the central government, and therefore supported tsarist despotism." —Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures, 1998, p. 88. See also footnote 1 in the game John Company.

⁶⁵ LAWSUITS were the result of the Enlightenment principle of an independent judiciary, meant to uphold a body of law rather than the will of a monarch. The Bill of Rights encodes the regime's philosophical foundations (black symbols). The General Will reflects the active conduct of the population (red symbols). Such conduct must not contradict the foundational principles. The closest Eastern equivalent was religious authorities declaring that an act violated sacred texts, and this had limited usefulness as a check on state enslavement, since Eastern theocracies did not practice separation of church and state.

G7. Plebiscite (with cost)⁶⁶

This Operation is identical to a Lawsuit (G6), except that it Globalizes the Idea into the General Will Splay rather than the Bill of Rights.⁶⁷

Tyranny of the Majority⁶⁸. If this Operation adds a 6th Idea (the 6th Freedom symbol, not card) to the General Will, the first Idea in the Splay is discarded (the 2nd card with a Freedom symbol).

Example (a Plebiscite, then a bonus Legislate): The Western column has, from bottom to top: the Liberty Party (with your red Syndicate), Liberalism (with two Syndicates, green and red), Bleeding Kansas, the Great Awakening (also with your Syndicate), Uncle Tom's Cabin, and the Communist Manifesto. During your Operations, as the Red Player, you perform a Plebiscite from the Awakening, targeting Liberalism below it. This costs 4 gold (two squared), and Divests two Agents. Liberalism has "feather-candle" symbols, and you choose to Globalize showing the "candle" side. This is the first card added to the General Will, so, as the Founding Father, you choose "feather-candle" as the first Freedom Pair. During your black bonus Petition, you may freely Globalize the Liberty Party Idea as an out-of-turn Legislate (L1.2), since you have a Syndicate on it and its "candle-feather" symbols match the Freedom Pair in the Bill of Rights.

⁶⁶ A MISSIONARY must have enough courage to enter a foreign culture, unarmed and alone, and tell them that what they have done for centuries is evil — such as slavery. Perhaps the greatest missionary-abolitionist was Dr. Livingstone (#25), whose intolerance of slavery led him into trouble with more than one African potentate. He lobbied the British government to fund a nonprofit version of European colonialism, with settlements of devout Christians living among the people to help them learn a way of life free of slavery. Today his ideas would be mocked as disrespect for local culture, but at the time his chief obstacles were treasury officials who understood the grim economic prospects in Africa. Nevertheless, Christian missionaries achieved striking success in converting indigenous cultures in the colonies. (I suspect this is because, for centuries, Christian scholars in the tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas had reconciled the natural and supernatural worlds.) Besides proselytizing (converting others to their faith) the word of God, missionaries often mastered local languages and developed writing systems for them, a great step forward for illiterate native peoples. Some of the newly literate, missionary-taught leaders, such as Haiti's Toussaint Louverture, went on to lead revolutions grounded in Enlightenment ideas. However, missionaries assigned to already-literate Eastern cultures achieved little success, and sometimes provoked mass repression, such as the Boxer Rebellion.

⁶⁷ REPUBLIC OR DEMOCRACY. A bill of rights, as in the constitutional law of a republic, codifies self-evident truths and scientific discoveries about the nature of a proper society. To the extent the Bill of Rights is objectively true, any attempt to circumvent it has consequences akin to a law of nature rather than a law of man. The Bill of Rights is considered fundamentally inviolable, regardless of rulers, votes, or public-opinion polls: a minority cannot be enslaved, even if the majority wishes it. In a republic, the use of force is regulated to be used only against the use of force. Democracy, by contrast, embodies the subjective will of the voters rather than the objective laws of nature. Democracy tends toward a storm of amoral rules, each backed by weapons, to create or defend a public or private fiefdom at the expense of someone's freedom. The first thing lost under majority rule is minority rights. This includes individual rights, given that every person constitutes a minority of one. Such suppression of minority views means that democracy is conservative in the face of change and (to use evolutionary terminology) that randomly beneficial mutations will never be naturally selected.

⁶⁸ THE TYRANNY OF THE MAJORITY. In this game, red symbols represent activism, and black symbols represent the moral foundation of that activism (Enlightenment or religious). The game's thesis is that morality must be excluded from democracy, or else a tyranny of the majority results, in which the minority is forced to adopt the moral standards of the majority. Conversely, activism should be excluded from a republic's bill of rights, leaving only the moral norms on which the nation was founded.

H. Elephant Phase

The Elephant token represents the press's interest in abolitionist efforts. Roll 1d6 to move the Elephant, and use that number, possibly, to discard one Market card via Cultural Diffusion. Then close up any gaps in the Market. If it is impossible to close a gap because both decks have run out of cards, the era ends (J3, J5) and scoring occurs (J4, J6).

H1. Elephant Actions, Operations, and Impacts

A small elephant icon marks an Action, Operation, or Impact that requires the Elephant. If you perform an Action, Operation, or Impact requiring the Elephant, immediately move the Elephant so it points at the port where you are performing it. The Elephant must remain in that port for the rest of your turn. In other words, all your Elephant Actions, Operations, and Impacts must be performed in the same port.

The only Elephant Action is Post Appointment (F4).
The Elephant Operations are Manumission (G2), Westernize (G3), Suffrage (G4), and Literacy (G5).
The only Elephant Impact (upon Legislating) is Claim a Barrier (M6).
Quinine. You cannot use the Elephant in a Sphere with a yellow-green Disease disk unless you have a Factory.⁶⁹ If you do, take that Disease disk into your Victory Pool.

⁶⁹ WERE FACTORY WORKERS SLAVES? No. Since the Renaissance, runaway serfs fled to the cities in search of work, despite severe punishments, including branding, for leaving the manor without permission. "Stadtluft macht frei" (city air makes you free) was the slogan of the age. Much has been written condemning the harsh conditions in urban factories, without mentioning that the workers were there of their own free will, having fled an even harsher system. Workers never become slaves because of poverty or bad factory conditions. Workers become slaves only when threatened with weapons or the whip, to ensure they cannot quit for something better. Which was better: working in a factory, or in the field? Many studies have confirmed the answer the workers themselves gave with their feet.

H2. Elephant's Walk Roll

If during your turn you did not take any Action, Operation, or Impact requiring the Elephant (H1), move the Elephant a number of Spheres equal to the Elephant's Walk roll. Otherwise, the Elephant stays where it is.

Clockwise Movement. The Elephant moves through all Spheres clockwise around the world map.
Bypass. While moving, the Elephant skips Spheres with Disease (even if you have an Industrial Revolution Factory) or Modern Spheres.
Port. Upon arriving at its destination, place the Elephant in the port with the most tokens. Count both Freedmen and the Administrator. You choose in case of a tie.

Example: The Elephant is in Europe and the Elephant's Walk roll is "4." Move the Elephant through: Ottoman Empire – China – Japan – East Indies. If this is the advanced game and the East Indies still has Disease, skip it, so the Elephant ends up in India. There are two ports to choose from, but Mughal has more Freedmen, so place the Elephant in the Mughal port (continued in H3).

H3. Cultural Diffusion⁷⁰

If there are no gaps on the Market to fill (since no Globalizations occurred in the advanced game, and no Revolutions succeeded via a revolutionary Impact (M4)), then one Market card is discarded. The Elephant's Walk roll shows which card is discarded, counting from the zero-cost position and moving up toward the deck. For example, if you roll "1," the lowest Market card is discarded. Any Agents on it are Divested, and any Revolutionaries above it are massacred. The Market column this happens to is always the West.⁷¹

Note: In the Basic Game, gaps to fill never occur, so the Elephant's Walk roll always leaves a gap in the West, and new cards always come from the Western deck.

Cultural Diffusion from West to East.⁷² If the target card from the Elephant's Walk roll has a Cultural Diffusion Arrow, then the card moves into the "East" column (following the arrow), instead of being discarded. The card moves to the same row in the "East" column, keeping all its Agents, and leaves a gap in its original spot. Discard the card currently in the "East" column, stripping it of all Syndicate members and destroying all Revolutionaries. This represents the disruptive spread of ideas from West to East.

Example: The Elephant's Walk roll from the previous example is "4." This discards the fourth card from the bottom of the Western column. But this card, "Freedom of Speech," has a Cultural Diffusion Arrow, so instead it "bumps" the fourth card from the bottom in the Eastern column. The card that ends up in that spot is the Russian Revolution with one Revolutionary; it returns to the Revolution stack as failed (K2), and the Revolutionary is discarded to the pool.

⁷⁰ CULTURAL DIFFUSION is the spread of cultural styles, religion, technology, languages, and other ideas among people, typically from one culture to another. In this game it occurs through persuasion, not coercion (e.g., banning forced marriages, forced conversions, invasions, etc.).

⁷¹ THE WEST. "The idea of freedom has always been peculiar to the West." —Ludwig von Mises, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, 1956.

⁷² THE EAST/WEST DIVERGENCE. "Although in 1346 there was little difference between Western and Eastern Europe in terms of political and economic institutions, by 1600 they were utterly different worlds. In the West, workers were free of feudal dues, fines, and decrees and were becoming part of a rapidly developing market economy. In the East, they too were drawn into such an economy, but as forced serfs growing food and agricultural commodities demanded by the West." —Acemoglu and Robinson, Why Nations Fail, 2013.

I. Hate and Pogrom Roll Phase

Make a mandatory hate roll to check the survival of Freedmen and missionaries in the port with the Elephant.⁷³ Then make a mandatory pogrom roll of 1D6 for each Sphere with two Anarchy disks.

⁷³ HATE — what is it? In Bios: Megafauna I describe emotions as states of consciousness tied to decision-making that first arose in the limbic system of certain reptiles. Hate may have its roots in territorial anger and sexual jealousy, but it seems to have become a purely human idea, directed collectively against a religion, race, or social status. In this game, hate embodies collectivist ideas aimed at legal or illegal violence against freedmen and Western abolitionists. "In 1855, when the sultan's firman (decree) [forbidding the slave trade] was read out in Mecca and Jedda, it provoked a revolution. Turkish officials, including the qadis who read the firman, were killed, the garrison was besieged, and Mecca was in a state of revolt until the Porte rescinded the unwelcome order. And when, on 25 February 1860, the Governor-General of the Hejaz issued an order forbidding the slave trade in all Turkish Red Sea ports, there was great agitation and fear of a repeat of the violence of 1855. There was no Ottoman cruiser in the Red Sea capable of enforcing this order, and Turkish officials were too frightened to enforce it." Beachey, The Slave Trade of Eastern Africa, 1976.

I1. Number of Dice, Hate Roll

The number of dice in a hate roll equals the number of open spaces in the port with the Elephant, to a maximum of 4 dice. Open spaces include the Administrator space, the Port itself (which is always open!), and slaves.

Example: The Elephant is in Hong Kong. Hong Kong⁷⁴ has 1 Freedman but no Administrator. Therefore the number of hate dice is 2: the open Administrator post plus the open Port. If an Agent is appointed to a post in Hong Kong, the number of hate dice drops to 1.

⁷⁴ HONG KONG was a tiny, neglected island ceded to Britain in 1842 after the Qing dynasty lost one of the Opium Wars. This had enormous consequences for all of Asia. Lacking every resource except human capital, and impoverished until the latter half of the 20th century, it became the fastest-growing economy in the world. It now has one of the highest per-capita incomes in the world, and a top personal income tax rate of only 15%. Canada's Fraser Institute ranks Hong Kong #1 in the world for economic freedom. Former British colonies dominate the world rankings for economic freedom: Singapore (2nd), New Zealand (3rd), Ireland (5th), the United Kingdom (6th), Mauritius (7th), Australia (9th), and the U.S. and Canada (tied for 11th). (Venezuela, the basket case of socialism, ranks last.) —Fraser Institute, Economic Freedom of the World Report, 2017.

I2. Hate Kills⁷⁵

When the hate roll is made, check the value rolled on each die. If a die face matches a number on a Barrier, its color indicates which token is lost. If you get multiple results, you choose the order in which to apply them.

a. Red, White, or Green Blood Dice (Freedom Barriers). Each red die symbol on a Barrier causes the killing of a red Freedman, or the Martyrdom of a red Agent (your choice). Likewise for White and Green die symbols. All Kills occur in the port with the Elephant, and any Dissidents resulting from them are placed in the Sphere with the Elephant. If the Dissident spaces are full, convert each extra meeple into Anarchy. If Anarchy is full, export each extra Anarchy as a Refugee.

Exception: In a non-Tyranny, frustrated hate generates Anarchy if there is no token of the matching die color to kill — see I3.

Example: If you roll 1, 1, 1 in Beijing, the Boxers⁷⁶ kill three Christian tokens. If there are 2 White Freedmen and a White Administrator there, both meeples are killed and moved to the Dissident squares, and the Agent is Martyred, adding a 3rd Dissident. But only one Dissident square remains empty, so the other two casualties become Anarchy disks.

b. Purple Die (Embargo).⁷⁷ Each purple die sinks one neighboring Merchant (your choice, if there is more than one) — not a warship (carrying Marines). c. Yellow Dice (Taxes).⁷⁸ Each yellow die forces you to spend 1 gold (ignore this if all your Agents are in Debt).

Example: The Likin tax token depicts two die faces: a green 6 and a yellow 6. If you roll a single 6 in Beijing, this tax token kills a green Freedman and forces you to spend gold.

⁷⁵ GET OUT OF THE DAMNED SPOT! What does it mean to disregard an inalienable right? The laws of nature cannot be violated: for instance, 300,000 km/sec isn't just a good idea, it's the law! The rights of the individual are likewise a Law of nature, and violating them (e.g., through enslavement, or in retaliatory killings) likewise carries an immutable consequence: the loss of one's status as a rational being. Since your survival depends on reason, this loss of humanity is a serious, even fatal, injury to your own self-identity. Yes, committing evil can cost you standing before others, or before God, but that is nothing compared to your own denial of the principles of life. Even stealing a penny, or a similarly tiny violation of principle, means you are a thief, and nothing in principle then stops you from stealing millions and living a miserable, envious life as a professional parasite.

⁷⁶ THE BOXERS (i.e., the "Righteous and Harmonious Fists") were an anti-Western nationalist movement, united under the slogan "Support the Qing government, exterminate the foreigners." Mystically believing themselves immune to Western bullets, they killed 32,000 Chinese Christians and 200 missionaries, and besieged thousands more in Beijing's legation quarter. The Chinese government was split between those who supported the Boxers, led by the Dowager Empress Cixi, and those favoring reconciliation, led by Prince Qing. A Western alliance of eight nations defeated the Chinese army and the Boxers and lifted the siege after 55 days.

⁷⁷ EMBARGOES use force to block one person's right to make a deal with another. Free trade is another Enlightenment-era principle of economic freedom, discovered by Adam Smith and adopted by Robert Peel on the eve of the industrial boom. Free trade was established to an unprecedented degree: repeal of the Corn Laws, repeal of the Navigation Acts, elimination of all tariffs, and application of every liberalizing measure equally to all trading partners, who were enriched accordingly.

⁷⁸ TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION represents a portion of your earned income, confiscated at gunpoint and spent on causes you do not agree with. A stark example: taxes on Jewish bankers helped pay for the gas chambers of Auschwitz. The only legitimate use of tax funds is the direct protection of individual rights. Legitimate expenses include funds for a judicial system to settle disputes between people, police to suppress armed conflict between people, a standing army to prevent invasions, and a navy to blockade the slave trade.

I3. Frustrated Hate in Non-Tyrannies⁷⁹

A Tyranny is any Sphere that begins this phase with 5 Barriers (the iron-fist symbol). It represents the iron fist of an absolute monarch suppressing any protest or Anarchy.⁸⁰ A Tyranny still has hate and pogrom rolls, but no frustrated mobs.

a. Frustrated Mobs. If a Sphere is not a Tyranny (i.e., has 4 or fewer Barriers), then the results of any die symbols with a black outline generate 1 Anarchy if they cannot kill anyone for lack of targets. In other words, in a non-Tyranny, if you roll a "frustration" die result shown on a Barrier and there are no tokens of that color available to kill, the mob generates Anarchy out of pure frustration! b. Solo or Cooperative Game. If you are playing a fully cooperative game (C1b or C1c), treat all Spheres as non-Tyrannies regardless of how many Barriers they have. This makes the world less stable and more anarchic.

Example: The Elephant is in Istanbul. The Ottoman Empire has all 5 Barriers and so is under the sultan's iron fist. The hate roll matters if any "6"s (the Jizya tax) come up. But if the Empire has previously lost the "Dvoryane" (Nobles) Barrier⁸¹, the iron fist loosens, and Anarchy from frustrated mobs becomes possible. If the hate roll is 1, 1, 2, 2, four citizens (red Freedmen) should be killed by Pan-Islamism and the Devshirme system. But there are no citizens to kill, so the mobs generate 4 Anarchy. Since the Ottomans can only hold 2 Anarchy, the Refugees spread the extra Anarchy into China and Europe.

⁷⁹ CRUELTY. Cesare Beccaria's treatise (#8) provided the moral sanction for unprecedented laws against "cruel and unusual punishment." Nineteenth-century Europe was the first to concretely challenge the morality of child labor, executions as a spectator sport, and punishment by torture and mutilation. Voltaire (#43), Hume (#45), Diderot (#46), and, more recently, Matt Ridley have argued that commercial behavior, dependent on trust and the absence of coercion, makes people gentler. It was nouveau-riche merchants (a person who rose rapidly from a low station), such as Wedgwood and Wilberforce, who financed the abolitionist movement. Sarah Wedgwood, Charles Darwin's aunt, was its single largest donor.

⁸⁰ A TYRANNY is any government that does not respect people's rights. In the game, all 5 Eastern Spheres except East Africa begin as tyrannies.

⁸¹ RUSSIAN SERFS became chattel property in 1658 and could be sold apart from their estate, but retained their families and possessions. According to the census of 1719, roughly four-fifths of the population were enslaved, divided about evenly between the Tsar and the nobility (dvoryane). Runaway serfs fled south along "underground railroads" (secret escape networks), and the nobility constantly demanded the government undertake their capture.

I4. Pogrom Rolls⁸²

For each Sphere with 2 Anarchy disks (indicating economically motivated genocide), roll 1D6 to see the result of a Massacre in that Sphere. A Massacre removes a token to the shared pool, without creating a Martyr or generating a Dissident. You choose the order.

Color of the Victim. If you roll a 1, kill a white token (if none, nothing happens). If you roll a 2, kill a red token (if none, nothing happens). If you roll a 3, kill a green token (if none, nothing happens). The removed token is your choice: a Freedman, a Dissident, an Administrator, or a Factory.
Refugees. If you roll a 4, 5, or 6, an Anarchy Regression occurs. Since the Sphere is already at its maximum of 2 disks, assign this Anarchy as Refugees to a neighboring Sphere. If this creates the conditions for a new pogrom, roll 1D6 for that pogrom too.⁸³

Note: Unlike hate, pogroms affect the entire Sphere and do not depend on Tyranny-frustration or on where the Elephant is.

Example: India has 2 Anarchy, and the Indian pogrom roll is 1, killing a white token. The only white token available in India is the British colonial Agent, discarded to the pool. During your opponent's turn the pogrom is still there, and a 1 is rolled again. But there are no more white tokens, so nothing happens. Now it's your turn again, and the pogroms are still occurring. You roll a 5, adding Anarchy taken from your Victory Pool. Since India is full, the overflow spreads to a neighboring Sphere. You choose China; this brings China to 2 Anarchy. So in China you must also make a pogrom roll.

⁸² POGROMS are officially condoned attacks on a targeted group. Tribal pogroms are often suppressed by European colonialism, but resurface after independence is gained. Examples include: Hindus against Muslims in India; Serbs killing Croats and Albanians in post-Tito Yugoslavia; Muslims killing Igbos in Nigeria; Hutus killing Tutsis in Rwanda/Burundi; Idi Amin killing Ugandan minorities; Muslims killing Pieds-Noirs, etc., in Algeria and Matabele, which wiped out the Shona in Zimbabwe, and the ongoing Rohingya pogrom in Myanmar. The victims are always relatively wealthy minorities, and the aggressors are driven by economic envy in keeping with the "Shylock syndrome," a mistaken belief that the victims enjoy excessive prosperity. Racism and religion play only a superficial role. The Nazi Holocaust is another example of a modern pogrom, targeting Jewish bankers and other economic middlemen.

⁸³ THE ASIAN SECOND SERFDOM was unlawfully imposed on private farming households during Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward, and the Killing Fields (mass grave sites for the victims of the far-left Khmer Rouge regime) of Pol Pot (Secretary-General of the Khmer Rouge). These were replaced with forced agricultural collectives, following socialist theory that sacrificing personal freedoms is necessary for a better society. Turning the clock back to feudalism under the Qing dynasty, the new serfs were forbidden to own property, lease, sell, or make use of land that had once belonged to them, to perform non-agricultural work, to protest, or to flee famine. Tens of millions died from starvation, cannibalism, militia violence, torture, and suicide. The destruction of private homes to resettle serfs into labor communes exceeded the scale of destruction caused by the bombing of Europe during World War II.

J. Market Update and End of Game

To finish your turn, restore the Market to a 6×2 matrix of cards. If you run out of cards in a deck, the cooperative era ends according to J3, and, if that is the end of the game, according to J4. If it is not the end of the game, continue into the competitive era according to J5.

The Dark Age. The game ends in defeat if all Anarchy is on the world map at the very end of this phase.
The Modern World. The game also ends if every Sphere becomes a Modern State.

J1. Market Update

To finish your turn, fill every gap on the Market by following this procedure:

Slide cards down. Move cards (and any Agents on them) down to fill each gap in their market column, starting with the lowest gap.
Deal new cards. Draw cards from the corresponding Eastern or Western deck and fill the column from its lowest empty slot. This restores the Market so each column again has 6 cards. If one deck (East or West) runs out, start dealing from the other deck instead. Fill gaps in the East first. This may place Western cards into the Eastern market, or vice versa.⁸⁴

Important note: If the Market cannot be refilled because both decks are empty, the cooperative (J3) or competitive (J5) game ends immediately, and scoring occurs.

⁸⁴ THE CONTRADICTIONS OF EASTERN MYSTICISM. The in-game situation, where Western ideas run dry while Eastern ideas begin flooding the Western market, might be considered an occult quirk, popularized by Swedenborg, Mesmer, and other spiritualists. Mesmer's name inspired the term "to mesmerize," but his séances were debunked by a committee headed by Benjamin Franklin (#44).

J2. Reset Market Agents

Move all Agents sitting on Operation symbols (G) to another spot on that Market card (so they can be used again on later turns).

Revolutions on the Market. Move a Revolutionary who has acted back to the empty Engagement spot (F6) it came from, so it doesn't lose its place in line.

J3. End of the Cooperative Era and Counter-Enlightenment⁸⁵

The cooperative era ends if, during the Market Update Phase (J1), a Market card cannot be refilled because both the Eastern and Western decks have run dry. Each player checks whether they avoided their personal Counter-Enlightenment.⁸⁶ If so, they may count victory points per J4.

Red Player's Counter-Enlightenment. At the end of the cooperative phase, the Red Player scores no VP if there are more Slavers in play than red Agents (British colonists, Administrators, Marines) and default red Administrators (K8).
White Player's Counter-Enlightenment. At the end of the cooperative phase, the White Player scores no VP if the game ends with fewer than 15 Freedmen of any player on the World Map (Dissidents don't count).
Green Player's Counter-Enlightenment. At the end of the cooperative phase, the Green Player scores no VP if more than 25 Barriers remain in play (there are 39 to start).

⁸⁵ WAS THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY INEVITABLE? Abolitionists could not have known they were racing against time. Emancipation could only find a moral foundation during the Age of Reason, when morality was regarded as being just as absolute as any other law of nature. This could not have happened under today's "cultural relativism," which judges a person's decisions and actions according to local culture, rather than by objective criteria. Contrast individual rights, which sanction the inalienable right to life, liberty, and property, with "human rights" as "defined" by the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "a person is free only when he lives as his society defines freedom." In other words, a local authority can artfully redefine any form of slavery as "freedom"! (Something that changes at whim is the opposite of a definition.) Although slavery (broadly defined) is now illegal worldwide, other coercive practices (such as caste systems, female infanticide (abortion), forced birth control, ritual genital mutilation, spousal abuse, and nationalization) still flourish. Missionaries who once fought this evil are retreating, accused by multiculturalist intellectuals of "Eurocentrism" or "disrespect for native cultures." Had the Industrial Revolution not occurred, and had abolitionists shown slightly less zeal, slavery would still be, not a "peculiar institution," but the dominant way of life.

⁸⁶ THE COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENT refers to the philosophy that overthrew the Age of Reason in favor of an age of Romanticism and, eventually, an age of Subjectivism. Isaiah Berlin, summarizing the Counter-Enlightenment as relativist, anti-rationalist, vitalist, and organic, lays the blame on German idealists such as Kant and Hegel, who rejected reason as the authority for knowledge and morality. Other historians, such as Everdell and Meltzer, cast Rousseau as the founder of the Counter-Enlightenment and of the philosophy of terror during the French Revolution. Whatever the case, without any good reason that I can see, intellectuals abandoned the Enlightenment at the very moment of its most spectacular successes in liberating humanity. "I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith." — Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 1781.

J4. Cooperative and Solo Scoring / Victory

If the game has ended (i.e., you are not playing a competitive era, either because everyone agreed in advance the game would be cooperative, or because not everyone avoided Counter-Enlightenment), every player who is permitted to counts their victory points.

Scoring. Each token or disk in your Victory Pool is worth 1 VP, except Disease disks, which are worth 3 VP. Each token of your color on the map (Freedman, Administrator, Factory, Marines, and default Administrators (K8)) counts for 1 VP. All Dissidents, regardless of color, are counted for the White Player (they follow a cult of Martyrs).
Victory. If the game does not continue into the competitive era (J5), the game ends. Add together the combined VP of the "Enlightened" players: 50–74 counts as a minor victory, 75 or more as a decisive victory.

J5. The Competitive Era

If all players in the multiplayer game avoided Counter-Enlightenment, the game continues for several more turns in the competitive era. At the end of this era, the sole winner is whoever has the most VP (they may take pride in the fact that their policies ended slavery).

Decks. Shuffle together all Western Ideas discarded during the cooperative era with any previously unused cards, and place 5 cards face up into the deck (2-player game) or 7 (3-player game). Do the same for the Eastern Ideas. Then continue play from where you left off.

J6. Competitive Scoring

The competitive era ends the same way the cooperative era does (J3): when a Market card cannot be added because both the Eastern and Western decks are empty. Then each player individually tallies their final VP as described below, and the player with the most points becomes the ultimate winner. In case of a tie, they share the victory.

Note: VP earned at the end of the cooperative era (J4) do not count toward the final victory!

a. Victory Pool. Each token or disk in your Victory Pool is worth 1 point, except Disease, which counts as 3 points. b. Tokens on the World Map. Each token of your color on the World Map (Freedmen, Administrators, Marines, and default Administrators (K8)) earns 1 VP each. All Dissidents, regardless of color, are counted for the White Player. However, each Factory cube (K6.7) counts as VP equal to the square of the number of neighboring ship tokens. c. Democracies. The Red Player scores 1 VP for each token (Freedmen, Administrators, default Administrators, and Factories, but not counting Dissidents and Marines) in a democracy (i.e., a Sphere with at least one red Barrier, but no other Barriers).⁸⁷ d. Theocracies. The White Player scores 1 VP for each token (Freedmen, Administrators, default Administrators, and Factories, but not counting Dissidents) in a theocratic monarchy (i.e., a Sphere with at least one white Barrier, but no other Barriers).⁸⁸ e. Republics. The Green Player scores 1 VP for each token (Freedmen, Administrators, default Administrators, and Factories, but not counting Dissidents) in a republic (i.e., a Sphere with no Barriers).

Remember: democracies, theocratic monarchies, and republics can exist as either feudal or modern states. A state with an embargo but no red or white Barrier is neither a democracy, a monarchy, nor a republic.

f. Globalized Revolutions. Revolutions in a Splay with a visible VP value are counted for the indicated player.

Example: As the White Player, you have 5 Barriers, 1 Slaver, and 7 disks in your Victory Pool. On the map there are 8 white Freedmen and Administrators, 4 Dissidents (of various colors), plus a Factory cube in Europe (with 2 ships on its borders). There is one theocracy, holding 3 meeples. The Taiping Rebellion in the Splay is oriented to give you 4 VP. Your final VP total is 13 + 16 + 3 + 4 = 36.

⁸⁷ "FREEDOM should be distinguished from democracy, with which it is often confused. The British had many rights that were lacking through much of Europe and the rest of the world, long before they acquired the privilege of controlling their government. Only a small fraction of Members of Parliament were popularly elected before the Reform Act of 1832. Nevertheless, freedom of speech, separation of powers, the right to trial by jury, and other hallmarks of a free society had existed in Britain for generations before this." —Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures, 1998, p. 91.

⁸⁸ SLAVERY IN ISLAM. At the time of the game, no region was as thoroughly gripped by slavery as the Ottoman Empire. The Quran sanctions slavery, but only for non-Muslims. Slaves were everywhere: sex slaves from Circassia, Syria, and Nubia; galley slaves (including Europeans abducted in Barbary pirate raids); Zanj household and plantation slaves; Mamluk slave-soldiers; African eunuchs and Christian harem-women for the sultan; and Turkish boys seized in the devshirme to serve the state. Even the lower classes could afford slaves in markets close to the sources of slaves, such as Tripoli, Egypt, Arabia, and the Persian Gulf. After the British suppressed the slave trade in 1857, petty traders (such as pilgrims returning from Mecca, army officers on leave, colonial administrators in Tripoli, and Istanbul vacationers in Africa) often brought back a few slaves for sale to cover their travel costs. — Ehud R. Toledano, The Ottoman Slave Trade and Its Suppression, 1983.

Book 2 — Advanced Game, Tips, Glossary

"The liberty of man, in society, is to be under no other legislative power but that established by consent in the commonwealth, nor under the dominion of any will or restraint of any law but what that legislative shall enact according to the trust put in it... Freedom then is not what Sir Robert Filmer tells us: a liberty for every one to do what he lists, to live as he pleases, and not to be tied by any laws; but freedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power erected in it; a liberty to follow my own will in all things where that rule prescribes not, and not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man." — John Locke, 1689

Book 2 covers the Revolution Phase (K), Bonus Petitions (L), Impacts (M), Strategy (N), the Example of Play (O), and the *Glossary.

K. Revolution Phase

10 Revolutions are held in the shared deck (C7), each Revolution corresponding to one of the 10 Spheres. If a Revolution's Sphere has accumulated both Dissidents and Anarchy, launch it (K1) onto the Market during this phase. On subsequent turns, the Revolution moves through the Market as it is churned (J1). During this period, players may join it via the Join Revolution action (F6) or a corresponding Impact (M4). If the Revolution card itself culturally diffuses while in the Western column, it moves along its diffusion arrow into the Eastern column. If it culturally diffuses while in the Eastern column, it is discarded as failed (K2). A Revolution succeeds during this phase if it is both Viable and has enough Revolutionary Agents (K4).

Order. If several Revolutions launch or succeed on your turn, you choose the order in which to resolve them.

K1. Launching a Revolution

During this phase, a Revolution launches if its corresponding Sphere has at least one Anarchy disk and at least one Dissident. Launching can also happen via an Impact (M4). Launching places the Revolution onto the Market; if the Revolution is already on the Market, it cannot re-launch. Every Revolution is double-sided, and which face is shown depends on whether it is a slave revolt or a civil-rights revolt.

a. Firebrand Replacement. A Revolution card for an Eastern Sphere replaces a Market card in the Eastern column, and a Revolution card for a Western Sphere replaces a Market card in the Western column. The Market card replaced is whichever has the lowest Firebrand value in that Market column. Discard the card with the lowest Firebrand level, ignoring its Cultural Diffusion Arrow. b. Popular Hero. If, in the Sphere, all Dissident squares are filled with Dissidents of a single color, take one new Revolutionary of that color from the pool to add to the Revolution. c. First Revolutionaries. Alongside the Popular Hero, any Syndicate members on the card with the minimum Firebrand value become Revolutionaries; they are placed left to right into the Engagement spots (with no cost paid). You choose the order. d. Civil Rights or Slave Revolt¹. Place the left-wing Revolution ("civil rights") face up if the Sphere has more red Dissidents than white. It has a red border. Place the right-wing Revolution ("slave revolt") face up if there are more white Dissidents than red. It has a white border. You choose in case of a tie. e. Instant Victory. If the Revolution is Viable and its first Revolutionaries (K1c), or Revolutionaries from an Impact (M4), fill (or overfill) all its Engagement spots, it is immediately considered successful (K4). All Syndicate members become Revolutionaries, and the laws of a victorious revolution are made according to K6.

Example: During your Revolution Phase, the 13 Colonies have a red Dissident and Anarchy, launching the left-wing American Revolution².¹ The lowest Firebrand value in the Western column is William Lloyd Garrison #11, with one red Syndicate member. You discard Garrison and turn his Syndicate Agent into the first Revolutionary.

¹ A slave revolt is a kind of de facto suffrage: if slaves make up an overwhelming majority, as in China or the Caribbean nations, majority rule is possible purely through numerical strength. Before the Enlightenment, a slave was characterized by hopeless fatalism and no notion that she could improve her lot in life. But a slave given missionary instruction in reading and writing, and familiar with Enlightenment ideas, could spark a revolt. The first successful slave revolt in history led to the founding of the independent, slave-run Republic of Haiti in 1804 (#12). This inspired other slaves, such as the Jamaican Sam Sharpe (#16). Having read that Parliament was considering emancipation, he led a general peaceful strike in 1832. His last words were: "I would rather die upon yonder gallows than live in slavery." His death helped spur Parliament to pass the Slavery Abolition Act the following year.

² THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION is classified as left-wing because its Constitution upholds intellectual freedoms but permits economic chattel slavery. (The left wing is defined in this game as a state where your mind is free but your labor belongs to society or the politburo.) The Constitution's glaring contradictions led the uncompromising abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison (#16) to denounce it as "a covenant with Hell." And yet, to be fair, it was written at a time when the Enlightenment was still raw, and the obvious abolitionist implications of "all men are created equal" had not yet been spelled out. One of the earliest official condemnations of slavery was Jefferson's first draft of the Declaration of Independence (#52), which criticized King George III for enslaving Africans and for vetoing colonial Virginia's attempt to ban slavery. In a draft Virginia state constitution prepared by Jefferson in 1776, he proposed banning the importation of slaves, and in 1783, the gradual emancipation of slaves. He was defeated in both attempts. The following year, Jefferson proposed a bill declaring slavery illegal in all Western territories, including Alabama and Mississippi. The bill lost by a single vote, since one legislator was too ill to attend and vote. "Thus we see the fate of millions unborn hanging on the tongue of one man, and Heaven was silent in that awful moment!" — Thomas Jefferson, 1786.

K2. Revolution Failure

A Revolution instantly fails if it is removed from the Market by Cultural Diffusion (H3), even if it is Viable with all its Revolutionaries in place. Return the Revolution card to the shared deck. All Revolutionaries on the card, as well as Administrators and Dissidents in the card's Sphere, are Massacred (they do not become Martyrs) and are not Divested. All starting tokens (Barriers and neighboring Slavers) of that Sphere are Regressed. Freedmen and Anarchy in that Sphere stay where they are.

K3. Write Manifesto

If you perform a Legislate (F5), Lawsuit (G6), or Plebiscite (G7) that makes a Revolution on the Market Viable, and it was not previously Viable, then you must add a Revolutionary Agent to it, taken from the reserve pool (not from your Finance board!). This costs no gold and no actions.

The Current Revolution. Manifestos are only effective for the currently visible side of the Revolution.
Supreme Revolutionary. You may join a Revolution even if all its Engagement spots are already filled.
World Revolution. A single Manifesto trigger can add Agents to several Revolutions.

Example: The White Player decides to join (F6) the American Revolution from the K1 example. Since the American Revolution already has 1 Agent, placing their white Revolutionary costs 1 gold. They decide to stage a counter-revolution (F6), flipping the American Revolution to the American Civil War. This Revolution is not Viable: there is no "unlock–candle" Freedom Pair in either the Bill of Rights or the General Will. In turn, the Green Player performs a Plebiscite of a card oriented to "candle" into the General Will, where the last card was "unlock." This forms an "unlock–candle" Freedom Pair, which triggers a Manifesto. This adds a Green Agent to the third and final Engagement spot, triggering a Union Victory in the Civil War, with Revolutionaries (first to last) Red, White, and Green.

K4. Revolution Success

During this phase, if a Revolution is Viable and has all its Engagement spots filled, it succeeds. Modernize the Sphere (K5), pass laws (K6), then discard the Revolution card unless law #8 (K6.8) was chosen, and Divest any Revolutionaries not appointed to a post by law #5.

K5. Modernization

Flip the World card corresponding to the Revolution to its modernized side. Keep Freedman meeples and Agents on Administrator posts in their original positions.³

Dissidents in the new modern state move to slave spaces of your choice. If there is no space, they emigrate (next bullet).
Emigrants. If there is no room for a Dissident because all slave spaces are full, move them to become a Freedman in another Sphere. Choose a disease-free Sphere with the fewest Barriers among Spheres that still have at least one slave.⁴ You choose in case of a tie.
The Elephant. If the Elephant is in the modernized Sphere, move it one Sphere clockwise (skipping modernized Spheres and Spheres with Disease).

Example: The 13 Colonies Sphere from the previous example flips to its modernized side: the United States of America. The colonial Agent in Virginia and the citizen in Virginia are kept.

³ THE FOREIGN POLICY of Victorian Britain generally supported constitutional monarchies. Canning's recognition of the South American Republics can be seen as part of this policy. Britain had virtually no physical presence there. This method became more important as free trade developed. — Dr. Marjie Bloy, 2002.

⁴ INDEPENDENCE FROM COLONIALISM can have catastrophic consequences. Leaders of newly independent states in Africa and India were often Western-educated, but unfortunately were taught the untested assumptions born of the era following the Age of Reason. The freedoms once enjoyed under colonial law were lost in the new independent socialist democracies and petty dictatorships, which trampled the Enlightenment principles of individual rights. The renewal of economic and intellectual enslavement was often accompanied by a renewal of intertribal bloodshed. Food production plummeted, turning Africa from a nearly self-sufficient continent into a mass importer of food. Uganda, Tanzania, Chad, Zambia, Ghana, Senegal, Madagascar, Zaire, Niger, Benin, the Central African Republic, Burundi, Rwanda, and Equatorial Guinea experienced negative per-capita production growth, leaving Africans poorer a generation after independence than they had been under imperial rule (Alpine & Pickett, 1993). The answer is not a return to colonialism, but rather a return to the Western traditions honored in the Age of Reason. After independence, most British colonies founded during the Enlightenment era became today's centers of freedom and prosperity, including the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Hong Kong. Even the African colonies of South Africa, Mauritius, and Botswana appear to have benefited from their British colonial experience. Botswana has been exceptional in protecting property rights for 30 years since independence, and has shown a striking 8% per-capita GDP growth, all while avoiding coups, civil wars, and dictators. These examples refute the exploitation theory of income inequality.

K6. Laws of a Victorious Revolution

Finally, each player with a Revolutionary enacts one law per Agent. The order of choice passes from the last-placed Agent to the first-placed Agent. You may choose laws 1 through 6 multiple times. There are 8 laws to choose from:

Claim one Barrier in the revolutionary Sphere.
Claim one Anarchy in the revolutionary Sphere.
Claim one Slaver on a border adjacent to the revolutionary Sphere.
Regress one Barrier (from any Victory Pool into the revolutionary Sphere). This is corruption (E7).
Place one of your Revolutionary Agents into an unoccupied Administrator post in any Sphere (except the modernized Sphere, and any Sphere with Disease unless you have a Factory). Return any Revolutionaries not used for a Post appointment to their owner's Wealth.
Place one meeple (any color) into an empty slave space in the revolutionary Sphere, from the reserve pool.
Build your Factory cube (if not already built).⁵ Place a cube of your color on the Sphere card representing the Industrial Revolution; see J6 and the Glossary for its benefits. Once built, your factory can only be removed by a Pogrom (I4).
Globalization & Purge. Globalize the Revolution into a Splay in which it is Viable, without flipping it to its other side. You choose the orientation, which will grant VP to the indicated player at game end. When added to the Bill of Rights, this placement purges (K7) that Splay, removing from the game all earlier Ideas, leaving only the starting card placed by the Founding Father and any earlier Revolutions.

Note: If no one chooses Law #8, remove this Revolution from the game.

Tip: The player who launched the Revolution has the option to enact the final law. The final law matters a great deal in a competitive game, because it often determines which way the government leans! See the following example.

Example: In the successful Civil War from the previous example, the Green Player chooses Law #8, placing the Civil War into the Bill of Rights with the "candle" orientation. This purges the other Idea cards from the Bill of Rights and grants them 3 VP at game end. The White Player chooses Law 1: Claim the red Barrier token (the Fugitive Slave Law). This leaves only the white token (the Ku Klux Klan), pulling the government to the right. The Red Player chooses last, and enthusiastically chooses Law 4, Regressing the red Jim Crow Barrier, so the U.S. government now has Barriers of both the left and the right.⁶

⁵ FREEDOM AS THE CAUSE OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION. As far as I can tell, the Industrial Revolution could have occurred centuries earlier or later. Likewise, abolitionism could have arisen centuries earlier or later. It is surely no coincidence that the two lived on the same small island a generation apart! And yet, despite this, many modern intellectuals blacklist the Industrial Revolution as a cause of slavery rather than a triumph over it. In fact, both phenomena share the same root: the Enlightenment. Although the Industrial Revolution made slavery economically obsolete, it ended serfdom in England centuries earlier with no special legislation at all, and ended the movement to abolish slavery half a century earlier still. Enriched by overseas trade and Enlightenment freedoms, demand for urban labor rose sharply. As migrants flocked to the cities, wages rose sharply too. High wages spurred inventors to find ways to replace expensive labor with cheap machinery. Inventors, who were mostly of humble origin and would themselves have been slaves in another society, enjoyed freedom of thought and thrift within an independent legal system. They also benefited from two British innovations in political freedom: common law and the patent system. They benefited only marginally from Enlightenment science and mathematics, such as Newton's laws or mathematical calculation.

⁶ THE 13TH AMENDMENT of 1865 abolished slavery and forced labor in the antebellum United States, except as punishment for a crime. In the game, this is the removal of the Fugitive Slave Law (a left Barrier).

K7. Bill of Rights Purge

If Law #8 is chosen to Globalize a card into the Bill of Rights (but not the General Will), then remove from the game all older cards in that Splay, except for earlier Revolutions and the Founding Father's starting card. This may make Ideas and Revolutions no longer Viable.

Example: As the revolutionary behind the Union Victory in the American Civil War, you enact Law #8. The Bill of Rights has 5 cards: "comet" (the starting card, from John Locke #109), "feather," "candle," "unlock," and "unlock." The Civil War has an "unlock–candle" pair, and so is Viable in the Bill of Rights. You Globalize the Civil War into this Splay and choose the "unlock" side, so that the White Player gains 3 VP. You then remove all earlier cards except the starting card (John Locke) and "feather," which is on the Philippine Revolution card. The resulting 3-card Bill of Rights is "comet" (the Founding Father's starting card), "feather" (Philippines), "unlock" (American Civil War).

K8. Modern State

Neither the Elephant nor Dissidents may be added to a state that has been flipped to its modernized side.⁷

Default Administrator. In a modern state, every Administrator post is always considered occupied. In cases where no Agent has actually been placed, the Administrator of the color indicated for that space is assumed present for the purposes of determining victory results.

Note: Corruption during Gunboat Diplomacy, and Refugees/Emigrants, are the only ways to affect a modern state's status.

Example: In the modern United States from the previous examples, there is an unoccupied red Administrator post in the Caribbean. During end-of-game scoring (J6b), it counts as a Red Player token.

⁷ Dissidents, of course, exist within a modern state, but only in a modern state is the right to protest respected and lawful. The game minimizes British interference in the affairs of modern states, reflecting the historical decline of colonization. But those states that modernized selectively along Enlightenment ideals, freeing some but not their own slaves — as in the U.S., Brazil, and India — would later pay for it in blood.

L. Bonus Petitions

L1. Red, Black, or Red-Black Petitions

Immediately after a Lawsuit (G6) or Plebiscite (G7), you may file a Petition to Parliament. There are 3 types: red (if you Globalized with a red symbol visible), black (if you Globalized with a black symbol visible), or red-black (either color of Globalization symbol).

Nationalization/Privatization (red circular symbol). If you are the Red Player, Nationalize (E2) a white or green Syndicate Agent. The target Agent must be in the Syndicate on the card being Globalized by the Lawsuit or Plebiscite. If you are the Green or White Player, you may Privatize (denationalize, E2) a Nationalized Agent of your color, Divesting it from the Red Player's Finance board.
Out-of-Turn Bill (black circular symbol). Perform one Legislate action (F5) on an Idea that carries your Syndicate and is Viable on the Market. Then draw a random card from a random unused deck (roll a D6 to determine the deck) and use it to fill the resulting gap.
Subsidized Fundraising (half-red, half-black symbol). Perform one bonus Fundraiser (F1).

Example: You are the Red Player with a Syndicate on the Baptist Missionary Society Idea #76. You perform a Lawsuit, Globalizing the Habeas Corpus Act, sharing a Syndicate with the White and Green Players. (This costs 4 gold.) You orient Habeas Corpus in the Bill of Rights with a red symbol visible, and are entitled to Nationalize either the white or the green Agent. You choose Green, which moves to your Wealth, while the white Agent is Divested and returns to the White Player's board. Had you instead oriented Habeas Corpus with a black symbol visible, you would not have been able to Nationalize, and so could instead have chosen the Out-of-Turn Bill bonus. Assuming the Baptist Society is Viable, you decide to Legislate it into the Splay and trigger its Impact (removing a red or white Barrier from the Sphere with the Elephant).

L2. Separation of Church & State⁸ (half-red, half-black symbol)

The White Player may file any bonus Petition (Privatization, Out-of-Turn Bill, or Fundraising) using either a red or a black Parliamentary law.

⁸ SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE is another principle discovered by John Locke. He argued that government lacks authority over the sphere of individual conscience, since a rational person cannot cede her opinion to the government. This principle allowed religious minorities to take up abolitionist positions that a state religion, largely oriented toward preserving the status quo, would never have entertained. The major state religions of the period promoted a hierarchy of obedience, with supreme authority at the top and slaves at the bottom, including Christianity in the West, the caste-based Hinduism of India, the Shinto blend of local kami worship and mystical Buddhism in Japan, the more this-worldly Neo-Confucianism governing bureaucrats in Qing China and Korea, and Islam in the Ottoman Empire and North Africa.

M. Impacts

An Impact is an additional bonus operation that occurs only through Legislating (F5). As the first step of Legislating, resolve the symbols on the left side of the card, from top to bottom, from M1 to M6. These are known as Impact symbols. Ignore any Impact that cannot be performed (e.g., claiming a red Barrier from a Sphere that already has none to claim).

New Agents. Impacts M1–M4 add a new Agent of your color from the pool onto the World Map, the Market, or the Finance board. This represents growth, so add it from the reserve pool (not from your Finance board).

M1. +Syndication

Take a new Agent from the pool and place it onto any Idea, even one that already has a Syndicate, with no need to pay gold. You may use this Syndicate for Operations during the current Ops Phase.

Example: You Legislate the Social Contract Idea, which creates a new Syndicate. You take an Agent from the pool and choose to place it on the most expensive Idea in the Eastern column.

M2. +Post Appointment

Take a new Agent from the pool and place it into the Administrator space of the indicated port, even if the Sphere has Disease or is Modern. This does not move the Elephant.

Disease. If the Sphere has Disease, take its yellow-green disk into your Victory Pool (even if you don't have an Industrial Revolution Factory).
Coup. If there is already an Administrator there (even your own), they suffer Martyrdom.

M3. +Wealth

You receive a new Finance Agent from the pool, placed immediately into your Wealth.

M4. +Revolutionary

You receive a new Revolutionary from the pool, placed onto an ongoing Revolution, with no need to spend an action or pay gold. You may even add a Revolutionary to a Revolution that is already full. Alternatively, you may launch a new Revolution (bypassing all conditions) with 1 Revolutionary, per K1. This is possible even in a Sphere with Disease. This may even trigger the Instant Victory (K1e) of a Revolution outside the Revolution Phase (K). This interrupts play to resolve the Revolution.

Example: You are the Red Player and Legislate a card with the +Revolutionary Impact, and choose India for a revolt. It has 3 green Dissidents, so you may choose either side, and you choose the red side. Take a green Agent from the pool to become the Popular Hero. You choose Green to become the first Revolutionary, and your red Agent to become the second.

M5. +Merchantman

You receive a new ship token, placed as a Merchant onto any Sea Border with no ship yet, with no gold cost (but without adding a new Agent to Debt). If there is a Red Administrator anywhere on the World Map (in any Sphere), you may move them onto this ship and perform Gunboat Diplomacy (E5) with this (now armed) ship.

M6. Claim Red/White Barrier (Elephant)

Claim a Barrier of the indicated color (if any) from the Sphere with the Elephant, and place it in your Victory Pool. Red Barriers are of the left, and white Barriers are of the right.⁹ A half-red/half-white Barrier may be claimed as either color.¹⁰

Elephant Operation. This is an Elephant Operation (H1), so moving the Elephant to the chosen port assumes you have not already taken any other Elephant Actions or Operations.

⁹ LEFT AND RIGHT WING politics took their names from the seating arrangement in the Estates-General of the French Revolution. Under left-wing politics you have a duty to work for society, but you may think for yourself. Under right-wing politics, you may work for your own gain, but suffer forced submission to another's opinion.

¹⁰ THE POLITICAL DIAMOND. Players of the board game High Frontier will notice that this game's compass rose corresponds to the diamond-shaped diagram in High Frontier. The labeled directions "right," "left," "up," and "down" correspond to "right-wing family values," "left-wing equality," "Libertarian work ethic," and "authoritarian command structure," respectively. This is an adaptation of the Nolan Chart, which likewise has a freedom-slavery axis and a left-right axis, defined here in terms of intellectual and economic submission.

N. Strategy Overview (Cooperative and Competitive Games)

N1. Actions

a. Form a Syndicate on a Market Card. A Market card has a Syndicate if it has an Agent on it. You need at least one card with a Syndicate to gain the benefit of Operations. Form a Syndicate on an Idea with a low Firebrand value, so as to get the first Revolutionary in the next revolution. b. Post an Administrator. Administrators matter for the Westernize (G3) and Literacy (G5) Operations, as well as for reducing hate, achieving a Majority, and adding VP at game end. Red Administrators matter for Suffrage (G4). Until Barriers are removed, Post Appointment is expensive for everyone except the White Player. c. Tame the Elephant. If you take no Elephant Actions or Operations on your turn, the Elephant is free to wander among Spheres and trigger hate or Anarchy, leading to pogroms. d. Manage Hate. It is actually safer to bring the Elephant into a Tyranny, because a tyrant suppresses frustrated hate (I3). Once the number of Barriers falls below 5, frustrated hate will first cause Anarchy, and then pogroms.

N2. Boost Finances

a. Short Term. Use Fundraiser. Do it twice if deep in debt, remembering to shed anything not absolutely necessary for your plans. If you are completely out of Capital and Wealth, first install an Agent somewhere for free (perhaps a free Syndicate, Post appointment, or Revolution), then immediately Divest it during fundraising. b. Add Agents. Normally you have a fixed number of Agent tokens, cycling between your Finance board and the World Map or Market. Adding Agents into the game significantly expands your options. In the basic game, the only way to do this is Shipbuilding (F3). Do this early, before you start accumulating Debt. In the advanced game, add Agents via Legislative Impacts (F5), a Popular Hero (K1.2), Manifestos (K3), or Nationalization/Privatization (L1.1). Any Agent of your color added to the World Map, to Finance, or to the Market significantly boosts your chances of winning.¹¹ c. Avoid Nationalization. In a competitive game, Divest any Agent in a Syndicate at risk of being Nationalized by the Red Player.

¹¹ THE MONEY SUPPLY of each country corresponds to its share of world production and trade (about 50% for Britain in 1840). The money supply is tied to the demand for money to make purchases and pay bills. Assuming a fixed money supply, the money supply only increases as productivity grows, as with the Industrial Revolution or the abolition of slavery. This game models a non-inflationary increase in the money supply through an increase in the number of Agents. Britain's rapid economic growth drew an inflow of gold into Britain, as the demand for money fell in countries such as China and India. Contrary to mercantilist theory, such globalization, like any voluntary trade, brings enormous benefit to the peoples of both countries. The British beneficiaries of, say, cheap factory-made textiles exported to India are mostly British factory workers, whose wages typically make up 80% of a company's payroll (the rest going to capital equipment and shareholders). The standard of living of Indian consumers benefits enormously from cheap cloth, whose production in a British factory takes mere man-hours, compared with man-months in India. The time savings enjoyed by Indian consumers can be devoted to other purposes, such as growing food.

N3. The Victory Pile

a. Suffrage is the key to Claiming Barriers and winning, but it requires either having a Majority (the number of tokens of your color > the number of slaves + tokens of other colors), being a British colony (a Red Administrator), or having no white (right-wing) Barriers in the Sphere with the Elephant. You can get rid of white Barriers via Legislate, or quickly build an Underground Railroad as a "bridge" into a Sphere with no white Barriers. b. Claim Red/White Barrier tokens via Legislate (F5) or Suffrage (G4). Legislating requires Freedom Pairs formed as a result of a Lawsuit, Plebiscite, or other Legislate actions. c. Claim Embargo, Anarchy, or Slaver tokens by installing or moving Marines (E5, F3, G1). Ships cannot move in this game, but Marines can move from ship to ship. Only the Red Player can create Marines, but any player may move them once created. The Red Player has a powerful incentive to create Marines, since they cannot score VP if, at game end, there are fewer red Agents on the map than remaining Slavers.

N4. Victory Points

a. Freeing slaves is essential to gain Freedmen of your color, which makes it easier to sink Slavers (E6) and helps you avoid Counter-Enlightenment (J3). Use Manumission and Westernize Operations to Liberate slaves, turning them into Freedman meeples. b. Political Sympathies. Use Legislative Impacts (F5), Suffrage (G4), or revolutionary laws (K6) to Claim white or red Barriers from a Sphere. The Red Player prefers red Barriers to remain, the White Player prefers white Barriers to remain, and the Green Player prefers no Barriers to remain at all. c. Revolutionary Laws. If you trigger a victorious and Viable revolution and enact Law #8 in the new Modern State (K6.8), you gain substantial victory points (VP).

N5. Avoiding Counter-Enlightenment¹²

a. Red Player, Sink Pirates. Since you need to end the game with at least as many red Agents on the World Map as there are Slavers (J3), you must build ships and fight pirates. Securing the Industrial Revolution is a priority. A typical turn might be to first Divest Marines during fundraising, then take a Shipbuilding action to build a new warship for Gunboat Diplomacy. A good first target might be the Barbary Pirates, letting you cheapen Suffrage in London, where you already hold a Post. b. White Player, Free the East. You need 15 Freedmen at the end to avoid Counter-Enlightenment (J3). And most of the slaves are in the East. A first step might be a Post appointment in Korea or Hong Kong, free for you, but costing others 5 gold. This lets you Westernize the single slave in that port. Now that you have a Majority, you can use Suffrage to Claim Barriers. Suffrage costs only 1 gold in China or Turkey, where there is only one Slaver. Warning: once the number of Barriers falls to 4 or fewer, the government's grip weakens, leading to chaos, frustrated hate, and revolution. c. Green Player, Claim Barriers. You need no more than 25 Barriers remaining at game's end. Suffrage is possible in the starting British colonies of Virginia, or London, or in India, or in France, where you either already have a Majority, or can obtain one. If you are a Syndicate member on a low-Firebrand Idea card, you'll become part of whatever Revolution it triggers, and can then choose Revolutionary Laws to Claim Barriers.

¹² THE THESIS OF THIS GAME: The Enlightenment supplied the reason-based premises and ideas that fueled anti-slavery activism. However, the Enlightenment philosophers themselves were not activists, and wrote comparatively little about slavery. (Accordingly, in this game the thinkers have few Operations, while the activists have many Operations listed on their cards.) Rather, abolition was an unexpected blessing flowing from a new concept of morality grounded in universal individual rights. One of the earliest Enlightenment activists was James Oglethorpe, who banned slavery on moral grounds in the province of Georgia in 1733. Speaking out against slavery in Parliament, he inspired his friends to form an electoral bloc of abolitionists, the "Clapham Saints" (#9). Modern accusations of hypocrisy against the Enlightenment thinkers — for instance, that Locke "profited from the slave trade" — are ahistorical. Locke (#109), one of the first to call slavery "vile and miserable," lived in an age when abolitionism as a concept still lay in the future, and could hardly have avoided profiting from the slave trade, had he invested his money in anything at all.

O. Example of Play: An Advanced Cooperative-Competitive Game for 3 Players (1776–1836)

Western Market column (bottom to top) at start: #46, #12, #23, #59, #38, #42, #66 (top of deck). Eastern Market column (bottom to top) at start: #92, #96, #71, #72, #70, #80, #76 (top of deck).

O1. Round 1 (1776–1782). The French Revolution Restores the Monarchy

Slaves are freed in Virginia, but some of them are killed by the Klan. A trading post is established in France, but the dissent this triggers launches the French Revolution. The Revolution concludes the following turn, spurred by a manifesto from an anti-Western Syndicate, restoring the monarchy, taking action against the Barbary pirates, and reforming taxes. The lead revolutionary, Lafayette, spurs suffrage and anarchy in Brazil.

a. Red's Actions (Raymond). Syndicate #46 and #92. These cost 0 gold. Operations: move the Elephant to the 13 Colonies, perform Westernize twice (one per Syndicate). Elephant (6): discards #42 via Cultural Diffusion. Hate: the Ku Klux Klan (1) kills one of the new Freedmen in the 13 Colonies, creating a red Dissident. Red Finance (Capital/Wealth/Debt): start = 3/3/0 with 2 posts (USA and Britain). End = 1/3/0 with 2 posts, 2 Syndicates. b. Green's Actions (Firaxis). Post an Administrator in Nantes (costs 3 gold and moves the Elephant), then Syndicate #23 (Frederick Douglass) for 1 gold. Operations: Frederick Douglass's Literacy creates a green Dissident in Europe. Elephant (4): discards #59. Hate (1): the Terror in France generates frustrated Anarchy in Europe, taken from the Green Player. Revolution: Louverture (#12) discarded to launch the French Revolution. Green chooses the white side (Lafayette). Green Finance: start = 3/3/0 with 1 post (Mughal). End = 0/3/1 with 2 posts, 1 Syndicate. Firaxis says: "The Green Player is financially strong, so I figured I could afford this strong opening move. In hindsight, I should have built a ship to secure early Capital." c. White's Actions (Simon). Joined the revolution for 0 gold, then Syndicate #72 (an anti-Western democracy) for 2 gold. Operations: Use #72's Plebiscite to Globalize #96 (the Independence Club). Manifesto: #96 is placed in the General Will to form an "unlock-candle" Freedom Pair, which is a Manifesto for the French Revolution. A new White Revolutionary is installed from the pool to complete the French Revolution. Bonus Petition (from the Plebiscite): Fundraising. Operations (continued): One of Lafayette's revolutionaries uses Suffrage, moving the Elephant to Brazil and claiming the bandeirantes (a red Barrier). This costs 4 gold. The other revolutionary Westernizes Brazil. Hate (6): White pays 1 gold in dízimo tax. Revolution: The French Revolution concludes in victory for the two white revolutionaries. Laws: the Gabelle tax is claimed, and the Barbary pirates are sunk. Simon says: "Big mistake — I should have sunk the Atlantic 'royal cotton' instead." Emigrants: One green person emigrates to the Caribbean. Raymond says: "Simon first tried to emigrate to Virginia. He changed his mind when I reminded him this is still a cooperative game, and ruining my Majority in Virginia would block American suffrage." White Finance: start = 3/3/0 with 1 post (Bahia). End = 0/5/1 with 1 post, 1 Syndicate.

O2. Round 2 (1783–1788). The American Revolution

In this version of history, "the shot heard round the world" was fired from Maroon muskets on Barbados. But the American Revolution degenerates into a Civil War, Viable but showing no signs of ending.

a. Red's Actions. Fundraiser, Divesting a Syndicate and the London Agent. With no Marines, the bonus Maritime Operation goes to waste. Then a Shipbuilding action in the North Atlantic (cost 3). Gunboat Diplomacy: a piracy roll (cost 1) rolls a (2), enough to sink "royal cotton" and trigger corruption, Regressing the gabelle tax farmers. Raymond says: "The restoration of the French monarchy is absolutely unacceptable, and I'm not afraid of a little bribery to set things right." Simon replies: "In our Virginia deal, you promised to remove barriers, not add them." Hate: no effect. Finance: 1/4/0 with 1 post (Virginia), 1 Marine, 1 Syndicate. b. Green's Actions. Fundraiser, then an Administrator in the Caribbean, cost 3. Operations: Frederick Douglass uses Suffrage to end Jim Crow in America, cost 1. Hate (5): the Fugitive Slave Law creates Anarchy. Revolution: the Maroons (#3) are discarded to launch the American Revolution. Green chooses the white (Washington) side. Green Finance: 0/2/1 with 3 posts, 1 Syndicate. c. White's Actions. Join the revolution for 0 gold, turn it into a counter-revolution for 1 gold, then add a second revolutionary for 1 gold. Operations: Once again, the anti-Western democracy uses a Plebiscite to Globalize an Idea into the General Will, which is now "unlock-candle-comet." Two Maritime Operations by Lincoln break the blockade of Napoleon's Continental System and suppress European Anarchy. Bonus Petition: Fundraising (Divesting from Bahia). Elephant (3): moves into Japan, where White chooses Korea. Hate (1, 4, 5): no effect, since only "6" is active in this Tyranny. White Finance: 2/0/3 with 2 revolutionaries, 1 Syndicate.

O3. Round 3 (1789–1794). The Industrial Revolution in the USA Under King Lincoln

Green loses its foothold in India when the Hindus overrun the EIC trading post. But the orator Frederick Douglass turns war-torn America into a barrier-free agrarian republic (agrarian, because it is not yet modern). Historically, Jefferson championed just such a slave-free, village-based utopia. But the South kept its slaves, while the North became urbanized. Nevertheless, even in 1860, more than half of Americans were still farmers.

a. Green/Red Negotiation. Firaxis says: "In the 13 Colonies there is a Red Agent on the default Green Administrator's spot, and a Green Agent on the default Red Administrator's spot. We'll both be better off if we both get rid of these Agents. As a show of good faith, you Divest yours first." b. Red's Actions. Fundraiser, Divesting the Agent from Virginia as promised, and the bonus Maritime action destroys Anarchy in the war-torn 13 Colonies. Then Syndicate (2 gold) on the Peasants' War. Operations: the Peasants Globalize the anti-Western democracy, then petition to Nationalize them! The General Will is now "unlock-candle-comet-feather." Elephant: moves to Mughal. Hate (3): supporters of the caste system Martyr the green Administrator. Red Finance: 3/3+W/0 with 1 Marine, 1 Syndicate. "W" denotes a Nationalized white Agent. c. Green's Actions. Fundraiser (Divesting from the Caribbean as promised), then adding a 2nd Syndicate on Douglass, cost 1 gold. Operations: Frederick Douglass uses Suffrage twice, ending the Klan and the Fugitive Slave Law in America, cost 2 gold. Firaxis says: "Douglass is a great American and my personal hero." Hate: skipped (no Barriers left in America). Green Finance: 1/3/0 with 1 post, 2 Syndicates. d. White's Actions. Joined the Civil War for 4 gold, then took a Post as Administrator in Edo for 0 gold. Operations: Westernized Japan three times. Hate: a white meeple falls victim to the shogunate. Revolution: the Civil War concludes with victory for the three white revolutionaries. Revolutionary Laws: the Industrial Revolution occurs in the USA, and a slave-sugar Merchant ship is destroyed. Nevertheless, the Klan returns, turning America into a theocracy under King Lincoln.¹³ White Finance: 0/3/3 with 1 post. Simon says: "My first attempt at this stage was Syndicate, Plebiscite, then a Legislative Petition with a bonus Revolutionary to win the Civil War. It failed because I forgot about the Tyranny of the Majority making Lincoln nonviable. Luckily, my opponents let me replay my turn."

¹³ LINCOLN, THE GREAT DICTATOR, took widely unconstitutional actions, including treating secession as treason, declaring martial law and invading the South without consulting Congress, suspending habeas corpus, imposing press and telegraph censorship, and drafting and jailing virtually anyone who disagreed with his radical views. —Thomas DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln, 2002.

O4. Round 4 (1795–1800). The End of Eastern Isolation

The British fleet finally expands (to two ships) and ends the long isolation of Japan and China, forcing Edo and Beijing to open to free trade. A war begins between White and Red Russia.

a. Red's Actions/Operations. Shipbuilding (3 gold) in the Sea of Japan, then Fundraiser. Gunboat Diplomacy: Claims an embargo from China and Japan. Hate: since Japan, with only four Barriers, is no longer a Tyranny, frustrated hate generates Anarchy, launching a revolution (white side). Red Finance: 6+W/0/0 with 2 Marines. b. Green's Actions/Operations. Take a Post in Hong Kong, then Syndicate (0 gold). Operations: Westernize and Suffrage in China (1 gold). Hate: frustrated Anarchy in China. Green Finance: 4/0/0 with 1 post, 2 Syndicates. c. White's Actions. Syndicate the Baptist missionaries (1 gold), then join the revolution as a Satsuma counter-revolutionary (1 gold). Operations: A Lawsuit on the Barbary Wars, so the Bill of Rights will "unlock" a candle. Petition: Privatize their Nationalized Agent. Hate (6): suffers taxation. White Finance: 0/1/4 with 1 revolutionary, 1 post, 1 Syndicate. Deep in debt.

O5. Round 5 (1801–1806). Disaster in Japan Triggers the Great British Depression

The Japanese Revolution is defeated by the assassination of three Agents. The ensuing Great Depression will last 3 rounds, to the financial suffering of all players.

a. Red's Actions. Syndicate the Great Awakening (1 gold), then join the revolution (1 gold). The latter is risky — the revolution could fail. Operations: Plebiscite a card previously syndicated by Green (1 gold). Petition: a law with the +Syndicate Impact, then a Plebiscite on the newly created Syndicate, then Fundraising for that petition. The resulting Tyranny of the Majority discards 2 cards from the General Will. Red Finance: 2/2/0 and 2 Marines, 1 Syndicate, 1 revolutionary. b. Green's Actions/Operations. Shipbuilding (Mediterranean), then Fundraiser. Operations: Literacy in Congo, using an Underground Railroad into Europe. Elephant (3): Cultural Diffusion causes the Japanese Revolution to fail! This kills the red-white revolutionaries and the white Administrator. Green Finance: 4/0/0 with 1 post, 2 Syndicates. Firaxis says: "I had only 5 more obstacles to clear, and then the shogun commits seppuku. I should have performed a Plebiscite or a Lawsuit to avoid the Cultural Diffusion. This is the worst game ever." c. White's starting Finance: 0/3/4 with 1 Syndicate. White's Actions: a Post in Zululand (Claiming the Disease token) and Fundraiser, which Divests everyone. White Finance: 4/0/4. By taking a free Post and then immediately Divesting, Simon squeezed out a little Capital.

O6. Round 6 (1807–1812) (Historically, the British Empire abolished the slave trade in 1807)

a. Red's Actions. Form a Syndicate, then Legislate it into the General Will. The law's Impact claims a white Barrier in China. b. Green's Actions. Take a Post and Westernize in St. Petersburg, to achieve a Majority. Operations: double Suffrage among the Ottomans, turning them into a democracy. c. White's Actions. Fundraiser, then Shipbuilding in the Caribbean.

O7. Round 7 (1813–1818). A Countercurrent of Eastern Mysticism Toward the West Begins

a. Red's Actions. Fundraiser (the Maritime bonus removes a Japanese embargo), then Syndicate. b. Green's Actions. Syndicate Dr. Livingstone and Fundraiser. Operations: double Suffrage in China. c. White's Actions. Fundraiser, then a Post in Luanda, Claiming the Disease token.

O8. Round 8 (1819–1824). A Democratic Ottoman Empire

a. Red's Actions. Syndicate, then Legislate the Habeas Corpus Act. Impact: a Post in Bahia. Operations: Suffrage turns Brazil into a democracy. b. Green's Actions. Syndicate 2 Ideas. Operations: double Suffrage in Congo. Counter-Enlightenment: 10 more Barriers remain. c. White's Actions. Syndicate the Grass Roots Idea (though it costs 4 gold, it is the cheapest card carrying Suffrage). Operations: Westernize and Suffrage in Congo. Counter-Enlightenment: 4 Freedmen remain.

O9. Round 9 (1825–1830). The Final 3 Turns of the Cooperative Era

a. Red's Actions. Shipbuilding (the Java Sea) and Fundraiser. Two instances of Gunboat Diplomacy lift blockades on the East Indies and India. Counter-Enlightenment: Red succeeds, with 6 Slavers and 6 tokens on the map (3 Marines, 1 Post Administrator, and default Posts occupied in London and the Caribbean). b. Green's Actions. Fundraiser, Syndicate the Grass Roots Idea (5 gold). Operations: triple Suffrage and Literacy among the Ottomans. Counter-Enlightenment: 4 Barriers remain. c. White's Actions. Syndicate, then a Post in Maranhão. Operations: 2 Westernize operations and Literacy in India. Simon says: "I started my turn needing to free two slaves to avoid my own Counter-Enlightenment, and remove 4 Barriers to avoid Green's Counter-Enlightenment. I simply couldn't do both."

O10. Scoring (1831–1836) (Historically, slavery in the British Empire was abolished in 1833)

The game ends with slavery still persisting in China, Japan, East Africa, India, and the East Indies. The Green Player has lost, with 27 Barriers remaining (needing 25 or fewer). There were as many Red Agents as Slavers, and 15 Freedmen, so the Red and White Players succeeded. Since one player lost, the game cannot proceed into the competitive era. Instead, the successful players add up their cooperative scores:

a. Victory Pool. 15 red + 16 white (including 6 VP for 2 Disease tokens) = 31. b. Tokens on the Map. 6 red + 13 white (including 5 VP for Dissidents and 1 VP for a Factory) = 19. c. Total Cooperative Score. 50 VP (enough for a cooperative victory).

The USA becomes an industrialized theocratic kingdom with slavery abolished, as shown below:

Illustration: The modern USA with a Ku Klux Klan Barrier, a white Factory. Virginia has 2 red meeples; the Caribbean has a green one.

The Ottoman Empire becomes a rural democracy, as shown below:

Illustration: A rural Ottoman Empire with a Nobles (dvoryane) Barrier. St. Petersburg: 1 green Agent, 1 green Freedman.

Glossary

Game terms beginning with a capital letter are defined here.

Agent (A5.1) is a pawn-shaped token that plays a special role depending on its location: Finance (on the Finance board — Capital, Wealth, or Debt), Syndicate (on an Idea card), Revolutionary (on a Revolution card), Administrator (at a Post in a World Sphere), Marine (on a ship).

Adding Agents into the game from the pool:

Shipbuilding (as an action) — an Agent is placed from the pool into the player's Finance board Debt field.
By a Legislative Impact:
1. +Syndication onto any Idea at no cost (immediately usable for Operations).
2. +Post Appointment of an Agent from the pool into the indicated port's Administrator space (with no restrictions; the Elephant does not move; a Disease token is Claimed; a predecessor becomes a Martyr).
3. +Wealth — the Agent is placed into Wealth on the Finance board.
4. +Revolutionary — an Agent is added from the pool to any open Revolution, or starts a new one (bypassing all restrictions and preconditions).
Manifesto — if Legislating, a Lawsuit, or a Plebiscite makes a Revolution Viable, add a Revolutionary to it from the pool at no cost.
Popular Hero — if, upon a Revolution's launch, all Dissident squares are occupied by one player's color, add their Agent to the revolutionaries from the pool.

Removing Agents from play into the pool:

Cultural Diffusion — discarding a Revolution card from the Market removes all Agents on it and on that Sphere's World card.
Pogroms — a D6 roll (1, 2, 3) removes an Administrator (if chosen as the target, without making them a Martyr).

Nationalization — after a Lawsuit or Plebiscite, the Red Player may take an opposing Agent into their own Wealth field, if they Globalized an Idea with a red symbol. This same mechanism can return an Agent to the White or Green Player's Wealth field — Privatization.

Administrator (Admin) (B2) is an Agent placed at an Administrator space associated with a port. It represents a British colony (if red), a mission (if white), or a trading post (if green). An Administrator is added by a Post Appointment (F4), by a Legislative Impact (M2), or by a law of a victorious revolution (K6.5), and is removed by Martyrdom during a Coup (F4) or a Hate Kill (I2).

Anarchy (B2) is a black disk representing civil unrest. A Sphere with 2 Anarchy must make a pogrom roll of 1d6 during phase I4. A Sphere overflowing with Anarchy generates Refugees. A Sphere with both Anarchy and Dissidents launches a Revolution during phase K.

Regressing Anarchy Disks. Anarchy is Regressed back onto the world map during Kills or Martyrdoms when there is no more room for Dissidents, by corruption (E7), and by pogrom rolls (I4.6).
Claiming Anarchy Disks. Anarchy is Claimed from the world map during Gunboat Diplomacy (E5) and revolutionary law #2 (K6.2). This adds it to your Victory Pool. Each Anarchy disk is worth 1 VP at game end.
Disk Management. The total amount of Anarchy in the game is fixed at 18 black disks. They never go to the reserve pool. If a disk is Regressed back onto the world map, take it from your own Victory Pool or an opponent's Victory Pool (your choice), if you have none left. If a disk is Claimed from the world map, add it to your own Victory Pool.
Refugees. The maximum amount of Anarchy in any Sphere is 2 disks. If a 3rd disk must be added, you must instead choose a neighboring Sphere to add it to. If that Sphere is also full, a cascade occurs, with Refugees moving into the next neighboring Sphere, and so on.
The Dark Age. The game ends in defeat if all Anarchy is on the world map.

Tip: Sometimes you need Anarchy to launch a Revolution, but ultimately you should try to rid the world map of Anarchy for a final victory.

Barrier (B6) is a red, white, or purple token placed just above or below each Sphere, representing a political Barrier to freedom. During final scoring (J6), each Claimed Barrier is worth 1 VP, and the remaining Barriers create democracies, theocracies, or republics for a given player's VP.

Red Barriers are left-wing economic enslavements, including the forced confiscation of output produced by a slave or serf.¹⁴

¹⁴ SLAVE HUNTERS included Portuguese fortune-seekers among the bandeirantes of Brazil, the Congolese Imbangala of Africa (Europeans almost never took African slaves themselves, owing to disease risk), professional Ottoman slave traders, Blood Hounds in the U.S. (after the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act), and Blackbirders, who by force or fraud brought laborers into industries such as sugar production in Queensland and Fiji, pearl diving in Australia, and guano mining in Peru. From 1859 onward, the maritime traffic of the Blackbirders was opposed by British anti-slavery ships of the Australia Squadron. It was, however, difficult to determine how many islanders came voluntarily, driven by harsh conditions at home such as coconut-induced famine, and how many were tricked or abducted.

White Barriers are right-wing intellectual enslavements, compelling conformity of thought or belief (a forced state religion, conscription¹⁵, or censorship¹⁶).

¹⁵ CONSCRIPTION had long been considered unlawful in England, but so-called "press gangs," rounding up men for the Royal Navy, had been legalized as far back as Elizabethan times, and disappeared only after the Napoleonic Wars.

¹⁶ FREEDOM OF THE PRESS was another idea of Locke's. In 1695, Locke successfully campaigned against the Licensing Act, a state monopoly on printing and censorship. Once the press no longer required a license, books and newspapers proliferated and became affordable. Unfortunately, state licensing (and censorship) still persists even in the West, for example with respect to broadcast licenses. "In those wretched countries where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarce call anything his own. Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech... Without freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty, without freedom of speech, which is the right of every man..." — Benjamin Franklin, 1722.

Purple Barriers are mercantilist embargoes, obstructing free trade.
Slavers and Anarchy are not Barriers.

Refugee (I4) is an Anarchy disk moving from one Sphere into a neighboring Sphere. This occurs when Anarchy is created or moved into a Sphere already at its maximum of 2 Anarchy. If a 3rd must be added, you must instead choose a neighboring Sphere to add it to. If that Sphere is also full, a cascade occurs: Refugees move into the next neighboring Sphere, and so on.³⁵

³⁵ REFUGEES fleeing pogroms sometimes go on to form their own successful nations, as attested by Liberia (#104) and Israel.

Disease is a yellow-green disk originally covering a mosquito symbol in both African Spheres and the East Indies. Its absence indicates that a Sphere is disease-free. The Elephant cannot move into a Sphere with a yellow-green disk, but it may be moved there if you have a Factory. With a Factory, you may Claim the yellow-green disk into your Victory Pool if you perform any Action, Operation, or Impact requiring the Elephant (H1) in that Sphere. Each disk is worth 3 VP. Once Claimed, it cannot be Regressed.¹⁸

¹⁸ TROPICAL MOSQUITO-BORNE VIRAL FEVERS originally devastated European colonists in Africa to much the same degree that Eurasian epidemic diseases devastated the native peoples of Australia and the Americas. However, medicines (such as quinine) and steamship technology, developed with the help of Industrial Revolution technology, kicked off the "Scramble for Africa" between 1881 and 1914. Even today, however, malaria remains the number-one killer of human beings, and following the regrettable ban on DDT, millions die each year, especially in Africa.

Majority (G4) is achieved in the port with the Elephant if the number of tokens of your color exceeds the number of slaves (unoccupied squares) plus opposing tokens. This matters for Suffrage (G4).

Tip: The Green Player starts with a Majority in Nantes, France.

Warship (E6) is a ship token carrying a Marine. Using a Maritime Operation (G1), warships may perform Gunboat Diplomacy (E5). The Red Player may create a warship by installing a Marine onto a Merchant during a Fundraiser action (F1), a Shipbuilding action (F3), or a Maritime Operation.

Freedman is any meeple on a slave square on the world map: white — a Christian, green — an Entrepreneur, red — a Citizen.²³ If a meeple is on a Dissident square on the world map, it is a Dissident, not a Freedman.

²³ "A SLAVE is one who is coerced into labor against his will by chains, whips, and guns, i.e., by physical force applied by other men. Were it not for such things, he would escape. The free worker, by contrast, is one who works by his own choice, and who can be prevented from working only by the actual use of physical force against him." — George Reisman, Capitalism, 1998.

Gold Generation (B3) — if an Operation (Op) or Action is costly (i.e., costs gold), generate the required gold by moving Agents down into the lower fields on your Finance board. You generate one gold for each Agent moved down on your board, i.e., from Capital to Wealth, or from Wealth to Debt.²⁸ For example, if you start with 1 in Capital and 5 in Wealth, and need to pay 4 gold, move 1 from Capital to Wealth, then 3 from Wealth to Debt. If you are entirely in Debt and have nothing left to Divest, see N2a.²⁹

²⁸ CONSUMPTION, in this game, is modeled by moving Agents downward. Thus Capital is spent to produce Wealth, and Wealth is spent to create Debt. Enlightenment economists recognized two types of consumption: unproductive and productive. The former includes eating bread (from Wealth to Debt), while the latter includes consuming flour and wearing out ovens to bake the bread (from Capital to Wealth). Flour and ovens are examples of Capital — anything productively consumed to produce Wealth (here, bread, but Wealth includes any human value from food to freedom). If the share of labor devoted to producing capital goods is large enough to more than offset productive consumption, then Capital Accumulation occurs, i.e., the supply of capital goods grows.

²⁹ THE GOLD STANDARD. After the introduction of the gold sovereign by the new Royal Mint in 1816, the British Empire established history's first gold standard with 100% reserve backing (full-reserve banking) in 1821. Such a standard helps prevent government interference in the monetary system. Unlike today, the government could not simply inflate away debt at the expense of everyone holding a bank account.

Globalize — to move an Idea or Revolution from the Market into a Splay; this occurs via Legislating, a Lawsuit, a Plebiscite, or Revolutionary Laws (K6.8). If you Globalize a card, choose its orientation in the Splay. A Globalized card becomes public knowledge, meaning its Operations (Ops) are lost, and all Syndicate Agents and Revolutionaries are Divested. Divested Agents may additionally be subject to Nationalization per L1.1.

Globalizing via a Lawsuit or Plebiscite (G6, G7). This does not require Viability to Globalize, and grants a bonus Petition (L).
Globalizing via Legislation (F5). This requires Viability and triggers Impacts (M).
Founding Father. If you are the first to Globalize into a particular Splay, you permanently set the orientation of the starting card (Locke's or Rousseau's).
Manifesto. After Globalizing, check every Revolution to see whether a Manifesto is triggered (K3).

Border is the gap between two World cards. For example, Brazil has two Borders: one to the east and one to the north. If it is marked with a ship-shaped symbol, it is a Sea Border.

Action is one of two game processes you may perform each turn, during Phase F.

Dissident (I2, E7) is a meeple in one of the white squares in each Sphere. White Dissidents oppose slave/serf ownership, red Dissidents are civil-rights fighters, and green Dissidents oppose taxation. A Dissident is created in the Sphere with the Elephant via a Literacy Operation (G5). A Dissident is also created whenever a meeple is killed (e.g., a hate kill per I2), or an Agent is Martyred (e.g., in a hate kill or a coup). If all Dissident squares are full, or the Sphere is a Modern State, place Anarchy instead of a Dissident. All Dissidents, regardless of color, are counted for the White Player during scoring (J).

Viable (F5) describes an idea or process supported by Enlightenment philosophy. An Idea or Revolution is Viable if its two Freedom symbols appear in a Freedom Pair — that is, are shown on any two adjacent cards in a Splay. Order does not matter. A Viable Idea may be Legislated into either of the two Splays per F5. A Revolution must be Viable to succeed.

Important: No card is Viable until the first Globalization, which forms the first Freedom Pair!

Idea (B4) is an elongated card with a Firebrand rating. Along with the Revolution, this is a type of Market card.³⁰

³⁰ THE CLASSICAL THEORY OF IDEAS was introduced by Locke (1690) as deriving from observed entities and their relations in the natural world, mentally manipulated in consciousness as verbal units. These words and definitions capture the essence of an idea or concept, including everything known and not yet known. Valid ideas, such as "freedom," are grounded in natural law and are therefore generally true across all cultures. Kant (#47) argued the opposite — that ideas were artificial cultural constructs having nothing to do with the objective world. Thus "idea" or "concept" are identical to their definition, thought is identical to language, and neither has any component of reality. Following Kant, almost all modern philosophers rejected the classical theory. Postmodern fallacies, such as Whorfianism, hold that it is impossible to communicate with a person of another culture or language, and so the missionary task is pointless, slavery is neither good nor evil, and a foreigner will never understand you talking about the weather, let alone Shakespeare.

Claim (A4.4) — move a token or disk into your Victory Pool. Each is worth 1 VP at game end (Disease is worth 3 VP).

Morality is a black Freedom symbol, either Enlightenment (a candle) or Mysticism (a comet). A morality icon supplies the natural or supernatural foundation for a red symbol (activism).³³

³³ MORALITY is a code for decision-making, traditionally held to be God-given (the comet symbol in the game). However, the drawback of a supernatural or mystical authority for ethics is that, by definition, reason, science, or logic cannot be used to study it; instead, one must wait for sacred texts or other revelations from an unknowable supreme being. Enlightenment philosophers, emboldened by the success of reason-based inquiry in physics, also undertook reason-based inquiries into ethics and sociology (the candle symbol in the game), with staggering success that thoroughly revolutionized human society, including global emancipation. Although Enlightenment thinkers such as Descartes (#35), Newton (#39), Locke (#109), Franklin (#44), Paley (#55), and Darwin (#66) made syncretic, deist attempts to reconcile the natural and the supernatural, the two are fundamentally incompatible. Either the universe is governed by a supreme supernatural consciousness, or by supreme natural law. Both cannot be supreme. Spinoza (#37) took the next logical step, defining a remarkable ethical system grounded entirely in reason, with no theological/supernatural involvement whatsoever. For this he was excommunicated from the Jewish faith, and one Counter-Enlightenment critic called his work "a book forged in hell by the devil himself."

Sea Border (B2) is one of the 9 Borders marked with a ship-shaped symbol. Each may hold one Slaver and one ship token.

Marine (F1, F3, G1) is a red Agent on a ship token. Each ship may carry only one red Marine token. A ship with a Marine is a Warship; a ship without is a Merchant. Since the Red Player represents the British Parliament, only they may install Marines. This can be applied onto an existing Merchant in three ways: as part of a Fundraiser action (F1), as part of a Shipbuilding action (F3), or as part of a Maritime Operation (G1). Only a Finance Agent at the very topmost position on the Finance board may become this red Agent. Marines cannot be Killed, Massacred, or Martyred.

Martyrdom (I2) is the forced removal of an Agent from an Administrator post on the world map, transferring it to its owner's Finance board Wealth field. Martyrdom occurs during a Coup (F4, M2) and Hate Kills (I2).

Dissident. Martyrdom always generates one Dissident of the Agent's color, placed in any Dissident square in the Sphere with the Elephant.
Anarchy. If there is no room for the generated Dissident because all Dissident squares are full, the player whose turn it is Regresses Anarchy instead.

Nationalized Agent (E2) is a White or Green Player's Agent that has been seized onto the Red Player's Finance board by a Globalization. Seizure can occur during a Lawsuit or Plebiscite as a bonus Petition (L1.1). This Agent is used by the Red Player the same as their own Agents on their Finance board, but it cannot be installed (E3). It is automatically returned to its owner when moved into Debt, or actively reclaimed by Privatization.

Op (Operation) (G) — Most Idea cards offer Operations, shown as a column of symbols at the lower right of the card. Each Syndicate or Revolution member may use up to one Operation (Op) per turn. Move the Agent onto the Operation symbol to show it has been used.

Liberate — to place a meeple onto a slave square on the world map, as a result of Manumission or Westernize Operations. This meeple, called a Freedman³², is added from the reserve pool.

³² BICAMERAL-MIND SLAVES. What sets us apart from other animals? How can we simply choose to benefit from our moral system, while other animals are enslaved to behavior with their own gene as the sole payoff? Why do we crave authorization for our moral systems? Why are we born, regardless of culture, with some notion of a higher being vested with such authority — with the attributes of worship, obedience, unconditional devotion, the power of suggestion, and the authority of charisma? Psychologist Julian Jaynes's remarkable theory concludes that both consciousness and free will are technological inventions (not products of natural selection), created through language technology. Because of the mental hierarchy in the human bicameral mind, obedience and slavery are artifacts of how consciousness is formed. Consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, recurring each time a child learns language — any language. More detail on bicameral-mind theory can be found in my game Bios: Origins. —Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1990.

Founding Father — if you are the first to Globalize an Idea card into a particular Splay (for example, via a Lawsuit into the Bill of Rights, or via a Plebiscite into the General Will), you must set the orientation of that Splay's starting card (Locke's or Rousseau's), so that one of its two symbols forms the first Freedom Pair. Once set, this orientation is fixed for the rest of the game. Founding Fathers are immune to Purges (K7) or the Tyranny of the Majority.

Divest (A4.1) — means returning an Agent from the World Map or the Market onto your Finance board, placing the token into the middle field (Wealth). Agents may be Divested during Fundraiser (F1.1), Martyrdom, Globalization, Cultural Diffusion (H3), Revolution success (K4), or Privatization (L1.1).

Freedom Pair — a pair of Freedom symbols (comet, candle, feather, unlock) that are visible and adjacent to each other in one of the two Splays. Together they form a "right" in the Bill of Rights, or a "law" in the General Will. There are two Moralities (black symbols) — candle and comet — and two Politics (red symbols) — feather and unlock. The 10 possible Freedom Pairs define ideologies as follows:

Black-Black. Enlightenment philosophers grounded themselves in religious morality (comet-comet), rationalism (candle-candle)²⁴, or logical positivism (comet-candle). The latter includes empirical scientists such as Franklin and Newton, who used a covert pantheism (a philosophical doctrine uniting god and the world) to reconcile a syncretic (a blending of disparate philosophical origins into one system) mixture of faith and reason.²⁵ These people are thinkers, not doers (so they have few Operations).

²⁴ RATIONALISM is the idea that everything can be deduced from reason alone. The trouble is that it tends to overlook facts supplied by the senses. Thus Descartes's physics, built on rationalist assumptions about motion, is deeply mistaken, while Newton's physics, derived under the motto "I frame no hypotheses [in the absence of facts]," is essentially correct and remains part of the scientific canon to this day. —Shawn E. Klein, 2010.

²⁵ ETHICS was regarded by the Enlightenment thinkers as a natural law, derived from the scientific method applied to human nature, as opposed to something ineffable, God-given, or beyond scientific inquiry. In this way, Newtonian science had a greater influence on morality and the abolition of slavery than it did on the Industrial Revolution! Most Enlightenment thinkers (#27, #31, #37, #38, #39, #43, #44, #45, #46, #47, #49, #52, #54, #56, #60, #61, #63, #66, #102, #119, #120) were deists, meaning they rejected miracles and divine intervention but regarded the Law of Nature as divinely created. Deism attempts to sidestep questions such as "must God follow his own laws?" or "is ethics knowable because it is Lawful, or unknowable because it was decreed by an inscrutable supreme being?"

Red-Red. Amoral activists adhering to pragmatism (i.e., doing whatever seems practical for now, without regard to principle or doubt), polylogism (i.e., the view that reason and morality are subjective or culturally biased), and behaviorism (i.e., the view that there is no free will, only animal instincts governing human behavior). This includes egalitarians (feather-feather)²⁶, idealists (feather-unlock)²⁷, and militants (unlock-unlock).

²⁶ EGALITARIANISM here means the de facto egalitarianism of social classes with state ownership of personal abilities and property, as opposed to de jure egalitarianism, which means equality before the law.

²⁷ IDEALISM is an epistemology (the philosophical-methodological discipline studying knowledge as such — its structure, function, and development) that puts consciousness first and reality second, and ultimately unreal or unknowable. Popular films such as The Matrix or Inception are idealist in the sense that they portray the objective world as illusory, dominated by worlds created by subjective consciousness. The German idealists were responsible for the Counter-Enlightenment that ended the Age of Reason, and laid the groundwork for today's dominant subjectivist philosophies.

Black-Red. Principled activists grounded in supernatural (comet) or natural (candle) principles, promoting intellectual (feather) or economic (unlock) freedoms. (A principle is an objective truth, true across all times, places, and cultures, regardless of human wishes or opinions.) The Freedom Pair (comet-feather) points to an artist who creates emotional/humane depictions of social ills.

First Revolutionary — when a revolution launches, all Syndicate members on the card (which the Revolution card will subsequently replace) with the minimum Firebrand value become Revolutionaries; they are placed left to right into the Revolution's Engagement spots (at no cost). You choose the order (K1c).

Underground Railroad — forms between two Adjacent Spheres if a ship (Warship or Merchant) sits between them, and one of those Spheres holds the Elephant. If the Sphere without the Elephant has no white (right-wing) Barriers, the Sphere with the Elephant is also treated as having no right-wing Barriers when performing Suffrage (G4). Likewise, if one of the two Spheres has no red (left-wing) Barriers, the other is also treated as having no left-wing Barriers when performing Westernize (G3).

Politics (B4) is a red Freedom symbol, of one of two kinds: left-wing (a feather) or right-wing (unlock). The feather symbol represents intellectual freedom: a person's right to voice their opinion, follow a religion of their own conscience, champion a cause of their choosing, marry whomever they wish, and migrate wherever they see fit. Intellectual freedoms are associated with left-wing politics. The unlock symbol represents economic freedoms: a person's right to own what they produce, to contract their labor or output to whomever they choose, and to quit or change jobs whenever they wish. Economic freedoms are associated with right-wing politics.³⁴

³⁴ IS SLAVERY GOOD FOR THE ECONOMY? No. By this theory, the economic and military centers of the 19th century should have been the most enslaved: the Ottomans, India, China. Just the opposite: the countries that undertook mass abolition experienced an economic boom, including Western Europe, the U.S., the British colonies, and Brazil. Even small doses of freedom consistently stimulate the economy as a whole, while every new act of enslavement consistently harms it. "Slavery is an institution hostile to the production of wealth, because it deprives slaves of the incentive to produce it." — George Reisman, Capitalism, 1998.

Port (B2) is a black dot printed on a World card, labeled with the name of a city or country. Tokens (pawns and meeples) are never placed in a port.

Firebrand is the number in the upper left corner of each Idea. This number measures the card's level of activism, ranging from 1 (a principled Firebrand) to 99 (a timid Theorist). In the advanced game, the Idea with the lowest Firebrand value becomes the Idea around which a Revolution is launched (K1).

Industrial Revolution (K6) — you have one Factory cube of your color, and may build a Factory by placing the cube onto a World card during Modernization, as an option under revolutionary law (K6.7). Besides being worth one or more VP at game end (J6), the cube reduces the cost of the Shipbuilding action (F3b) and lets you Claim a Disease disk (H1). This represents the sum of gains in productivity, wealth, health, and energy harnessing that follow rapid industrialization.³¹

³¹ "For a very long time, everything was awful, and then the Industrial Revolution happened." Luke Muehlhauser, Three Wild Speculations from Amateur Quantitative Macrohistory, 2017.

Enlightenment was the dominant philosophy in the world of ideas during the Age of Reason in 18th-century Europe. Enlightenment ideas were centered on the individual, as the basic unit of society²², and on reason, as the primary source of the individual's authority and legitimacy. The Enlightenment's dominant religion, Deism, excludes the possibility of supernatural forces acting within the universe after its creation, and vests the Laws of Nature in humanity and its inquiries.

²² WHY THE INDIVIDUAL? Classically, the basic social unit (BSU) was the caste: kings, nobles, or serfs/slaves. These castes are hereditary and immutable, regardless of individual preference, ability, or choice. (Strikingly, unchangeable, racially defined caste systems are still upheld by the supreme courts of countries such as Haiti and India.) The Enlightenment thinkers argued that individuals were the basic decision-making units of society. Deist Enlightenment thinkers argued that only individuals have souls, sin, and are judged for their sins in the afterlife. (For instance, slaves would be judged by their willful words and deeds, not by their status as slaves.) Secular Enlightenment thinkers likewise argued that only the individual can be praised for achievements, punished for crimes, and is, in general, responsible for their own words and deeds. The collectivist philosophers of the Counter-Enlightenment proposed new BSUs. For instance, under Marxism and trade unionism, all people within the worker caste are interchangeable units and should receive equal pay regardless of individual merit or effort. Other collectivist BSUs are "society" (socialism), a master race (fascism), the majority (democracy), or the human species (eugenics and social Darwinism). Under every form of collectivism, the individual may be morally sacrificed or enslaved if someone judges it good for the collective.

Victory Pile (A4.4) is each player's open pile of tokens and disks, each worth VP at game end (J6).

Slaver (E6) is one of the 9 brown, ship-shaped tokens that historically captured/transported slaves and blood products. Sink them by making a Piracy Roll (E6) during Gunboat Diplomacy (E5).

Splay (A4.5) is a column of overlapping shared cards, placed there as a result of Legislating, Lawsuits, Plebiscites, and successful Revolutions. There are two Splays: the Bill of Rights and the General Will.³⁶ Together they represent the Enlightenment concept of international law. The orientation of a Splay's starting card is set by its Founding Father. The Bill of Rights may be Purged (K7) if a Revolution is added to it (K6.8).

³⁶ FREEDOM VS. EQUALITY traces back to the second and third phases of the French Revolution. After the initial aristocratic protest against royal absolutism, a Lockean phase (including the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, drafted with Jefferson's input) gave way to the final egalitarian phase — the Terror — grounded in Rousseau's philosophy. (Capaldi and Lloyd, Liberty and Equality in Political Economy: From Locke Versus Rousseau to the Present, 2017.) Rights, like morality, can have only one foundational meaning, and freedom and equality are fundamentally incompatible. (By "equality" here I mean the sort of egalitarianism a doctor would practice if he made a patient with a broken leg feel better by breaking the legs of ten other people. I am not speaking of de jure equality, such as equality before the Law.) Redistributing wealth at gunpoint — regardless of whether the gun is held by politicians, the mafia, or the Terror — always enslaves individual liberties. Since people hold different views and make different choices, material inequality is a mark of a healthy, developing society, invariably wealthier than societies without freedom. Every person finds their own path, and gives or receives charity on terms of their own choosing.

Gap is an empty slot in the 6×2 Idea Market matrix, arising in the course of play.

Massacre (I4) — to remove a token to the reserve pool without creating a Dissident or Anarchy. This occurs during a failed Revolution (K2) or a pogrom (I4).

Revolutionary (K1c) is an Agent placed in one of a Revolution's Engagement spots. A Revolution succeeds when it is filled with Revolutionaries and is Viable.

Revolution (K) is a shared card bearing two Freedom symbols used to check Viability, with one to four Engagement spots where players may add Revolutionaries. It launches per K1, is joined per F6, fails per K2, and succeeds per K4. Revolutions and Ideas are the two types of Market cards.

Regress — to take a Barrier chit or an Anarchy disk from a Victory Pool and place it onto a Sphere on the World map. In the case of Anarchy, the Victory Pool should be your own if possible; otherwise you choose whose pool it comes from. Barrier tokens must be Regressed to the Sphere they came from; they are Regressed during corruption (E7) and Revolution failure (K2). Anarchy is Regressed when there are too many Dissidents during Kills or Martyrdoms. This also happens during corruption (E7) and pogrom rolls (I4); the game ends in defeat if all 18 Anarchy disks are Regressed onto the map.

Market (A4.2) has two columns: East (right) and West (left). Each column holds 6 face-up Idea cards, forming 6 rows of two cards. Above each column is the deck from which Eastern and Western Ideas are drawn. Each row has a Market Cost.

Market Cost — the cost of a Syndicate action (F2) depends on the row position of the Idea on the Market. The Idea in the lowest row costs 0 gold, the next costs 1 gold, then 2 gold, 3 gold, 4 gold, and 5 gold for the most expensive, nearest the deck.

Elephant is a token that points to the port where the foreign policy of Victorian England is focused, chiefly the promotion of constitutional monarchies and free trade. If during your turn you perform an Action or Operation marked on your Finance board with an elephant symbol, you must move the Elephant to the port where it takes place. You may only move the Elephant once per turn, so all your Post Appointments, Manumissions, Westernizing, Literacy, and Suffrage happen in that same port. If you perform no Action, Operation, or Impact bearing the Elephant symbol, the Elephant token will instead Walk (H2). Its location determines both the Sphere where you Claim Barriers during Impacts (M6), and the port where the victims¹⁹ of a hate roll (I2) are killed. The Elephant cannot move into a Sphere with Disease or a Modern Sphere.²⁰ As an exception, if every un-modernized Sphere has Disease, the Elephant may enter a Sphere with Disease.

¹⁹ SKIN COLOR plays no role in this game, because it has nothing to do with slavery. Only in the Ottoman Empire, or in certain European colonies, could a person's former slave status be inferred from appearance, and this was a result of historical accident — Africa being the last place from which slaves could be easily obtained (see the footnote "BEYOND AFRICA"). Consider the Korean emperor's description of his own slaves (exported as tribute to China) as "a different race," despite the fact that they were Koreans, physically indistinguishable from himself: "Our ancestors taught us that these enslaved beings belong to a different race, and so it is impossible for them to become normal people. To challenge the teachings of our ancestors would endanger our social order." — Emperor Chungnyeol, circa 1300.

²⁰ THE ELEPHANT was used during Lincoln's campaign as the symbol of the Republican Party, and was popularized largely by the great cartoonist, Republican, and abolitionist Thomas Nast. Moreover, the elephant has a whimsical tradition in Sierra Madre Games of appearing in cameo across Bios: Megafauna, Greenland, Neanderthal, Pax Renaissance, and John Company.

Modern State (K8) is a Sphere flipped to its modern side. This happens as a result of a successful Revolution (K5) and is irreversible. The Elephant cannot move into a Modern State, since Modern States are relatively immune to British interference (and all players are British abolitionists). Modern States are still affected by Emigration, Corruption, and Refugees.

Syndication is an Agent on a Market Idea, installed by a Syndicate action (F2). This Agent immediately lets you perform the card's Operations (Ops), if any. "To syndicate" means to organize a group around an idea or founding principle.

Adjacent — Two Spheres are Adjacent if they share a Border. A Border is Adjacent to a Sphere if it lies along one of the edges between that Sphere and a neighboring one. A visible Freedom on one Idea is Adjacent to a Freedom on another Idea if it lies directly above or below it in a Splay.

Agent-Squared Cost — an amount of gold equal to the square of the current number of Agents (of any color) on the target card [0, 1, 4, 9 respectively]. The Agent-Squared Cost is used in the Lawsuit and Plebiscite Operations (G6a, G7), as well as the Syndicate and Join Revolution actions (F2, F6).

Barrier Cost — the cost of placing a token via the Post Appointment action (F4) or the Manumission Operation (G2). This cost is an amount of gold equal to the number of Barriers (red, white, or purple tokens) in the Sphere.¹⁷

¹⁷ THE COST OF BARRIERS. "Economic growth associated with commercial expansion, known as Smithian growth, gave rise to rent-seekers, tax farmers, mercantilist protectionists, state-sponsored monopolies, and sometimes outright robbers and marauders. Such parasites often killed the geese that laid the golden eggs." Joel Mokyr, The Industrial Revolution and the Netherlands: Why Did It Not Happen?, 2000.

Dissident-Squared Cost — the additional cost to turn a Revolution into a counter-revolution by joining it (F6). This is an amount of gold equal to the square of the current number of opposing Dissidents in the corresponding Sphere [0, 1, 4, 9 respectively].

Dice-Squared Cost — the cost of a piracy roll (E6). Take the number of dice you want to roll and square that number to get the gold amount. So if you decide to roll 2 dice, it costs 4 gold.

Slaver-Squared Cost — the cost of Claiming a Barrier during the Suffrage Operation (G4). This cost is an amount of gold equal to the square of the number of Slavers Adjacent to the Sphere with the Elephant [0, 1, 4 respectively].

Sphere (B2) is one of the ten cards that make up the world map, arranged 2×5. The Spheres are the 13 Colonies, Europe, the Ottoman Empire, Qing China, and Tokugawa Japan in the north, and Brazil, Congo, Zululand, India, and the East Indies in the south. Between each card is a gap called a Border. All Spheres are double-sided, beginning the game on their serfdom side, but able to flip to a Modern State.

Tyranny is any Sphere with 5 Barriers. A Tyranny has hate kills, but no Anarchy from frustrated hate. If India, for example, has a Barrier bearing the "green die 3" symbol (the caste system), then rolling a "3" during hate will kill a green token, regardless of whether India is a Tyranny. But if India has no green token, then the caste system does nothing if India is a Tyranny, or Regresses 1 Anarchy if India is not a Tyranny. If you are playing a cooperative or solitaire (C1) game, no Sphere is ever a Tyranny (I3b).

Tyranny of the Majority (G7) — the General Will is limited to 5 cards, including the Founding Father (voters have a limited attention span). If a 6th card is added (e.g., via Legislation, Plebiscite, or a Globalized Revolution), discard the oldest card from the game, leaving the Founding Father (Rousseau, #110) untouched. This may make Ideas and Revolutions unviable, or flush away victory points.

Kill — move a red, white, or green Freedman onto a Dissident square in the same Sphere, following a hate roll. The color killed is determined by the color of the die symbol on the Barrier. If an Administrator of that color is present, you may Martyr them instead of killing a Freedman. Kills only occur in the port with the Elephant (not the whole Sphere). If the kill is marked by a "frustration" symbol and the matching color is unavailable, then either nothing happens (if the Sphere is a Tyranny), or a frustrated mob (I3) Regresses 1 Anarchy (if the Sphere is not a Tyranny). If the Dissident squares are full (or absent, in the case of a Modern State), the killed meeple goes to the reserve pool, and 1 Anarchy disk is Regressed by the player whose turn it is.

Token Management — You are limited to the tokens provided (Agents, meeples, ships, and disks). The number of black disks in the game is fixed, and they never go to the reserve pool (see Anarchy). If you must add an Agent and the reserve pool is empty, you may take it from anywhere on your Finance board, including Debt. You cannot perform an Action or Op if there are no more tokens in the shared pool. If you must place a Dissident but there are no more meeples in the pool, then refrain from placing the Dissident.

Factory — see Industrial Revolution.

Emigrant — a Dissident moved during Modernization (K5). It moves to become a Freedman in another Sphere. From Spheres with at least one slave and no Disease, choose the one with the fewest Barriers.²¹

²¹ "GIVE ME YOUR TIRED, YOUR POOR…" In the 19th century, emigrants preferred America. This was a golden age for the U.S. North, and, after the fall of slavery in 1865, for the South as well. Its borders were fully open; everyone was welcomed. Its rapidly growing economy was free of inflation, and during the two periods of greatest growth, 1820–1850 and 1865–1900, prices actually fell by half. All this ended in the early 20th century, when America turned from a republic into a democracy. The first racist immigration laws were passed, and the Fed (Federal Reserve System) seized control of the money supply. With the loss of the gold standard came permanent inflation and periodic depressions.

What Are Freedom and Slavery?

DEFINING FREEDOM AND SLAVERY. Freedom, in a political context, is the absence of physical force or coercion — that is, man-made force directed against the products of mind or body. As Locke says, it is "not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but to have only the law of Nature for his rule." Under freedom, every action is voluntary, and every transaction is free of the use of force or the threat of force. Freedom is the opposite of slavery. As one rises, the other falls. Freedom is properly defined such that one person's freedom cannot eclipse another's.

WHAT FREEDOM IS. Political freedom is not freedom from hunger or poverty, which is akin to asking to be free from the laws of physics and chemistry. Robinson Crusoe, alone on a desert island, had complete freedom from the use of force, but was not "free" of the principle that you must work in order to eat. Freedom is not pointing a weapon at someone to procure food for you. Freedom is not living under a democracy, if the majority votes for slavery. Nor can freedom be anarchy, if a neighboring family or clan happens to have more members and decides to enslave you. The only road to freedom is what Locke called "freedom under the rule of law" — that is, life in a constitutional republic, where the monopoly on power belongs not to the gang next door, but to a tightly regulated police force operating under separation of powers, whose officers have sworn to uphold a constitution guaranteeing individual rights, for the good of each of them as well as the good of society.

SLAVERY IS EVIL. Why bother with such a trite statement? Because in the fog of today's moral relativism and "tolerance," using the word "evil" is condemned, while "tolerance" is exalted. But any violation of morality allows evil to exist! The thinkers of the Age of Reason held that whatever furthers the life of a rational being is good, and whatever opposes it is evil. And since a person under coercion cannot act according to their own reason, they are denied the basic means of survival: reason itself. Permitting slavery would not only leave individual rights unprotected, but would undermine the very tools people need to flourish in society. And since this reasoning follows a Law of Nature, "slavery as evil" rings true across every culture. It is a universal evil.

IS SLAVERY A "NECESSARY EVIL"? No. "Evil" is something you choose for yourself, even though it degrades your own self-identification as a rational being and, secondarily, corrupts both the intellect and the economy of civilization. "Necessity" and "Evil" are opposites.

A BLACK-AND-WHITE WORLD. The pragmatist (i.e., someone who rejects morality and other principles in favor of whatever seems practical at the moment) likes to justify evil with the saying: "There's no such thing as black or white, only shades of gray." Any artist knows this is a lie: shades of gray are illusions formed by mixing black and white, down to the mixed carbon and titanium-dioxide molecules in the paint. It would be more accurate to say: "there are no good or evil people, only good or bad decisions," or to say: "the world is black and white, and shades of gray exist only in people's minds."

THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY, THE ECONOMIC ARGUMENT. The British crusaders against slavery are usually portrayed today as motivated, one way or another, by economic self-interest rather than by the moral imperatives that today's intellectuals find so hard to grasp. But are such moral imperatives irrational? Are British taxpayers not entitled to spend so much on global emancipation with no visible payoff? Their Enlightenment judicial system depended heavily on individual grievances within a system of law, rather than on some monarch making pronouncements over entire classes of people. Freedom of thought, religion, trade, speech, and action was necessary for their flourishing. Every slaveholder runs up against the practical limits of total submission whenever higher-quality work is required. In a free society, where every transaction is voluntary, both people must perceive a gain, or the deal doesn't happen. An economy, which is nothing more than the sum of all free transactions, is helped by every one of them, however modest, and harmed by every transaction conducted at gunpoint, whether that gun enforces a regulated price or wage, a tariff, or slavery.

THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY, THE INTELLECTUAL ARGUMENT. It is almost self-evident, almost Darwinian, that intellectual slavery — such as the regulation of religion, language, sexuality, festivals, clothing, music, housing, and other forms of forced conformity — will suppress diversity. Force is opposed to the mind, and contradicts a person's own decisions about their own well-being, as well as the free exchange of ideas. Suppressing speech leads a society to stagnate: most of the intellectual achievements of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution came from people of humble origin.

WHAT IS MORALITY? Morality is a code of values that guides a person's decisions, and that decisively determines who benefits from their actions. Does she have a moral claim to her own life and well-being, or does she owe her life to society or to her societal masters? The Enlightenment thinkers agreed that each person is master of their own life, but split on the foundation of that morality: emotion (Hutcheson) or reason (Locke)? Is slavery evil and does it trouble your conscience because it is disgusting and foul-smelling, or because it catastrophically cripples the rational society in which you are trying to live? During my research for Bios: Megafauna 2, I discovered that emotion is an ancient decision-making mechanism available to animals as far back as lizards and their descendants. Sensory signals trigger an emotion, and a whole complex of actions follows, including fight or flight. Reason, by contrast, requires sophisticated language technology combined with the discovery of logic in order to serve as an effective guide for decision-making. Unlike emotion, which arises automatically, reason is a faculty exercised by choice (for the definition and origins of free will, see my game Bios: Origins). Drawing on biological discoveries unavailable to the Enlightenment thinkers (such as Darwin), I conclude that the foundation of morality is both emotional and rational. A person who uses Reason as their moral guide will also automatically develop the emotions that shape their instant decisions, using the very same limbic foundation a lizard uses.

THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY, THE MORAL ARGUMENT. The breakthrough of the Enlightenment was the recognition that it is fundamentally immoral for any person to live their life for the sake of another, and, accordingly, that slavery was harmful to everyone, without exception. Even the slaveholder suffers from slavery, since this artificial hierarchy ultimately undermines his own capacity for a rational moral life free of weapons, clubs, and parasitism, and also causes both the general economy and intellectual discourse to stagnate. Thus the moral argument encompasses both the economic and the intellectual arguments for freedom. In other words, what is morally humane is identical to what benefits both a free economy and free speech, both reason and emotion, precisely because morality is defined as whatever rationally maximizes human values (including profit and discourse) for every individual. Under this definition, it is rational to free the innocent from coercion, and irrational to wield a weapon as a parasitic slave trader.

HUMANITARIAN MOTIVE OR SELF-INTEREST? Drescher rightly observes that British taxpayers committed "econocide" (the social consequence of a global financial crisis) by spending a fortune on worldwide abolition with no visible financial return. Critics counter that a nation of shopkeepers would never propose to close up shop, and that the true cause of global emancipation was the declining value of slavery in an industrializing world. Baseless claims that a thriving economy requires slavery have existed since ancient Greece, and remain popular among socialists (such as Eric Williams, the nationalist politician who wrote Capitalism and Slavery). As with any globalization, fortunes were won and lost in the course of emancipation. But under freedom, more is gained than lost, following the strict economic law of nature that value is added in every voluntary transaction, and value is subtracted from every transaction dominated by force. There is no dichotomy between the "humanitarian" and "self-interest": what is humane also serves your rational self-interest.

THE INTELLECTUAL FOUNDATION OF RIGHT-WING AND LEFT-WING SLAVERY. The political right, as defined in this game, follows the philosophy of idealism — the idea that free will and consciousness encompass everything real, and that what we perceive is merely an imperfect reflection of an unknowable spiritual reality. Idealists such as Plato, St. Augustine, and the Enlightenment-era intellectuals Hegel and Kant hold that knowledge of reality flows from revelation, against which reason-based arguments are useless, and force is required. The political left in this game follows the opposite philosophy of behaviorism — the idea that consciousness and free will are illusory, and that people are driven purely by animal instincts, genes, or Hegelian dialectics. Hobbes was a behaviorist, describing life without a supreme dictator as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Thus both the mystical right and the materialist left reject reason and argument, leaving the use of force as the only way to settle disputes. According to the idealist right, force is necessary to subjugate people's minds under intellectual slavery, while the behaviorist left holds that force is necessary to subjugate human bodies under economic slavery. As I explain in my game Origins, the life sciences have proven that human beings are not programmed machines devoid of free will, but possess a unique decision-making attribute called consciousness.

THE WEALTH OF NATIONS. The Enlightenment philosopher Adam Smith proved that wages are always better for the economy than slavery. He described the nature of capitalism, a social system that had already freed the serfs across Europe and would eventually free the whole world. Laissez-faire capitalism is defined as the rejection of slavery: it is a social system that excludes force from every transaction. If weapons are involved, then by definition it cannot be capitalism. Capitalism's enemies point to political entrepreneurs who use the force of government, for example, to suppress competition or establish monopolies. By definition, such a person is better described as a bureaucrat than a capitalist.

WHY DID IT TAKE SO LONG? Why did even the concept of abolishing slavery — of attacking slavery as an institution — take tens of thousands of years to arise? The concept of freedom as a universal value required language (the Paleolithic), logic and reason (ancient Greece), and the rise of capitalism and force-free deal-making (Renaissance Europe). And finally, it required the rise of science (Enlightenment Europe), a methodology using logic, reason, and observation to explain everything that exists — including, first and foremost, humanity, its machinations, and its morality.

ARE PRISON INMATES SLAVES? A slave is the victim of initiated force. Accordingly, a criminal who used force or fraud against their victim is more of a slave trader than a slave, even if subsequently imprisoned under a proper justice system. I agree with Locke that "captives taken in a just war" have consented to the use of force against them. On the other hand, a political prisoner, a prisoner of conscience, or someone accused of a "victimless" crime has initiated no force and, if imprisoned, is a de facto slave.

IS AN INDENTURED SERVANT A SLAVE? An indentured servant works for another person for a fixed period of time, for example in exchange for free passage to a new country. Like any contractual relationship, this contract constitutes slavery if a threat to life, liberty, or property was used to secure agreement to its terms. This was the case after Britain's historic Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, under which former slaves were legally held as "apprentices" for the following 6 years. Thus the true end date of legal slavery in the British Empire was 1840.

DEBT SLAVERY? Locke argued that a person cannot sell himself into slavery. Obligations cannot be inherited; a person is morally responsible only for what he voluntarily does and voluntarily contracts for. Formal slavery, such as offering your daughter or wife as collateral for a loan (a common practice in Siam), is likewise immoral unless all parties consent and have reached the age of consent, and personal rights can never be morally violated under any circumstances.

IS MILITARY CONSCRIPTION SLAVERY? Yes. Every involuntary sacrifice made in the name of "country" or "society" falls under the definition of slavery, and makes that country or society rather unworthy of being fought for — as in Venezuela, where slaves were promised freedom if they fought in the revolutionary armies, and were then used as cannon fodder. My view aligns with Hutcheson's A System of Moral Philosophy (which launched the Scottish Enlightenment in 1755): "No endowments, natural or acquired, can give a perfect right to assume power over others, without their consent. This is contrary to the doctrine of Aristotle, and some others of the ancients, 'that some men are naturally slaves' ... The natural sense of justice and humanity abhors the notion." (Book V, p. 301). He allows that a debtor or a criminal may have to relinquish labor to repay a debt or make amends for a crime. But "neither the criminal, nor much less the debtor, has forfeited all the natural rights of mankind, except the right to his own labor." They retain the right to sufficient resources to sustain themselves, to enter into contracts, and to use force against anyone who would torture, rape, or otherwise harm them (Vol. II, Book III, pp. 201–202).

IS CORRUPTION SLAVERY? Yes. Corruption is the unlawful extortion of money (or other value) by a government official from a victim, in exchange for some degree of freedom. Corruption is only possible within a system where a bureaucrat holds absolute power to enslave a producer — for instance, the power to shut down his business, or to demand payment at gunpoint just to earn a living.

IS CENTRAL PLANNING SLAVERY? Yes, when it is enforced at gunpoint. The "invisible hand of the market" — an Enlightenment principle discovered by Mandeville, Smith, and others — holds that people are best trusted with their own lives. Central planning is not the same thing as a central government, which is necessary to enforce a code of conduct that excludes the use of force against others. Central planners, insisting that someone must be in charge, override the private decisions of the realm. Such autocracy is usually justified paternalistically, on the grounds that "people are children, too foolish for freedom." A typical example is social-welfare guardianship — the paternalistic premise that people are too foolish to save for themselves, and so force must be used to take their earnings for their own good. Similar arguments justify using a gun to override people's own judgment on matters of health, marriage, education, the environment, population control, clothing, housing, migration, employment, safety, business, and so on — exactly as it was in the days of the local warlords and their serfs. Paternalism remains excuse #1 for slavery. Freedom, by definition, is a bottom-up process, and cannot be centrally planned. "Socialism requires a system of forced labor — that is, slavery... Forced labor is inherent in the very idea of socialist planning. If the government is to plan the production of all goods, it must also plan what skills the workers who are to produce those goods will possess, and where those workers will live and work. It is incompatible with socialist planning to allow individuals the freedom to acquire the skills they want and to live where they wish. Such freedom would make socialist planning impossible." George Reisman, 1994.

IS A SENSE OF DUTY SLAVERY? Yes. "Duty" means legal obligations toward a person or regime that you suffer under not by your own choice, but simply as a result of birth. The classic example is the hereditary "duty" of a serf to obey his lord. "Patriotic duty," though it sounds more benevolent, means loyalty to whichever politician happens to currently hold power. "Family duty" sounds nobler still, but it overrides the choice every adult child should have to honor, or to give financial support to, whomever they believe has earned it through how they were raised. As with everything else, duty becomes slavery the moment you are compelled to support someone else.

IS SOCIALISM SLAVERY? "Socialism sacrifices the individual to society," Joseph Goebbels. Others have tried to define "socialism" in more euphemistic terms than the National Socialists did, but if a definition implicitly contains the elements "individual," "weapon," "society," it is slavery by definition. Socialism requires state ownership. Under class socialism (Marx, #65), labor belongs to the state. Under national socialism (Hegel, #58), the mind belongs to the state. Whether left-wing or right-wing, socialism always involves some portion of society being lawfully forced to live for society rather than for itself.

ARE RESTRICTIONS AND BARRIERS SLAVERY? Any barrier erected against the free movement of people seeking a better life is merely a modern version of slave chains. The Berlin Wall turned East Berlin into a slave camp. When I lived in Tucson, I watched hundreds of refugees die in the desert practically on my doorstep, trying to cross the wall between the U.S. and Mexico — in a country that had fully open migration barely a century earlier.

DEFINING SEXUAL SLAVERY. Ongoing enslavement, especially in the East, haunts those trapped in forced marriages, harems, or prostitution. But how do you know if you're a sex slave? As with any slavery, a threat of physical force must be present. Since slavery is illegal, in theory a sex slave need only contact the police to be freed and to have her captor arrested. If it goes to trial, the victim must demonstrate that force or fraud was used or threatened, following a process similar to a Western rape trial. Though this may not be easy, regardless of the verdict, the victim must remain free to leave her husband or pimp if she wishes.

BLOOD DIAMONDS. Free enterprise and capitalism are defined by their exclusion of force from transactions. Nevertheless, a free-enterprise transaction may involve goods produced by slaves — the so-called "blood diamond dilemma." Such a transaction is morally treated in court exactly the same way restrictions on stolen goods are, with the aim of stopping the problem at its source.

IS IT IMMORAL TO BUY THIS GAME? This game was manufactured in a Chinese sweatshop, under a government that has long resisted Western freedoms. However, every sweatshop employee who worked on this game did so voluntarily, for their own benefit and livelihood. Many of them are freed serfs, who have been flocking to the cities ever since China's borders opened to free trade amid rapid industrialization. The number of migrants flooding into China's newly privatized enterprises rivals the entire population of the United States. This has dramatically increased China's GDP from $400 billion (1990) to $6 trillion (2010). Brad Gardner notes that 20% of this miracle was achieved simply by abolishing the hukou serfdom, China's "urban or rural" identity card, designed to prevent serfs from leaving the farms. By buying this game, you become part of the miracle that has turned 50% of the world's poorest into people of relative means. An extra 8 or 9 dollars a day may not sound like much by the standards of the average city-dweller, but it is the difference between struggling to buy clothes and struggling to buy a phone, between literacy and technical education, between an open field and a flush toilet. I myself have worked in sweatshops, both in Mexico and on the Navajo Reservation, and I noticed that every worker, from the janitor to the CEO, works hard, knowing their career and reputation will be lost if they don't.

INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS vs. HUMAN RIGHTS. Both terms sound similar but differ fundamentally in their basic social unit (BSU). (The social unit determines who holds the more fundamental rights: each individual, or the collective.) An individual right is granted to every single person, but a "human right" grants rights to the collective, or rather to a representative of the collective, presumed to act in the collective's interest. The BSU determines whether individuals or society hold the more fundamental rights. The key point is that individual rights forbid slavery as an evil against the person, while human rights permit slavery if a representative of humanity judges slavery to be good for the human species. But "Humanity" is not a decision-making unit, because only individuals can make decisions and be held accountable for them. "Collective decision" is a myth. Consequently, no "human" representative holds any special rights over other individuals.

DOES SOCIETY NEED INITIATED FORCE? Today's debate over freedom centers on whether, and to what degree, force is necessary for a Western culture to function. The origins of society and the legitimacy of state authority over the individual were addressed by the Enlightenment concept of the social contract — actually, two concepts: the Hobbesian one (by living in society, you sign an implicit contract stipulating that you agree to obey every statute a local politician dreams up, and that rebelling against the state is immoral), or the Milton/Locke one (a local politician protects your life, liberty, and private property from the initiation of force, and it is moral to rebel if he violates that contract by micromanaging your affairs). This latter vision is the foundation of the political theory called capitalism, under which initiated force is lawfully excluded from every transaction. As detailed in my board game Pax Renaissance, the earliest capitalists were freed merchant-serfs, ultimately responsible for dismantling feudalism in the West. The opposing theory, called socialism, holds that the use of force against certain victim groups is necessary for the sake of egalitarianism and "society." The victims, who are not members of the government and are therefore powerless, can be practically any minority around which a socialist politician can rally votes: lower castes, Jewish bankers, "the rich," "big business," immigrants, and so on. By persecuting them, socialist politicians undermine free will in the marketplace, seizing control over property rights in agriculture, trade, and industry.

THE CASE AGAINST FREEDOM boils down to the claim that "people are foolish/evil." This behaviorist assertion — that unregulated people are animals incapable of morality or long-term conceptual planning — was first proposed by the Enlightenment philosopher Thomas Hobbes (#34). Later Enlightenment-era behaviorists, such as Rousseau (#110), Malthus (#57), Hegel (#58), and Marx (#65), advanced this idea to justify a benevolent and absolute paternal monarchy that must keep its wards on a short leash. A modern politician is being Hobbesian whenever he claims that, without his benevolent, compulsory rules, free people would destroy X, where X = the economy, national security, the environment, an alleged population crisis, scarce resources, their own savings, their own health, their own happiness, themselves. In my Bios trilogy of games, I model an amoral Hobbesian/Malthusian animal world, but observe how and why that world is contradicted by the emergence of consciousness and free will.

THE CASE FOR FREEDOM shows that if people really were as Hobbesian as claimed — concerned only with short-term, brutish survival — then establishing an all-powerful socialist regime and hoping it will somehow turn out benevolently non-Hobbesian is pointless, since the regime itself is made up of such people. If unregulated people are so shortsighted that they damage the economy, why are the freest countries also the most prosperous per capita, in places like Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Hong Kong, and Singapore? If free people naturally let their disabled, elderly, or destitute starve, why do 100% of actual famines occur in socialist countries, such as China during the "Great Leap Forward," North Korea, post-colonial Africa, or post-Chávez Venezuela? If freedom is bad for the environment, why are the cleanest conditions found in capitalist countries, and the filthiest in environmental hellholes such as Africa, China, South Asia, and the countries behind the former "Iron Curtain"? The case for freedom regards people as Lockean, conscious beings, capable of conceptualizing and carrying out long-term plans for their own rational well-being, if given the freedom to do so. The only regulation or coercion needed for human happiness is regulation against coercion itself. — Phil Eklund

Below is Luke Muehlhauser's "hockey stick" chart, demonstrating that the Enlightenment-Industrial Revolution was the single most significant event in Earth's history, if human life is the measure of value:

— life expectancy — GDP per capita — % not living in extreme poverty — energy capture (kcal/cap/day) — war-making capacity — % living in a democracy

A Personal Journey

SLAVERY NEXT DOOR. Twice a week I would encounter slavery in my small village. Under a row of poplars I met a neighbor — a chatty old farmer who told me he had planted the trees himself 40 years earlier. He then told me of his terrible ordeal, drafted as a teenager into the Nazi army, surviving only by feigning death while the Russians executed his comrades. Only a few days later I happened to notice a small memorial plaque dedicated to 2,000 Zwangsarbeiter (forced laborers) who worked and died there, brought in from lands seized by the National Socialists. In my hometown of Tucson there is a colony of escaped serfs, the Yaqui Indians, who arrived quite recently, in 1908. In the designer notes to Pax Porfiriana, I tell the story of how my son Matthew and I encountered slave traders, armed to the teeth, in a remote corner of Sonora. Slavery, rather than being some distant historical phenomenon, suddenly showed up in my own neighborhood and within the living memory of my neighbors.

A map showing the historical slave-trading and underground-railroad routes of this game's period. The "#" mark indicates the card number in the game. My hometown of Tucson is the terminus of the Yaqui underground railroad through northern Sonora. Chinese immigrants went underground in 1882, following passage of the notorious Chinese Exclusion Act, the first racist immigration barrier in the U.S. Fortunately, Mother Nature came to the rescue: the destruction of records after the 1907 earthquake allowed nearly a million undocumented Chinese to claim their records had been destroyed in San Francisco.

WAS D-DAY MORAL? I've asked some of my elderly neighbors this question: "Was the British-American armed invasion of your homeland morally justified?" It was certainly illegal (as I was told, it violated several Vichy ordinances against "littering"). But it freed the slaves, including survivors from our neighboring death camp. And it turned Nazi Germany into a Western society so great that I live here by my own free choice. My neighbors agree: D-Day was not only honorable, but successful to a degree never seen before or since. Force against force is moral; force against freedom is immoral. I would argue that British colonial occupation of tribal lands was equally honorable, for the same reasons. Today's Western world consists largely of formerly productive colonies. No one living there, however much of a fan of Rousseau's "noble savage" they might be, would rationally wish to see a return to tribal warlords and routine enslavement.

SLAVERY AS A EUROGAME TABOO. For example, the game Puerto Rico never names what its tokens actually represent. I broke this taboo in Origins: How We Became Human, a civilization-style board game in which players could enslave one another. This taboo resurfaced in Greenland, where I learned that seafaring Vikings and proto-Inuit were the principal slave traders in the North, just as seafaring Maori were the principal slave traders in the far South. While researching Pax Renaissance, in which the slave trade is a central theme, I was surprised to discover that the Ottoman Empire ran the largest slave trade in the world, dwarfing anything that later developed in the West.

THIS IS MY INSPIRATION for taking this on right now. The freeing of the slaves was the greatest achievement in the world — why had no game ever been made on the subject? I can buy dozens of games about the Seven Years' War; why has the war of liberation, fought with ships, cannons, and courage, been utterly ignored? The British and Christian crusade to abolish slavery, together with its roots in the Enlightenment, has been quietly excised from history textbooks, to such a degree that most people I asked came away with the impression that these politically incorrect groups had started slavery, rather than ended it.

THE FALL OF ABSOLUTES. This startling impression arose because modern intellectuals have declared absolutes obsolete. Newspeak insists there are no absolutes, no principles, no good or evil. This trend, begun by Hume, Hegel, and Kant (all philosophers featured in this game), overturned the Enlightenment view that the universe and its inhabitants operate according to absolute laws of nature. As one Lockean scholar put it: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among which are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." Note that the Declaration of Independence uses absolutist language. Terms such as "truth," "self-evident," "all men," and "unalienable" describe facts dictated by the nature of existence and are, therefore, unchangeable by human action or opinion.

CAN CIVILIZATION SURVIVE THE FALL OF THE AGE OF REASON? No. We need reason to survive just as a tiger needs its claws. Imagine a conversation with a postmodernist, a typical disciple of Kant (whether or not he's ever heard of Kant), who dismisses all philosophy as mere opinion. He begins by belittling principles, truth, beauty, knowledge, art, physics, and morality as mere opinions with no objective merit. "Hey, what's your evidence for this philosophy?" you ask. "Evidence is a matter of opinion. There are, in principle, no principles. As for absolute morality, there are 7 billion versions, one for every living person," he replies. "So there are no absolutes?" "Absolutely none," he says, without any hesitation in using the very principle he just denied. "How do you know that?" "Knowledge is an arbitrary social construct." "Even the laws of physics?" you ask. "Physics is merely a convenient mathematical description of phenomena, having nothing to do with reality. What matters is whether enough people believe it." "Hey, a volcano just erupted, there's a wall of lava right there!" "Let's imagine a more pleasant reality."

A STORY THAT NEEDS TO BE TOLD. In particular, these truths do not contradict local human laws, such as the formerly immoral laws protecting slavery. In Britain and its colonies, this gave rise to the first law under which the individual, not the state, was sovereign. The idea of inalienable individual rights ultimately led Western civilization to be the first to discover that slavery is morally repugnant. This is a story worth telling, since today's moral erosion (to the point where its very existence is now disputed) is throwing the door wide open to a return of slavery.

Phil Eklund, 2017

Pax Emancipation Rulebook

Table of Contents

A. What Is This Game About?
B. Components
C. Setup (the real rules begin here)
D. Sequence of Play
- D1. Overview of a Player's Turn
E. Finance and Gunboat Diplomacy
F. Action Phase
G. Ops Phase (Operations)
H. Elephant Phase
I. Hate and Pogrom Roll Phase
J. Market Update and End of Game
Book 2 — Advanced Game, Tips, Glossary
K. Revolution Phase
L. Bonus Petitions
- L1. Red, Black, or Red-Black Petitions
- L2. Separation of Church & State⁸ (half-red, half-black symbol)
M. Impacts
N. Strategy Overview (Cooperative and Competitive Games)
O. Example of Play: An Advanced Cooperative-Competitive Game for 3 Players (1776–1836)
Glossary
What Are Freedom and Slavery?
- A Personal Journey

A. What Is This Game About?

A1. Historical Background

² ECONOMIC VS. INTELLECTUAL SLAVERY. A slave, as property, is enslaved in both body and mind. Under intellectual slavery, she is told which God to believe in, whom to vote for, and what she may say or express. Under economic slavery, everything she produces belongs to her master, as do her body, possessions, and her life. Both types of slavery are imposed by force: intellectual slavery through censorship of the right to protest, forced conversion, book bans, and conscription; economic slavery through "perpetual slavery" — coercion at gunpoint, chaining to the land, migration barriers, and state ownership of property.

³ The Enlightenment was the political discovery that liberty is a fundamental human virtue. It spawned the two most important revolutions in history: the industrial revolution and the abolition of capital punishment. Age of Reason thinkers established that all people share the same basic nature, identifiable through reason and science, and that this nature flourishes under a politics free of physical force. Montesquieu (#41), Voltaire (#43), Rousseau (#110), Diderot (#46), Smith (#49), and Condorcet (#50) were the first to challenge the legitimacy of forced submission. But isn't it reasonable to pursue happiness by enslaving others? No. Violating human rights undermines reason itself, the very foundation a person needs in order to flourish. It negates the motivation to think or to produce. Every compromise on the principle of liberty tears down the one barrier holding back the advance toward total tyranny. Moreover, slave traders are ignoble parasites, and every parasite knows, deep in its dark heart, that if the overburdened producer stops producing, the parasite is doomed.

⁴ JOHN LOCKE (#109). "The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions... every one, as he is bound to preserve himself, and not to quit his station wilfully, so by the like reason, when his own preservation comes not in competition, ought he, as much as he can, to preserve the rest of mankind, and not unless it be to do justice on an offender, take away or impair the life, or what tends to the preservation of the life, liberty, health, limb, or goods of another." Second Treatise of Government, 1689.

⁵ THE GLORIOUS REVOLUTION. "Great efforts were made ... to create an image of a ruling class that was itself subject to the rule of law, and whose legitimacy rested upon the justice and universality of those legal forms. And in a serious sense the rulers were, willingly or unwillingly, prisoners of their own rhetoric; they played power games by rules that suited them, but they could not break those rules, or the whole game would be thrown away." —E.P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters, 1975.

⁶ THE GOLDEN RULE. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," from Matthew 7:12. This Biblical passage, reinterpreted in the spirit of the Enlightenment, gave rise to the petition of 1688, which first argued that slavery is inherently immoral because of equal rights, regardless of race, color, or creed. It was drafted by Francis Daniel Pastorius and presented at the monthly Quaker meeting in Germantown, Pennsylvania. Nevertheless, the Bible also contains passages describing in detail the status of slaves in ancient Israel, including their legal classification, economic role, and inherent duties to their masters. Nowhere does the Bible condemn slavery in the abstract, as an institution. Slavery was so deeply bound up with society that its absence was unthinkable before the Age of Reason.

⁷ FREEDOM in this game means political freedom — that is, freedom from physical force at the hands of others. It does not mean freedom from the forces of nature. It is not valid to claim enslavement because you must obey the law of gravity, or cannot afford a Mercedes, or cannot fly to Alpha Centauri. Cheap transportation and spacecraft are only possible if every would-be entrepreneur is granted political freedom.

⁸ INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS are the moral principles sanctioning a person's freedom of action in a social context. This is the freedom to act on one's own judgment, for one's own purposes, by one's own voluntary choice, free from coercion by any weapon. It is the right to one's own life, and it provides for the legal punishment of anyone who violates this fundamental right. The source of this right, in John Locke's formulation, is "God or Nature" — that is, embodied in the nature of human beings as creatures possessing free will.

A2. Player Identity

Pax Emancipation is a card game in which 1 to 3 players represent one of three agencies for freeing slaves, in a cooperative effort to end slavery worldwide beginning in the 18th century:

The British Parliament (Red Player) and its agents, the colonial imperialists.⁹ Their monopoly on naval power lets them build Marines to fight slave ships, anarchy, and embargoes.
The Evangelicals (White Player) and their agents, the missionaries.¹⁰ Unlike the other players' Agents, missionaries are installed without a Barrier cost.
The Philanthropists (Green Player) and their agents, merchants and explorers out of London. They gain a financial advantage when installing Agents from their boards (e.g., when forming a Syndicate or making a Post appointment).¹¹

Remember: all 3 players are heroes for the liberation of slaves in this game. There are no "gotcha" cards here.

⁹ A GOVERNMENT is an agency holding a monopoly on the use of force within a given geographic area. Such agencies range from empires to neighborhood gangs. By definition a government holds exclusive authority to enforce the rules of social conduct within its territory, including slavery. The goal of Pax Emancipation's players is to compel or persuade the world's governments to recognize slavery as illegal. Illegality makes slavery impractical, since any slave who escaped would have grounds for a lawsuit and could testify against her enslaver.

¹⁰ EVANGELICALS. "Nowhere in Eurasia was there simply anything like the Western church — no religion that was politically autonomous and equipped with an organized clergy that could prevent rulers from becoming too powerful." Philip Hoffman, Why Did Europe Conquer the World?, 2015, p. 133.

¹¹ PHILANTHROPIC ABOLITIONIST COMPANIES included Quaker-owned shipping and banking firms, which most likely had profited from the slave trade. However, from 1758 onward they refused to engage in the slave trade.

A3. Meta-Rules (Rules About Rules)

Terms written with a capital letter (e.g., Viable, Liberated) are defined in the Glossary. Bold type means the term has a definition.¹²
Pronouns. In the footnotes I use feminine pronouns when referring to slaves and masculine pronouns when referring to slaveholders. This choice is not entirely arbitrary, since historically men were more often the aggressor in coercive operations (e.g., in sex slavery). Nonetheless, this pronoun choice is made for clarity, not as a political statement. Master and slave are defined by the application of physical force, not by sex.
Card Numbers. The "#" symbol in the rules refers to a card number from 1 to 120.
Golden Rule. If the text on a card contradicts these rules, the card takes precedence. If text on a player aid contradicts these rules, the rules take precedence.
Advanced Game. Text set in blue type is intended for the advanced game, to which are added Splays, Disease, the Industrial Revolution, Freedom Pairs, passing laws, court cases, plebiscites, impacts, Revolutions, and Modern States. See Book 2.

¹² DEFINITIONS. It goes without saying that for a game to be playable, it requires unambiguous rules and definitions. Unfortunately, a politician usually finds it advantageous not to define terms such as "freedom" or "slavery," in order to better justify all manner of uses of force to consolidate his power. Rousseau (#110), a self-proclaimed champion of liberty, anticipated Orwell by redefining freedom to mean its opposite: social cooperation and submission to the "General Will." Since Rousseau claimed the state knows your true nature better than you do, he saw nothing contradictory in being "forced to be free." "There is no dictator in the West who, in the years after Rousseau, has not used this monstrous paradox to justify his conduct." — Isaiah Berlin, Freedom, 1969.

¹³ A SLAVE is any person who is initially under compulsion (force) or in a state of dependency serving another's interests. From the most wretched slaves, all freedoms are taken by force of arms: the right to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. The term "force" means coercion carried out by a physical person with a weapon, fists, or lynching. Force is the opposite of persuasion, the other means of resolving a dispute. The term "initiation" means beginning the use of physical force against another. Using force against a victim turns her into a slave to the extent that the force usurps her ability to make her own decisions. One who uses force may himself be imprisoned (e.g., as a prisoner of war, or a convicted rapist), and this justice is not slavery, since it is not the initiator.

A4. The Five Game Arenas

Finance Board. Move Finance Agents down to obtain enough gold to pay for each action with a cost. Move them up using the fundraising action. Divesting is moving Agents from another arena onto the Finance board (e.g., fundraising). Installing is moving Agents from the Finance board onto another game arena (joining a Syndicate, making a Post appointment, creating Marines).
Market. Choosing from the two columns of the East and West Idea Market, you join Syndicates of anti-slavery organizations to gain access to their Operations (Ops).
Map. On the 10-card global World Map, each square represents 2 million slaves. Liberate each square by placing a Freedman (meeple) there. Each circle represents a Post for placing colonial, missionary, or trading Agents, which activate Westernization, suffrage, or literacy. Warships on sea borders suppress slavers, anarchy, and blockades. Merchants establish and maintain slave escape routes.
Victory Pool. Any token or disk in your Victory Pool counts as VP at game end. Claim them via suffrage, impacts from passed laws, revolutionary laws, or Warships. Corruption can Regress (return) them to the map.
Splays¹⁴. The two shared boards are columns of overlapping cards called Splays. One is the Bill of Rights¹⁵, and the other is the General Will. Pairs of adjacent symbols in the Splays are called a "Freedom Pair" and indicate whether an Idea or Revolution is Viable (i.e., qualifies to be passed as a law in the Splay).

¹⁴ COMMON LAW is a body of precedent-based rulings, grounded in a country's foundational principles, which a common-law court weighs for applicability to the facts at hand. Common law arose in medieval England and developed over centuries. Without such precedent, a country's law is guided by the whim of the current judge or dictator rather than by principle. The game models common law as the Bill of Rights table, built up over generations.

¹⁵ THE ENGLISH BILL OF RIGHTS was signed by the English monarchs William and Mary in 1689, ending the Glorious Revolution. Notably, the judiciary became fully independent. "Judges' appointments could no longer be revoked except for misconduct — and that only by Parliament, which itself could be turned out by the voters... in the same spirit, freedom of the press from prior censorship was introduced in 1695. All these things, now so widely taken for granted, can be taken for granted only because the British pioneered them." Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures, 1998, p. 89.

A5. From Tyranny to Modernity, Using Four Cycles

Agent Cycle. Pawn figures represent Agents. Move them to your Finance board to generate gold, or install them on the Market as Syndicates or Revolutionaries, or on the World Map as Administrators. If lost, they are withdrawn back to Finance, as wealth. If they are lost on the World Map, they additionally create a Dissident meeple of the same color. Add extra Agents into the game via Shipbuilding.
Meeple Cycle. Meeples represent the population of free people. A square without a meeple is a slave/serf. Liberation places a meeple on that square, representing a free worker. If a meeple is killed in a Hate incident, it becomes a Dissident. If there are more Dissidents than spaces to place them, Anarchy is generated.
Anarchy Cycle. Anarchy is generated by frustration, pogroms, or a surplus of Dissidents. If there are too many Anarchy disks, the extras move as refugees to neighboring Spheres. Any Sphere at its maximum of 2 Anarchy must undergo a pogrom roll (try to avoid this).
Nation Cycle. If a Sphere has both Anarchy and Dissidents, a Revolution is born there. If a Revolution accumulates enough revolutionary Agents and is philosophically Viable, it succeeds, and the Sphere's map card is flipped to its modern side. The laws of the new nation reduce barriers, slavers, and Anarchy.

A6. Overview of Competitive and Cooperative Mode (Multiplayer Game)

Counter-Enlightenment. If there are more slavers than Red Agents (including Administrators by default, K8), then the Red Player scores no VP. If there are fewer than 15 Freedmen, the White Player scores no VP. If 26 or more Barriers remain on the Spheres, the Green Player scores no VP.
Your cooperative VP are essentially equal to the number of tokens of your color on the World Map, plus the number of tokens and disks in your Victory Pool.
Your final VP equal your cooperative VP plus 1 VP for each token in a Sphere that politically leans your way, plus a bonus for Revolutions of your color visible in the Splay.
The Banality of Evil.¹⁶ During the cooperative era of the game you may gain advantages through deliberate corruption, pogroms, murders, or nationalization. This threatens your victim with Counter-Enlightenment (J3), in which case the advantages mean nothing, since there will be no competitive era and no competitive winner. But you might also commit such evil not for competitive advantage, but simply so that the game has no winner at all. In the name of all the slaves left in misery, I sincerely ask you to refrain from this and to fight to the very end.

¹⁶ THE BANALITY OF EVIL. All players in this game fight for Good, following my view of Evil as something mundanely bureaucratic. Just as slavery occurs in the absence of freedom, evil is what happens when good people do nothing. I disagree with the portrayal of evil as all-powerful, as in typical horror films. Although it might seem that unprincipled people have more freedoms than principled people, only the latter is capable of both purposeful behavior and long-term happiness. "The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them." — Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, 1963.

B. Components

B1. Game Contents

3 Finance boards: one per player.
120 cards: 98 Idea cards, 10 World cards, 10 Revolution cards, and 2 starting Splay cards.
48 cardboard tokens: represent Barriers and Slavers, worth victory points (VP) in the cooperative and competitive scoring.
45 Agents (15 red, 15 white, 15 green), representing Agents and investments.
48 meeples: 16 red (Educated (literate) freemen), 16 green (free Entrepreneurs), 16 white (free Christians).
The "Elephant" represents a focal point for the media, in an age when communication by newspaper worldwide was only just beginning.
9 purple ship tokens. Place on Sea Borders to indicate anti-slavery squadrons or Merchants.
21 disks: 18 black (Anarchy), 3 yellow-green (Disease).
3 cubes: (1 red, 1 white, 1 green) represent factories in the advanced game.
4D6. Used for piracy, hate, and pogrom rolls.

B2. Structure of the World Cards (10)

There are 10 double-sided cards that make up the world map with ten Spheres. One side shows the starting (serf) side, and the reverse shows the modern (Westernized) side.

¹⁷ CHATTEL SLAVERY is a form of slavery in which the slave is treated as a commodity that may be lawfully bought and sold. A slave's status as property says nothing about the degree of slavery she suffers: a serf, who is not property, is often more thoroughly enslaved. Serfdom is a form of chattel slavery in which the serf (slave) is sold and bought together with the land, and is forbidden to flee. Because feudalism is a loose confederation of warlords under conditions close to anarchy, where no warlord bears any social cost for cruelty or caprice, a serf often finds himself worse off than other chattel slaves. Chattel serfdom prevailed worldwide until it first disappeared in Western Europe between the 16th and 18th centuries. Even there, freedmen still suffered from the lords, taxes, and labor obligations into which they were born.

¹⁸ ARE BONDSMEN (SERFS) SLAVES? Yes. A serf is a laborer, typically a field laborer, held in forced servitude to a lord vested with full or partial legal authority over his agricultural production. He differs from a chattel slave only in that he is bought and sold together with the land, rather than on the open market. His economic slavery is expressed as the percentage of his labor he must render as corvée to his lord. Because he has no freedom to quit or to rebel, he remains a slave even if he is compensated for his work, for example with wages or protection from marauders. He is also usually an intellectual slave, deprived of freedom of conscience and speech. It makes no difference to him whether his master is a private lord or a public socialist, or whether his labor is demanded out of selfish motives or "for the good of society." All he knows is that his life and labor are not his own, and that he lives under compulsion for the sake of others.

¹⁹ WESTERN COLONIALISM AS A PAINFUL FIRST STEP TOWARD FREEDOM. The urge to condemn colonialism ignores the illiteracy, tribal slavery, and warlord anarchy that the colonies replaced. Slave conditions would have continued for centuries until native literacy or Enlightenment values were independently discovered. Whatever vices and abuses occurred under the name of Western imperialism, it was the one winding path to freedom. "...what destroyed slavery in the non-Western world was Western imperialism... Nothing is more troubling, and more at odds with the vision of today's intellectuals, than the fact that it was businessmen, devout religious leaders, and Western imperialists together who destroyed slavery throughout the world. And if that doesn't fit their vision, for them it's as if it never happened." — Thomas Sowell, The Real History of Slavery and Racism, 2005.

B3. Structure of the Finance Board (3)²⁰

²⁰ ECONOMICS was founded as a science by Enlightenment thinkers such as Smith, Ricardo, and Mill. They founded economics as the study of the allocation of resources to produce wealth in a society with a division of labor and limited resources. There are three levels: Debt (obligations undertaken to consume wealth), Wealth (any human value, from food to freedom), and Capital (wealth used to produce wealth). Capital is spent to produce wealth, and wealth is spent to create debt.

B4. Structure of the Idea Cards (98)

²¹ IDEAS OF FREEDOM can be regrouped to form new ideas. Moral premises can be based on reason, on the supernatural, or on nothing at all. Activity can be aimed at freedom of thought or freedom of labor. They can be combined in various ways, and the Enlightenment thinkers tried them all. Structure of an Idea card (a Western Idea), example above: Freedom symbols: 2 comets. Operations: Manumission, Literacy. Impact: + Post appointment in Bahia. Firebrand: 26. Cultural Diffusion Arrow.

B5. Structure of the Revolution Cards (10)

These cards represent Revolutions on the path to Modernity. There is one Revolution for each Sphere. They have 2 features not found on Ideas:

B6. Structure of the Barrier Token (Hate Roll, 39)

These tokens, called Barriers, are worth 1 VP each if they remain at game end. The information on them is used during setup (C5) and during hate rolls (I1) or piracy rolls (E6).

Sphere. Each Barrier belongs to its Sphere: America, Europe, Ottoman Empire, China, Japan, Brazil, W. Africa, E. Africa, India, or East Indies. This indicates placement during setup (C5) or Regression.
Leaning. Barrier names are color-coded as follows: Red = a Barrier of the left²², White = a Barrier of the right²³, Purple = an embargo.
Blood cubes. Colored dice show which color token dies. Red dice kill a red token, white dice kill a white token, green dice kill a green token, yellow dice cause a loss of gold, purple dice sink a Merchant, and black dice regress a Barrier (corruption, E7).
Frustration. Die symbols with a black outline indicate frustration hate (I3).
Reverse side. Indicates the starting number of Barriers in that Sphere, useful during setup (C5) or corruption (E7).

²² LEFT-WING SOCIALISM is the doctrine that a person's life and labor do not belong to himself but to society. "From each according to his ability," as Marx (#65) put it. Chattel slavery differs only in that the owner is a lord and master rather than a representative of society.

²³ RIGHT-WING CONSERVATISM proclaims freedom in the material world, opposing state ownership and control of a person's life and labor, but imposes intellectual control over his mind for the sake of a unified society.

Anatomy of a Barrier token (the Embargo Barrier): Sphere is Europe (or the First French Empire, if Europe is modern). Blood cubes (green), embargo cubes (purple), frustration (black outline).

C. Setup (the real rules begin here)

C1. Choose a Game Variant

²⁴ FEUDALISM is an agricultural system of forced labor in which noble warlords act as the government and serfs form its lowest and most numerous component. Serfs are legally permitted to engage only in agricultural work, and only on the land assigned to them. Feudalism prevailed across Eurasia for centuries, alongside similar extractive hierarchies in the agricultural regions of the Americas and Africa. Feudalism declined in Europe during the Renaissance but revived in Eastern Europe during the "second serfdom." By the start of the game, serfdom had vanished in England, France, Spain, Austria, Greece, Italy, Switzerland, and Scandinavia, but remained dominant across the rest of the agricultural world.

²⁵ MALTHUS (#57) was a behaviorist, meaning he believed that people lack free will and, therefore, the capacity to avoid catastrophic population growth during a surplus of resources. All of these conclusions have been proven to be Malthus's error.

C2. Assign Player Roles

Randomly assign each player a color. Up to three may play:

Parliamentary Left (Red).²⁶ (e.g., a left-wing abolitionist MP). Historical example: Lord Palmerston (#84).
Evangelical Right (White).²⁷ (e.g., a right-wing anti-slavery religious zealot). Example: David Livingstone (#25).
Philanthropists (Green). (e.g., a wealthy abolitionist businessman). Example: William Wilberforce (#9).

²⁶ WAS BRITAIN THE FIRST ABOLITIONIST STATE? With the possible exception of the 1256 Liber Paradisus of Bologna, the historical record shows that every instance of abolition in Asia and Africa, as well as in Europe and the Americas, was tied to "pressure from European abolitionist movements, the expansion of capitalist relations or production, the concerns and self-image of the colonial state, and efforts by non-Western elites to modernize their culture.... There is no evidence that slavery came under serious attack anywhere in the world before the 18th century." — Martin A. Klein, Breaking the Chains, 1993.

²⁷ QUAKERS (the Society of Friends) is a dissenting Christian sect founded in England in 1650 (#20). Among the most secular of Christians, they were natural capitalists and individualists. Quakers founded banks and financial institutions such as Lloyds of London, Barclays, and Friends Provident, and, like every institution worldwide, invested in the slave trade. As late as 1705, most Quaker leaders in Philadelphia were slaveholders. And they were Christians who had gone nearly 2,000 years without challenging slavery. And yet, perhaps as a result of the prevailing Enlightenment spirit combined with their own history of breaking with tradition, the Quakers became the first known group to consider slavery a threat to their own eternal salvation. They were the first to forbid their members from owning slaves (Philadelphia, 1758), and the first organization to petition Parliament (1783) and Congress (1790) to abolish slavery. Since Quakers were barred by law from Parliament, they persuaded wealthy Anglican evangelicals such as Granville Sharp, Thomas Clarkson (#10), and William Wilberforce (#9) to plead the case. Gradually more and more Christian denominations came to regard slavery as morally unacceptable, and the religious right came to lead abolitionism.

C3. Starting Finance Boards

C4. Form the World Map

Borders. Leave a small gap (10 mm) between cards.

C5. Place the Barrier and Slaver Tokens

Place the Barriers face up next to the space marked on their token, as shown.

Northern Hemisphere. America (3), Europe (3), Ottoman (5), China (5), and Japan (5).
Southern Hemisphere. Brazil (3), W. Africa (3), E. Africa (4), India (5), and East Indies (3).
Slavers. Place ship tokens on each of the 9 sea borders, matching the blood product²⁸ shown on the world map (cotton, sugar, rubber, etc.).

²⁸ BLOOD PRODUCTS are produced by slave labor and fraudulently sold on the open market. Their history traces back to the Kingdom of Congo, an illiterate, warlike state whose economy had depended on enslavement ever since the Bantu peoples conquered Africa. The Congolese king welcomed the Portuguese, converted to Christianity, and intensified the seizure of slaves for export. Europeans were confined to a few slave ports, while the actual abductions were carried out by local Imbangala mercenaries during war or raiding. This devastated neighboring villages along the eastern frontier of Congo and Angola. As the export trade surged, the local population was enslaved as well, and the entire structure of law came to center on slavery: whatever the offense, the punishment was slavery. After 330 miserable years, the export slave trade was abruptly halted under British pressure in 1839. The royal slavery monopoly no longer had any income, and had thousands of unsold slaves on its hands. These slaves were forced to produce "legitimate" blood products for export: kola nuts, copper, ivory, and later rubber. When Congo finally lost its independence in 1890, this royal monopoly was seized by King Leopold II of Belgium. In Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad described the brutal conditions in the royal Congo Free State, including illegal enslavement enforced by terror and atrocities. (This novel inspired the notorious film Apocalypse Now, in which the setting was changed to Vietnam.) When a photojournalist exposed the story, the king was ousted, and Congo fell under civilian colonialism and relative sanity. Hundreds of thousands of commoners and freedmen began transporting goods from the interior to the coastal ports, creating a new class of wealthy merchants. Unfortunately, immediately after gaining independence in 1960, Congo again fell under petty tyrants, civil war, and anarchy, which continue to this day. "The horror!"

C6. Place the Starting Tokens on the World Map

Elephant. Set the Elephant token with its trunk pointing at London.
Anarchy. The 18 black disks are divided evenly among the players, each of whom places them in their Victory Pool (disks and tokens here are worth 1 victory point at game end).
Starting Administrators. Wherever indicated by colored dots, place an Agent of the matching color (the British Parliament in London, the British colony in Virginia, the Jesuit Reductions in Brazil, and the East India Company (EIC) in Mughal India). Place these even if that color is not in the game.
Freedmen. Wherever indicated by colored squares in Europe, place a meeple of that color (1 red, 1 white, and 2 green meeples).²⁹
Disease (advanced game only). Place one yellow-green disk wherever indicated: in Congo, Zululand, and the East Indies, see B2. This disk indicates that the Sphere has Disease.
Reserve Pool. All remaining tokens go into the shared pool.

²⁹ LONDON'S MERCHANTS. "Despite the absence of any single institution to govern and oversee it, [London's] urban savvy helped London's practitioners successfully investigate nature, ... seek financial backing from civic and judicial figures, and overcome hardship ... to be heard over the din of market stalls on nearly every street, working in cramped backyards over forges and furnaces, and working beyond the storefronts of the Royal Exchange and other trading quarters — hundreds of men and women of every nationality were engaged in the work of science, medicine, and technology in London." —Deborah E. Harkness, The Jewel House, 2007, 8–9.

C7. Prepare the Decks

Cooperative Era Decks. For all advanced-game variants (C1a, b, or c), shuffle the Western Ideas and place 16 into the deck (1- or 2-player game) or 22 (3-player game).³⁰ If you are playing the basic variant (C1a, b, or c), remove 3 cards from each deck, i.e. 13 for the basic 1- or 2-player game, or 19 for the 3-player game. Then shuffle the Eastern Ideas into a deck with the same number of cards as the West. Place the decks side by side, with the East to the right of the West. The remaining cards will not be used.
Applying "Astrology" (mandatory). Both decks lie face up, not face down, so players can see one card in the "future."

³⁰ WESTERN IDEAS became the benchmark by which the whole world is now judged. Take a moment to review the Western Idea cards — freedom of speech, trial by jury, human rights, separation of church and state, consent of the governed, habeas corpus — today all of these standards are taken for granted. For example, torture was a legal and widely accepted practice until the Enlightenment treatise on cruel and unusual punishment (#8). Political progress has stalled since the Enlightenment, as the principles that made it possible have been forgotten or rejected. The very concept of "principle" has been substantially reworked. Rather than being an objective truth independent of culture, it is now an opinion, biased by culture.

Starting Splays. Place the two starting Splay cards (Bill of Rights and General Will) side by side, leaving enough room below for the two Splays to grow. The orientation of the cards doesn't matter yet, since this will be decided by the Founding Father for each column.
Shared Deck. The ten double-sided cards are the Revolutions. One side has a white border, the other a red border. Place them in an open shared deck. You may inspect the shared deck at any time during the game.

C8. Form the Market

Deal 6 cards from the Western deck to form a column of six face-up cards. Do the same for the Eastern deck, to the right of the Western column.

Orient all cards in the same direction (the Cultural Diffusion Arrow (H3) of cards in the Western column should point toward the Eastern column).
Start the first round with the Red player (order is shown at the top center of your board).

D. Sequence of Play

D1. Overview of a Player's Turn

Each turn of a game round represents about 8 years of history. During your turn, perform the following 5 steps:

Action Phase (F). Perform up to 2 per turn. You may perform the same action multiple times. Choose from this list:
- Fundraiser lets you Divest Agents from the World Map or the Market and increase Capital on your Finance board.
- Syndicate (with cost) moves a Finance Agent onto a Market card, e.g. forming an abolitionist organization with special Operations (Ops).
- Shipbuilding (with cost) creates a ship token for 3 gold. Only 1 ship per action.
- Post Appointment (with cost and the Elephant) installs an Administrator on the map. This is needed to make local populations literate or Westernized.³¹
- Legislate applies a Viable Idea with a Syndicate on the Market into one of the two Splays (after which other Ideas may become Viable). This gives an Impact (M) in your favor.
- Join a Revolution (with cost) to overthrow an outdated feudal nation and establish a modern, Westernized one (K).
Ops Phase (G). You may perform one Operation for each of your Syndicate members or Revolutionary Agents. Choose an Operation from those listed on the Syndicate cards:
- Maritime — move Marines from one ship to another and carry out Gunboat Diplomacy (E5).
- Manumissions (with cost and the Elephant) — pay for slaves' freedom.
- Westernize (with the Elephant) — free slaves in a legal Theocracy or Republic.
- Suffrage (with cost and the Elephant) — claim Barriers, if in a British colony or a legal democracy.
- Literacy (with the Elephant) — create Dissidents.³²
- Lawsuits and Plebiscite (with cost) — churn the market and create new, favorable mechanisms for legislating Ideas in a Splay. This grants bonus Petitions (L).
Note. Actions and Operations marked "Elephant" must be performed in the port with the Elephant. Actions and Operations marked "with cost" may require payment in gold. Pay the cost (E3) before performing the action or operation.
Elephant Phase (H). Make one 1D6 roll to determine where the Elephant moves (H2) and which Market card is discarded (H3).
Hate and Pogrom Roll Phase (I).
- Hate Roll. Roll one or more dice, causing attrition in the port with the Elephant (I2).
- Pogrom Roll. For each Sphere with 2 Anarchy disks, roll 1d6 (I4).
Revolution Phase (K). If a Sphere has both Anarchy and Dissidents, start a Revolution (K1) on the Idea Market in the corresponding column, if not already started. If a Revolution is Viable and has enough Revolutionaries, it succeeds (K4).
Market Update. Close up all gaps on the market (J1) and return all market Agents from occupied option spaces to any location on the map (J2). Perform the end-of-game check (J3, J5).

³¹ JOHN COMPANY is a board game designed by Cole Wehrle and published by me in 2017. It is the story of the East India Company, a joint-stock company that began operations with trading posts in India (1611). It was not fully private, given that its maritime monopoly was backed by the guns of the British navy. But on land the Company counted barely a hundred guards, and so existed only at the whim of local authorities. The situation changed during the Seven Years' War with France, when the Company was staffed with troops and by 1757 governed parts of the subcontinent. Any institution with a monopoly on force is a government, not a business, and this was made explicit in 1765 when Robert Clive obtained the Diwani (the legal right to collect revenue by force of arms in Bengal and Bihar). In 1793 the Permanent Settlement was signed, an agreement granting the zamindars — landowning aristocrats who collected taxes for the Mughal emperor — a similar tax-collecting monopoly for the John Company. This dependency of the Company on slaveholding zamindars was thrown into crisis after the abolition of slavery in Britain in 1833. The crisis was resolved by delaying passage of the Slavery Abolition Act in India by a decade, and then ruling that all those enslaved under the pariah caste system would be reclassified under the euphemism "agricultural laborers." "It seems quite likely that slaves, whose masters treat them fairly well and who are paid in kind, are in fact happier ... than free men struggling to survive under competition." — the Collector of Tanjore, 40 years after the legal abolition of slavery in India in 1843.

³² THE EDUCATED VOTER AS THE ESSENCE OF FREEDOM. Thomas Jefferson wrote that "enlightened people and a vigorous public opinion" were necessary to keep "the aristocratic spirit of government" in check. Printers such as Benjamin Franklin used newspapers to teach the population the moral virtues he considered necessary for the survival of the new republic.

E. Finance and Gunboat Diplomacy

Your Finance board tracks your funds for performing costly Actions (with cost) or Operations. Gunboat Diplomacy is a bonus action that follows from Actions or Operations involving Marines.

E1. Paying for Costly Actions or Operations

a. Finance Tokens. Your Finance board may hold only Agents, and can never hold meeples or other tokens. b. Transparent Financing. The information on your Finance board is public.

³³ LABOR is a precondition for producing wealth, but it is not itself wealth. Owning slaves has a market value, but it would be a mistake to regard slaves as wealth. Slavery fundamentally reduces the production of wealth by removing people's incentive to produce. In the end, any slaveholder would be better off employing freedmen than slaves. The economic differences between the antebellum American North and South were partly due to the Southern plantation owner's mistake in regarding slaves as wealth or capital. If he considers himself wealthy merely because laborers exist, then he feels no need to accumulate or own genuine capital. The industrialist of the North regarded capital as his factory and machines, as well as his stock of materials and finished goods. — George Reisman, Capitalism, 1998.

E2. Nationalized Agents³⁴

No Installing. A Nationalized Agent cannot be installed (E3).
Privatized Debt. If the Red Player moves a Nationalized Agent into Debt, pass it to its owner's Finance board (it returns to their Wealth).
Privatization. As a bonus Petition (L), you may free your Nationalized Agent from the Red Player (upon globalizing an Idea with the black Freedom symbol).

³⁴ NATIONALIZATION is the lawful theft of property by a government official. After the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, the EIC (East India Company) was nationalized and the British Raj assumed direct rule of India.

E3. Installing Agents from Your Finance Board

Placement Hierarchy, Red and White Players. When placing Agents from your board onto the World Map or a Market card, remove them from your board top to bottom. In other words, install from Capital first, then from Wealth if there is no more Capital, then from Debt.
Placement Hierarchy, Green Player. The Green Player has a financial advantage that lets them ignore the above restriction, and may install Agents from anywhere on their Finance board, as they choose.

E4. Divesting

An Agent moved onto your Finance board for any reason is placed in your Wealth field.³⁵ This is called Divesting.

Circumstances. Return to Wealth happens if your Agent is voluntarily Divested from a Syndicate (F1.1), or if your Administrator suffers a Coup (F4) or is Hate Killed (I2).
Advanced Game. Return to Wealth also happens if your Revolutionaries succeed (K4), or if you Privatize (L1.1) your Nationalized Agent.

³⁵ WEALTH is the material goods necessary to attain human value. For an abolitionist, that value is political freedom. The capital for producing this wealth is warships and armaments capable of stopping slavers and slaveholding warlords, together with colonial, missionary, and trading posts capable of establishing the values of a free mind, a free body, and free trade, respectively.

E5. Gunboat Diplomacy³⁶

Claim Anarchy. Choose one of the 2 neighboring Spheres and take one Anarchy disk from it. It goes into your Victory Pool.
Claim an Embargo. Choose one of the 2 neighboring Spheres and remove one embargo token (purple Barrier) from it.
Make a Piracy Roll (with cost). See E6.

³⁶ GUNBOAT DIPLOMACY is the use of force to open up free trade, as in the Barbary Wars (#80), the Opium Wars (#82), and Commodore Perry's Black Ships at Edo (#85). Since the use of force here is directed against a government that is suppressing the free transactions of its own merchants, gunboat diplomacy (as defined here) is a form of benevolent imperialism.

E6. Piracy Roll (with cost)

If during Gunboat Diplomacy you decide to pay for a piracy roll, follow this procedure:

Cube-Squared Cost. Choose how many dice to roll, from 1 to 4, and pay the Cube-Squared Cost: D6 count 1/2/3/4 = Gold 1/4/9/16.
Roll the dice and sum the results.
Sink the Slaver. If the rolled total is greater than the number of slaves (combined) in the two Spheres adjacent to that border, place the Slaver in your Victory Pool.
Corruption. If you roll only a single die, and the value rolled matches one of the black die values shown on the Slaver token, corruption additionally occurs (E7).³⁷

³⁷ The WEST AFRICA SQUADRON was formed a year after Parliament passed the Slave Trade Act of 1807. This Royal Navy squadron shut down the African triangular slave trade, capturing 1,600 slave ships and freeing 150,000 Africans between 1808 and 1860. Most of the freed slaves chose to settle in Sierra Leone, the first British colony in West Africa, fearing they would otherwise be re-enslaved. The cost to Britain included not only naval and resettlement expenses, and the cost of maintaining up to a sixth of the British marine corps, but also bribes paid for cooperation from Spain and Portugal, and the cost of dangerous friction with France, the United States, and others. Additional squadrons were established in the Pacific, Indian Ocean, Red Sea, and Persian Gulf, but chasing shallow-draft dhow slavers into shoal water proved difficult. Despite mounting costs and a complete absence of financial gain for Britain, this crusade was steadily pursued to eventual success. — David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823, pp. 68–69; —R.W. Beachey, The Slave Trade of Eastern Africa, pp. 87, 100–101; —W.E.B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870, p. 141.

³⁸ THE VOC (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie) SLAVE TRADE. The Dutch East India Company prospered on spices imported to Europe from Batavia, its East Indies colony. The route to Europe ran around the Cape of Africa, where the Dutch colony served as a waystation. The Governor of Cape Town, suffering from a chronic labor shortage and unable to draw workers from the local Khoi peoples, pressed sailors and soldiers from passing ships into service. Beginning in 1685, slaves were imported into the Cape Colony, chiefly from India/Ceylon, but also from Madagascar, Kilwa in East Africa, and the East Indies. The slave trade did not spread into the Atlantic, owing to an agreement between the East and West India Companies, and later to the threat posed by the West Africa Squadron. In 1792 a final resolution of the Council of Policy renounced the slave trade entirely, but otherwise the Dutch were slow to pursue emancipation, and plantation slavery remained legal in the Dutch East Indies until 1862.

E7. Corruption³⁹

Corruption Regresses one Barrier (if possible) from a Victory Pool to the target Sphere. The plundered Victory Pool may be anyone's, as long as it holds a suitable token.

Corruption from a Single-D6 Piracy Roll. Corruption occurs if the die value rolled in a 1D6 piracy roll matches one of the black die values shown on the Slaver token. If no Barrier can be Regressed, because both Spheres are already at their full Barrier quota (these quotas are shown on the back of each Barrier token), Regress an Anarchy token instead. The target Sphere must be one of the two neighboring the Sea Border where the piracy battle takes place.

Note: Corruption occurs even if the pirate is sunk.

Corruption from Revolutionary Law #4: see K6.

³⁹ CORRUPTION is a payment made by a person engaged in business, in exchange for the freedom to earn a living. It is a transaction under the dominance of force, in which the aggressor is always the government and the victim is the merchant. This hierarchy necessarily follows from the definition of "government" as an institution holding a monopoly on the use of force. Contrary to Marxist claims, the right to buy and sell is a fundamental right, and "bribes" paid at gunpoint are simply illegal taxation. However, a business may buy enough weapons and mercenaries to become a government itself, as was the case with the John Company in India or a modern-day drug lord in Colombia. If so, it is no longer a business.

F. Action Phase

Choose up to two Actions to perform.

Order. You may perform your Actions in any order, or the same Action twice.
Elephant Action. Determines the port with the Elephant for your turn. Assuming you haven't already performed an Elephant Action this turn, the Elephant will move from its starting location.
Action with Cost. Pay the cost by generating gold before performing the action.

F1. Fundraiser

This three-step process improves your financial position on your Finance board:

Divest. You may freely divest any number of Agents (but not meeples) of your color that are in play (i.e., as Syndicate members, Revolutionaries, Marines, or Administrators) onto your Finance board's Wealth field.
Collateral.⁴⁰ If you have Agents in both Debt and Capital, spend one Agent from Capital to Wealth for every Agent moving from Debt to Wealth, until you have no more Debt or no more Capital left.
Capital Accumulation.⁴¹ Move all Agents from your Wealth field into your Capital.
Red Player Bonus Step. If you did not divest Marines in F1.1, perform a free Maritime Operation (G1).⁴²

⁴⁰ COLLATERAL is the possession of capital that proves to a lender you are capable of repaying a debt.

⁴¹ CAPITAL ACCUMULATION occurs when an economic system devotes more effort to producing capital goods than is needed simply to replace capital goods that are worn out or consumed. Consider a subsistence farmer whose own harvest, in the form of seed, is the source of capital for further production. If he can only produce 2 bushels of crop from 1 bushel of seed, then he must use half his harvest as seed for next year's crop. His family, producing nothing, consumes the other half. But if, through some improvement in efficiency — say, tools — he can produce 3 bushels of crop from one bushel of seed, then he can accumulate capital and become a grain exporter, rather than a subsistence farmer.

⁴² BRITANNIA RULES THE WAVES. A government is an institution holding a monopoly on the use of force within a territory, and on the sea trade routes that institution was often the British Parliament (or one of its bureaucratic arms, such as the EIC). Accordingly, the Red Player commands maritime anti-slavery operations, while the other players serve in supporting or advisory roles.

F2. Syndicate (with cost)

Example: John Brown is in the second row from the bottom. The market cost of joining this Idea's Syndicate is 1 gold.

F3. Shipbuilding (with cost)⁴³

Tip: The Red Player is the key to installing Marines, and moving Marines is the key to sinking pirates (E6). Move Marines with a Maritime Operation (G1).

⁴³ THE BLOCKADE. "In 1849 and 1850 ... the British government took decisive measures against slave traders in Brazilian territorial waters, entirely disregarding Brazil's sovereignty, with the intention of wresting from the Brazilian government a commitment to enact and enforce an effective anti-slave-trade law. Thoroughly humiliated by British incursions into the Empire's harbors, by the seizure and destruction of Brazilian slave ships even in Brazil's territorial waters, and facing threats to the Empire's legal shipping, armed conflict, and even a blockade of Brazilian ports, the Imperial government was compelled in 1850 to agree to Britain's demands in exchange for a promise to suspend the naval attacks." —Robert Conrad, The Destruction of Brazilian Slavery: 1850–1888, 1972.

⁴⁴ PAX BRITANNICA was a period of general peace, in which Britain ruled the waves through a global police force of unchallenged naval power. This benefited the civilized world by suppressing slavery and piracy, and, after 1840, by embracing free trade. Moreover, Pax Britannica also globally suppressed the endless cycles of warlord aggression, wars of succession, and random violence, as compiled in the massive 832-page volume by Harvard sociologist Steven Pinker. "On average, non-state societies kill about 15% of their people in war, whereas today's states kill a few hundredths of a percent." The decline of intertribal warfare in the colonies was in part due to top-down state control, as Thomas Hobbes advocated, to prevent the imminent war of all against all otherwise demanded by basic human wildness. Yet the Enlightenment was the culmination of a bottom-up process as well: "Starting in the 11th or 12th century and reaching maturity in the 17th and 18th, Europeans increasingly suppressed their impulses, anticipated the long-term consequences of their actions, and took other people's thoughts and feelings into consideration. A culture of honor — a readiness to avenge — gave way to a culture of dignity — a readiness to control one's emotions. These ideals arose in explicit instructions that cultural arbiters gave to aristocrats and nobles, letting them distinguish themselves from villains and boors. But then they were absorbed into the socialization of the younger generation and of children, until they became second nature." — Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (Viking, 2011).

⁴⁵ UNDERGROUND RAILROADS carry fugitives to independent havens for escaped slaves. Such havens existed in Jamaica, Liberia, Argentina, and Brazil, and were created as a result of the emancipation of the British colonies in 1834. American slaves followed hidden paths to Canada, slaves of Dutch Borneo fled to Sarawak under the rule of the abolitionist White Rajahs (#83), and sugar, coffee, and tobacco slaves from Dutch Suriname escaped to British Guiana.

⁴⁶ QING CONQUEST THEORY explains how China stagnated while Europe underwent the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Restrictions imposed on trade and industry, and the persecution of unorthodox views following the Manchu conquest of China, caused the country to fall behind the West. The Manchus (1) restricted foreign trade to a single federal monopoly at a single port, Canton, (2) expropriated vast tracts of land, turning millions of tenant farmers into hereditary serfs, (3) established slave markets for those enslaved during the conquest, (4) set new standards of literary inquisition, including executing hundreds of intellectuals for minor offenses and burning thousands of ancient texts, and (5) abandoned the laissez-faire policy of the previous Ming dynasty in favor of widespread economic regulation of trade and investment in cash crops and mining. In this way, nascent entrepreneurial capitalism was suppressed. —Zhang and Mao, 2008.

F4. Post Appointment (with cost and the Elephant)⁴⁷

This action adds an Administrator to the administration area of the Sphere with the Elephant. This Agent is installed from your Finance board according to the installation hierarchy (E3).

Cost. For the Green and Red Players, the amount of gold spent equals the Barrier Cost. For the White Player, this costs no gold at all (missionaries are quite abstemious).
Coup. If the space is occupied by an Administrator (yours or an opponent's), they suffer Martyrdom — they return to their owning player's Wealth, and a Dissident of their color appears (if no free space is available, the player Regresses an Anarchy token instead).

Note: The Post Appointment action and certain Impacts are the only ways to add an Administrator.

⁴⁷ COLONIALISM (often called imperialism) is the expansion (usually by sea) of a government's monopoly on power into territory that is unoccupied or in a state of anarchy (e.g., warring tribes or states). It is thus distinct from territorial wars between states, such as the Russo-Ottoman Wars (#84) or Napoleonic France (#101). European colonies in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Americas beginning in the 16th century are often cited, but other seafaring powers of the period, such as the Maori, likewise established colonization of weaker peoples. At first, governments followed mercantilism, a type of economy that allowed a colony to trade only with its home government. By the mid-19th century, however, the British government abandoned mercantilism and introduced the Smithian principle of free trade with few restrictions and duties.

F5. Legislate⁴⁸

Action:

Removes the Idea from the Market.
Triggers the Idea's Impacts (the card's left-hand column).
Divests all Syndicate members.
Globalizes the Idea into whichever Splay(s) the Idea is recognized as Viable in.⁴⁹

Conditions:

You must have a Syndicate on the Idea (F2).
The Idea must be Viable. To be Viable, an Idea must have a Freedom Pair in one of the Splays matching its two Freedoms on the card (candle/feather, feather/comet, etc.).

An Idea or Revolution is Viable if its two symbols appear in a Freedom Pair⁵⁰ — that is, in any two adjacent cards in either of the two Splays. Each new Idea added to a Splay (after being legislated, or from a court case or plebiscite) creates a new Freedom Pair and may make other Ideas on the Market Viable.⁵¹

Note: At the start of the game each Splay has only one card, so nothing is Viable yet. Only a court case or plebiscite can grow a Splay.

Impact. Legislating triggers Impacts (M), from top to bottom.
Globalization upon Legislating. Choose which Freedom (via its orientation) you want visible when it is globalized into the Splay. Move the legislated Idea to the bottom of the appropriate Splay (Bill of Rights or General Will, depending on where it is Viable), and orient it so that only the chosen Freedom is visible. This creates a new Freedom Pair.⁵²
Tyranny of the Majority. If Legislating adds a 6th Idea to the General Will, the first Idea in the Splay is discarded.

⁴⁸ NATURAL RIGHTS are universal and inalienable rights that cannot be abolished or restricted by human laws. They are objectively authoritative because they arise from the nature of humanity and society, as discovered by science. They differ from legal rights, which are granted to a person by a given legal system within a given culture. Enlightenment thinkers were the first to challenge the divine right of kings, replacing it with the natural rights of man as the sole valid foundation of Law.

⁴⁹ A MIXED ECONOMY is a compromise between a bill of rights and democracy. However, any compromise on moral questions such as freedom and slavery means that common law loses its fundamental foundation, and a rudderless nation drifts further and further from capitalism toward statism. Almost by definition this drift is one-directional, since no totalitarian institution has ever voluntarily relinquished its powers. Modern examples of "little tyrants" in the United States' mixed economy are the "alphabet agencies": the SEC, EPA, FCC, EEOC, and so on. These agencies issue far more law than Congress does, tens of thousands of minutiae per year, with minimal constitutional oversight. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is a typical example of tyranny, because: (1) it is a legal monopoly. (2) It does not pay for its own mistakes. (3) Like any frontier judge, it keeps a share of the fines it levies. (4) The legal costs of contesting fines and pointless rules are borne by the victims, while OSHA's own legal costs are borne by the taxpayers. (5) OSHA has nothing to lose from delays and installation costs, and everyone else bears them. (6) By combining executive, legislative, and judicial roles, OSHA violates the constitutional (and Enlightenment) separation of powers. (7) OSHA's damage is proportional to human suffering, ruined careers, and enormous delays in technology and progress achieved.

⁵⁰ FREEDOM was, and for many remains, not at all an obvious or desired goal. Other values and ideals mattered, or matter, far more to them — values such as the pursuit of glory, honor, and power for oneself or one's family and clan, nationalism and imperial grandeur, militarism and valor in war, filial piety, the harmony of heaven and earth, the spread of the "true faith," nirvana, hedonism, altruism, justice, equality, material progress — the list is endless. But almost never, outside the context of Western culture and its influence, did they include freedom. Indeed, non-Western peoples thought so little about freedom that most human languages did not even have a word for the concept before contact with the West." —Orlando Patterson, Freedom, Vol. I, p. 8, 1991.

⁵¹ WHEN IDEAS HAVE SEX. A pair of ideas, combined in a new way, undergoes a kind of Darwinian natural selection — but selection among ideas, not genes. No other animal has "sex between ideas," or memes, the way genes do. This did not change human nature or morality, but it revolutionized human culture. —Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist, 2010.

⁵² RIGHTS are properly defined so that they cannot violate anyone else's right to life, liberty, or property. Contrary to this Lockean principle, politicians often gain political advantage by promising to hand out the services of professionals for free. Such promises of free loans, housing, medical care, education, and so forth, imposed unilaterally, contradict the principle that no one has the right to demand another person's services at gunpoint. You have no right to food, because someone must labor to grow that food, and forcing a serf to grow it for you makes you no better than a medieval lord. Instead, you have the right to negotiate for, or trade for, food, using the trader principle. You have no right to receive medical care on demand, because medical workers (such as myself and my wife) are not slaves, and deal with others on mutually agreed terms.

⁵³ BEYOND AFRICA. Why Africa? As the world consolidated from tribes into nation-states, it became harder and harder for slave traders to find regions where they could raid without resistance. As Russia came to dominate the Caucasus and the Balkans, the Islamic world, and later the Western world, turned to Africa as the last unconsolidated source of slaves. Africa was already enslaved internally, with the principal slaveholding empires being the Zulu in the East and the Asante in the West. The transport of slaves across the Sahara to the Ottoman Empire soon averaged 7,000 slaves a year, with another 6,000 arriving via the Red Sea and the Swahili coast. The annual transport of slaves westward, in the notorious Atlantic slave trade, was even higher — 24,700 slaves a year. By Ralph Austen's estimate, the total number of slaves moved eastward is 17 million, and westward, 11.5 million (the reason the Eastern figure is higher is that it occurred over a longer period, 650–1920, compared to 1450–1870 for the West).

F6. Join Revolution Action (with cost)⁵⁴

With this action, an Agent from the topmost position on your Finance board is installed (E3) as a Revolutionary on a Revolution card on the Market.

Engagement Spots. Each Revolution has 1 to 4 Engagement spots. Place the Revolutionary in the leftmost open circle. You may join even if all spots are filled.
Agent Cost. Joining a Revolution costs an amount of gold equal to the Agents-Squared cost (any color) already participating in the Revolution [0, 1, 4, 9 respectively].
Counter-Revolution. If you join a Revolution, you have the option to flip its card to the other side, keeping the location of all Agents. This costs the Dissident-Squared Cost, counting only opposing Dissidents (so 2 White Dissidents would cost you 4 gold if you are not the White Player).

⁵⁴ REVOLUTIONS that overthrew (to some degree) serfdom or slavery in favor of Western ideas of freedom include the American Revolution of 1765–83 (#102), the French Revolution of 1789–99 (#101), the American Civil War of 1862–65 (#102), the Japanese Meiji Restoration of 1868–69 (#108), the Chinese Xinhai Revolution of 1911 (#107), and the Russian Revolution of 1917–1922 (#106). These were not ordinary, thoughtless power grabs by some new warlord or successor; they were the culmination of a long philosophical development of the yearning to breathe free, ultimately liberating vast numbers of people.

G. Ops Phase (Operations)

Order. You may perform your Operations in any order.
Elephant Operations. Determine the port with the Elephant for your turn.
Operation with Cost. Pay the cost with generated gold before performing the action.

G1. Maritime Operation

Install Marines. The Red Player may instead use this Operation to install Marines onto an existing merchant ship, taking them from the topmost position on their Finance board. This lets that ship perform Gunboat Diplomacy (E5).

G2. Manumission (with cost and the Elephant)⁵⁵

This Operation liberates a slave, placing a meeple of your color, taken from the pool.⁵⁶ You cannot perform this Operation if there are no slaves to free in the port with the Elephant.

Barrier Cost. The gold to pay equals the number of Barriers remaining in the Sphere.

Example: As the Red Player, the Elephant is in the port of Luanda, where Congo has 3 Barriers. You pay 3 gold for Manumission, then move a red meeple onto the slave square in Luanda.

⁵⁵ MANUMISSION is the freeing of a slave by her master. After British emancipation, since slaves were legal property, their owners had to be compensated for their release. This cost £20 million, roughly 5% of British GDP in 1833. Although this was an enormous sum, the United States would have done well to imitate it. The monetary cost of the American Civil War would have been enough to buy every last Southern slave (and give each one 40 acres and a mule). In Gran Colombia, the cost of emancipation bankrupted the government, and abolition was delayed by more than a decade, contributing to civil war.

⁵⁶ THE FREEDMAN. The gulf between "slave" and "almost a slave" is enormous. "Few workers proved more vulnerable than the newly freed blacks in the United States after the Civil War. They were desperately poor, wholly uneducated, unorganized, and unfamiliar with the principles of a market economy. Nevertheless, organized attempts by white employers and landowners in the South to hold down wages for them, and to limit their choices, broke down as all the sharecroppers went to market amid bitter mutual recriminations between white employers and landowners. When the wage scale set by organized white employers fell below the annual productivity of black laborers, it became profitable for any given employer to offer more than others were paying, so long as his higher offer still did not exceed the black laborer's level of productivity. As for agricultural workers, the pressure on each employer mounted as planting season approached…" — Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics, 2015.

G3. Westernize (with the Elephant)⁵⁷

This Operation liberates a slave, placing a meeple of your color from the pool. You cannot perform this Operation if there are no slaves to free in the port with the Elephant.

Condition:

The Administrator in the port with the Elephant is your color, or
There are no red (left) Barriers. You may use an Underground Railroad to satisfy this option.⁵⁸

Tip: Westernize is a cheaper way to free slaves than Manumission, but it has more preconditions.

⁵⁷ THE WEST, in this game, means any person, idea, or government that upholds Enlightenment principles of individual liberty. Any violations of individual liberty, regardless of whether they were perpetrated by an agency located in the Western world, are not Western by definition (for example, concentration camps during the Anglo-Boer War). Western ideas established the standards by which actions and regimes are judged today, including abolitionism. An example of a mixed compromise between freedom and slavery is the U.S. Constitution, the world's first (and last) founded on Enlightenment principles. There, slavery was an obvious and irreconcilable contradiction, one that came under ideological attack from the very first draft of the Declaration of Independence. For the first time in history, a number of Northern states historically banned slavery immediately upon gaining independence.

⁵⁸ Michael Clemens compares FREEDOM OF MIGRATION to a trillion-dollar bill lying on the sidewalk: "A modest reduction in barriers to labor mobility would add more value than the complete, global elimination of all remaining political barriers to trade in goods and all barriers to capital flows, combined." Trillions picked up off the sidewalk already include the fall of the Berlin Wall and of China's hukou system. Still to be torn down are the walls around North Korea and along the U.S.–Mexico border. —Brad Gardner, China's Great Migration: How the Poor Built a Thriving Nation, 2017.

G4. Suffrage (with cost and the Elephant)⁵⁹

This Operation Claims one Barrier, choosing one of the tokens in the Sphere with the Elephant. Alternatively, it may Regress one Barrier back into the Sphere with the Elephant.

Condition:

You have a Majority — i.e., there are more tokens (meeples and the Administrator) of your color in the port with the Elephant than slaves + opposing tokens, or
The Administrator in the port with the Elephant is a Red Agent⁶⁰, or
There are no white (right) Barriers⁶¹. You may use an Underground Railroad to satisfy this option.

Slavers-Squared Cost. This Operation is paid for in gold equal to the square of the number of Slavers on the Sea Borders adjacent to the Sphere with the Elephant.

Tip: Stopping the sale of blood products, achieved by sinking Slavers during piracy rolls (E6), makes removing Barriers via Suffrage cheaper.

Tip: Since Suffrage tends to be expensive, it is usually cheaper to remove an embargo (purple Barriers) via Gunboat Diplomacy (E5) rather than Suffrage.

⁵⁹ CITIZENSHIP AND SUFFRAGE are hallmarks of democracy, but incidental to a republic. Citizenship — vesting politicians with special powers — is out of place in a republic, where castes are illegal, and everyone who manages to swim or crawl to its borders enjoys equal rights. Suffrage is used in a republic to elect civil servants, but since these officials are not leaders (the population governs itself) and are tightly constrained, their identity hardly matters. Indeed, in a country like Switzerland, voter turnout is dismal, and most people neither know nor care who their prime minister is. This is a mark of a free nation. Voting in a republic, unlike votes in a democracy, cannot be used to gain favors or power over your neighbors, since freedom is defined precisely as the exclusion of such powers, and is not subject to a vote.

⁶⁰ THE PRIME DIRECTIVE forbids interference in the internal development of alien civilizations in the Star Trek universe. In 19th-century Africa, two such "Captain Kirks" who violated the Prime Directive were Stanley (a reporter) and Livingstone (a missionary), immortalized as "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" The dilemma they faced was that slavery in Africa had been commonplace for millennia, and colonization seemed the only alternative to leaving the locals to work out literacy and Enlightenment values on their own. To secure abolition in Africa, Dr. Livingstone championed a series of Peace Corps–style missions (i.e., the White Player), while Stanley collaborated with the King of Belgium to establish indirect civilized rule in the Congo Free State (i.e., the Red Player) — tragically exploiting the existing enslavement to export blood products.

⁶¹ DEMOCRACY, in this game, is a nation with no right-wing barriers to freedom, such as censorship or a state religion. Nevertheless, left-wing barriers aimed at minorities, such as mercantilism (protectionist regulated prices and wages), are often upheld by a majority. The dark side of democracy is that human rights are not protected if the majority wishes otherwise.

G5. Literacy (with the Elephant)⁶²

This Operation places one Dissident of your color, taken from the pool, into the Sphere with the Elephant. If the Dissident squares are full, this Operation instead Regresses one Anarchy.

Condition. The Administrator in the port with the Elephant must be your color.

⁶² LITERACY is a prerequisite for valuing any political idea more sophisticated than "might makes right." And yet, without Western imperialism, the illiterate tribal lands prevailing across the Americas, the Pacific, Australia, and Africa would have needed centuries to become literate. It is no coincidence that Britain, the world leader in political and industrial ideas, was also the most literate country (53% in 1650, compared with a few percent for the rest of the world). Literacy connects you to the lessons of history and everything discovered by Western culture since Aristotle. In an age when most slaveholders could not read, literate slaves were a rarity. Nevertheless, slaves taught by missionaries led numerous uprisings (#02, #12, #13, #14, #16, #19, #21, #23, #28, #33), and so slaveholders persecuted missionaries who tried to teach slaves to read and write. One literate slave, Joseph Knight, who had read about the Somerset case (see the footnote "DID SLAVES SUE THEIR MASTERS?"), filed and won a freedom suit in his own name (Knight v. Wedderburn, 1778). Freed slaves who became literate citizens fastest were in the United States, where more than half were literate within 50 years of the Emancipation Proclamation. This was higher than in most countries, against a world average of 26% in 1915. Robert Higgs called this "an achievement rarely seen in human history."

G6. Lawsuit (with cost)⁶³

If the court ruling was red (a red symbol was left visible, G6b), perform the red bonus (Nationalize/Privatize an Agent) (L1.1) or the red-black bonus (fundraising) (L1.3).
If the court ruling was black, perform the black bonus (Legislate) (L1.2) or the red-black bonus (fundraising).

⁶³ DID SLAVES SUE THEIR MASTERS? Only in Britain, with its long tradition of common law and its Enlightenment-era discoveries. In Somerset v Stewart, a test case sponsored by the abolitionist Granville Sharp, the defendant was James Somerset, an escaped Jamaican slave who had fled to England. His advocates argued that, although colonial laws might permit slavery, it was unlawful in England, because neither Parliament nor English common law said anything on the subject. The opposition argued that property was of paramount importance and that it would be dangerous to free all the slaves in England. The judge ruled that Somerset must be freed: "The state of slavery is of such a nature that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political, but only by positive law, which preserves its force long after the reasons, occasion, and time itself from whence it was created is erased from memory. It is so odious that nothing can be suffered to support it but positive law. Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from the decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England; and therefore the black must be discharged." — Lord Mansfield, Somerset v Stewart, 1772.

⁶⁴ THE BRITISH LEGAL TRADITION. "... the British landed aristocracy, unlike the landed aristocracy in some European countries such as Russia, was based at the local level, both economically and politically. This meant that the landed gentry supported the decentralization of power, especially since these local elites themselves exercised much of that power as justices of the peace and in other roles. By contrast, the Russian nobility derived its economic support and political power from its role as either a military or civil agent of the central government, and therefore supported tsarist despotism." —Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures, 1998, p. 88. See also footnote 1 in the game John Company.

⁶⁵ LAWSUITS were the result of the Enlightenment principle of an independent judiciary, meant to uphold a body of law rather than the will of a monarch. The Bill of Rights encodes the regime's philosophical foundations (black symbols). The General Will reflects the active conduct of the population (red symbols). Such conduct must not contradict the foundational principles. The closest Eastern equivalent was religious authorities declaring that an act violated sacred texts, and this had limited usefulness as a check on state enslavement, since Eastern theocracies did not practice separation of church and state.

G7. Plebiscite (with cost)⁶⁶

This Operation is identical to a Lawsuit (G6), except that it Globalizes the Idea into the General Will Splay rather than the Bill of Rights.⁶⁷

Tyranny of the Majority⁶⁸. If this Operation adds a 6th Idea (the 6th Freedom symbol, not card) to the General Will, the first Idea in the Splay is discarded (the 2nd card with a Freedom symbol).

⁶⁶ A MISSIONARY must have enough courage to enter a foreign culture, unarmed and alone, and tell them that what they have done for centuries is evil — such as slavery. Perhaps the greatest missionary-abolitionist was Dr. Livingstone (#25), whose intolerance of slavery led him into trouble with more than one African potentate. He lobbied the British government to fund a nonprofit version of European colonialism, with settlements of devout Christians living among the people to help them learn a way of life free of slavery. Today his ideas would be mocked as disrespect for local culture, but at the time his chief obstacles were treasury officials who understood the grim economic prospects in Africa. Nevertheless, Christian missionaries achieved striking success in converting indigenous cultures in the colonies. (I suspect this is because, for centuries, Christian scholars in the tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas had reconciled the natural and supernatural worlds.) Besides proselytizing (converting others to their faith) the word of God, missionaries often mastered local languages and developed writing systems for them, a great step forward for illiterate native peoples. Some of the newly literate, missionary-taught leaders, such as Haiti's Toussaint Louverture, went on to lead revolutions grounded in Enlightenment ideas. However, missionaries assigned to already-literate Eastern cultures achieved little success, and sometimes provoked mass repression, such as the Boxer Rebellion.

⁶⁷ REPUBLIC OR DEMOCRACY. A bill of rights, as in the constitutional law of a republic, codifies self-evident truths and scientific discoveries about the nature of a proper society. To the extent the Bill of Rights is objectively true, any attempt to circumvent it has consequences akin to a law of nature rather than a law of man. The Bill of Rights is considered fundamentally inviolable, regardless of rulers, votes, or public-opinion polls: a minority cannot be enslaved, even if the majority wishes it. In a republic, the use of force is regulated to be used only against the use of force. Democracy, by contrast, embodies the subjective will of the voters rather than the objective laws of nature. Democracy tends toward a storm of amoral rules, each backed by weapons, to create or defend a public or private fiefdom at the expense of someone's freedom. The first thing lost under majority rule is minority rights. This includes individual rights, given that every person constitutes a minority of one. Such suppression of minority views means that democracy is conservative in the face of change and (to use evolutionary terminology) that randomly beneficial mutations will never be naturally selected.

⁶⁸ THE TYRANNY OF THE MAJORITY. In this game, red symbols represent activism, and black symbols represent the moral foundation of that activism (Enlightenment or religious). The game's thesis is that morality must be excluded from democracy, or else a tyranny of the majority results, in which the minority is forced to adopt the moral standards of the majority. Conversely, activism should be excluded from a republic's bill of rights, leaving only the moral norms on which the nation was founded.

H. Elephant Phase

H1. Elephant Actions, Operations, and Impacts

The only Elephant Action is Post Appointment (F4).
The Elephant Operations are Manumission (G2), Westernize (G3), Suffrage (G4), and Literacy (G5).
The only Elephant Impact (upon Legislating) is Claim a Barrier (M6).
Quinine. You cannot use the Elephant in a Sphere with a yellow-green Disease disk unless you have a Factory.⁶⁹ If you do, take that Disease disk into your Victory Pool.

⁶⁹ WERE FACTORY WORKERS SLAVES? No. Since the Renaissance, runaway serfs fled to the cities in search of work, despite severe punishments, including branding, for leaving the manor without permission. "Stadtluft macht frei" (city air makes you free) was the slogan of the age. Much has been written condemning the harsh conditions in urban factories, without mentioning that the workers were there of their own free will, having fled an even harsher system. Workers never become slaves because of poverty or bad factory conditions. Workers become slaves only when threatened with weapons or the whip, to ensure they cannot quit for something better. Which was better: working in a factory, or in the field? Many studies have confirmed the answer the workers themselves gave with their feet.

H2. Elephant's Walk Roll

Clockwise Movement. The Elephant moves through all Spheres clockwise around the world map.
Bypass. While moving, the Elephant skips Spheres with Disease (even if you have an Industrial Revolution Factory) or Modern Spheres.
Port. Upon arriving at its destination, place the Elephant in the port with the most tokens. Count both Freedmen and the Administrator. You choose in case of a tie.

H3. Cultural Diffusion⁷⁰

Note: In the Basic Game, gaps to fill never occur, so the Elephant's Walk roll always leaves a gap in the West, and new cards always come from the Western deck.

Cultural Diffusion from West to East.⁷² If the target card from the Elephant's Walk roll has a Cultural Diffusion Arrow, then the card moves into the "East" column (following the arrow), instead of being discarded. The card moves to the same row in the "East" column, keeping all its Agents, and leaves a gap in its original spot. Discard the card currently in the "East" column, stripping it of all Syndicate members and destroying all Revolutionaries. This represents the disruptive spread of ideas from West to East.

⁷⁰ CULTURAL DIFFUSION is the spread of cultural styles, religion, technology, languages, and other ideas among people, typically from one culture to another. In this game it occurs through persuasion, not coercion (e.g., banning forced marriages, forced conversions, invasions, etc.).

⁷¹ THE WEST. "The idea of freedom has always been peculiar to the West." —Ludwig von Mises, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, 1956.

⁷² THE EAST/WEST DIVERGENCE. "Although in 1346 there was little difference between Western and Eastern Europe in terms of political and economic institutions, by 1600 they were utterly different worlds. In the West, workers were free of feudal dues, fines, and decrees and were becoming part of a rapidly developing market economy. In the East, they too were drawn into such an economy, but as forced serfs growing food and agricultural commodities demanded by the West." —Acemoglu and Robinson, Why Nations Fail, 2013.

I. Hate and Pogrom Roll Phase

Make a mandatory hate roll to check the survival of Freedmen and missionaries in the port with the Elephant.⁷³ Then make a mandatory pogrom roll of 1D6 for each Sphere with two Anarchy disks.

⁷³ HATE — what is it? In Bios: Megafauna I describe emotions as states of consciousness tied to decision-making that first arose in the limbic system of certain reptiles. Hate may have its roots in territorial anger and sexual jealousy, but it seems to have become a purely human idea, directed collectively against a religion, race, or social status. In this game, hate embodies collectivist ideas aimed at legal or illegal violence against freedmen and Western abolitionists. "In 1855, when the sultan's firman (decree) [forbidding the slave trade] was read out in Mecca and Jedda, it provoked a revolution. Turkish officials, including the qadis who read the firman, were killed, the garrison was besieged, and Mecca was in a state of revolt until the Porte rescinded the unwelcome order. And when, on 25 February 1860, the Governor-General of the Hejaz issued an order forbidding the slave trade in all Turkish Red Sea ports, there was great agitation and fear of a repeat of the violence of 1855. There was no Ottoman cruiser in the Red Sea capable of enforcing this order, and Turkish officials were too frightened to enforce it." Beachey, The Slave Trade of Eastern Africa, 1976.

I1. Number of Dice, Hate Roll

⁷⁴ HONG KONG was a tiny, neglected island ceded to Britain in 1842 after the Qing dynasty lost one of the Opium Wars. This had enormous consequences for all of Asia. Lacking every resource except human capital, and impoverished until the latter half of the 20th century, it became the fastest-growing economy in the world. It now has one of the highest per-capita incomes in the world, and a top personal income tax rate of only 15%. Canada's Fraser Institute ranks Hong Kong #1 in the world for economic freedom. Former British colonies dominate the world rankings for economic freedom: Singapore (2nd), New Zealand (3rd), Ireland (5th), the United Kingdom (6th), Mauritius (7th), Australia (9th), and the U.S. and Canada (tied for 11th). (Venezuela, the basket case of socialism, ranks last.) —Fraser Institute, Economic Freedom of the World Report, 2017.

I2. Hate Kills⁷⁵

Exception: In a non-Tyranny, frustrated hate generates Anarchy if there is no token of the matching die color to kill — see I3.

Example: The Likin tax token depicts two die faces: a green 6 and a yellow 6. If you roll a single 6 in Beijing, this tax token kills a green Freedman and forces you to spend gold.

⁷⁵ GET OUT OF THE DAMNED SPOT! What does it mean to disregard an inalienable right? The laws of nature cannot be violated: for instance, 300,000 km/sec isn't just a good idea, it's the law! The rights of the individual are likewise a Law of nature, and violating them (e.g., through enslavement, or in retaliatory killings) likewise carries an immutable consequence: the loss of one's status as a rational being. Since your survival depends on reason, this loss of humanity is a serious, even fatal, injury to your own self-identity. Yes, committing evil can cost you standing before others, or before God, but that is nothing compared to your own denial of the principles of life. Even stealing a penny, or a similarly tiny violation of principle, means you are a thief, and nothing in principle then stops you from stealing millions and living a miserable, envious life as a professional parasite.

⁷⁶ THE BOXERS (i.e., the "Righteous and Harmonious Fists") were an anti-Western nationalist movement, united under the slogan "Support the Qing government, exterminate the foreigners." Mystically believing themselves immune to Western bullets, they killed 32,000 Chinese Christians and 200 missionaries, and besieged thousands more in Beijing's legation quarter. The Chinese government was split between those who supported the Boxers, led by the Dowager Empress Cixi, and those favoring reconciliation, led by Prince Qing. A Western alliance of eight nations defeated the Chinese army and the Boxers and lifted the siege after 55 days.

⁷⁷ EMBARGOES use force to block one person's right to make a deal with another. Free trade is another Enlightenment-era principle of economic freedom, discovered by Adam Smith and adopted by Robert Peel on the eve of the industrial boom. Free trade was established to an unprecedented degree: repeal of the Corn Laws, repeal of the Navigation Acts, elimination of all tariffs, and application of every liberalizing measure equally to all trading partners, who were enriched accordingly.

⁷⁸ TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION represents a portion of your earned income, confiscated at gunpoint and spent on causes you do not agree with. A stark example: taxes on Jewish bankers helped pay for the gas chambers of Auschwitz. The only legitimate use of tax funds is the direct protection of individual rights. Legitimate expenses include funds for a judicial system to settle disputes between people, police to suppress armed conflict between people, a standing army to prevent invasions, and a navy to blockade the slave trade.

I3. Frustrated Hate in Non-Tyrannies⁷⁹

⁷⁹ CRUELTY. Cesare Beccaria's treatise (#8) provided the moral sanction for unprecedented laws against "cruel and unusual punishment." Nineteenth-century Europe was the first to concretely challenge the morality of child labor, executions as a spectator sport, and punishment by torture and mutilation. Voltaire (#43), Hume (#45), Diderot (#46), and, more recently, Matt Ridley have argued that commercial behavior, dependent on trust and the absence of coercion, makes people gentler. It was nouveau-riche merchants (a person who rose rapidly from a low station), such as Wedgwood and Wilberforce, who financed the abolitionist movement. Sarah Wedgwood, Charles Darwin's aunt, was its single largest donor.

⁸⁰ A TYRANNY is any government that does not respect people's rights. In the game, all 5 Eastern Spheres except East Africa begin as tyrannies.

⁸¹ RUSSIAN SERFS became chattel property in 1658 and could be sold apart from their estate, but retained their families and possessions. According to the census of 1719, roughly four-fifths of the population were enslaved, divided about evenly between the Tsar and the nobility (dvoryane). Runaway serfs fled south along "underground railroads" (secret escape networks), and the nobility constantly demanded the government undertake their capture.

I4. Pogrom Rolls⁸²

Color of the Victim. If you roll a 1, kill a white token (if none, nothing happens). If you roll a 2, kill a red token (if none, nothing happens). If you roll a 3, kill a green token (if none, nothing happens). The removed token is your choice: a Freedman, a Dissident, an Administrator, or a Factory.
Refugees. If you roll a 4, 5, or 6, an Anarchy Regression occurs. Since the Sphere is already at its maximum of 2 disks, assign this Anarchy as Refugees to a neighboring Sphere. If this creates the conditions for a new pogrom, roll 1D6 for that pogrom too.⁸³

Note: Unlike hate, pogroms affect the entire Sphere and do not depend on Tyranny-frustration or on where the Elephant is.

⁸² POGROMS are officially condoned attacks on a targeted group. Tribal pogroms are often suppressed by European colonialism, but resurface after independence is gained. Examples include: Hindus against Muslims in India; Serbs killing Croats and Albanians in post-Tito Yugoslavia; Muslims killing Igbos in Nigeria; Hutus killing Tutsis in Rwanda/Burundi; Idi Amin killing Ugandan minorities; Muslims killing Pieds-Noirs, etc., in Algeria and Matabele, which wiped out the Shona in Zimbabwe, and the ongoing Rohingya pogrom in Myanmar. The victims are always relatively wealthy minorities, and the aggressors are driven by economic envy in keeping with the "Shylock syndrome," a mistaken belief that the victims enjoy excessive prosperity. Racism and religion play only a superficial role. The Nazi Holocaust is another example of a modern pogrom, targeting Jewish bankers and other economic middlemen.

⁸³ THE ASIAN SECOND SERFDOM was unlawfully imposed on private farming households during Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward, and the Killing Fields (mass grave sites for the victims of the far-left Khmer Rouge regime) of Pol Pot (Secretary-General of the Khmer Rouge). These were replaced with forced agricultural collectives, following socialist theory that sacrificing personal freedoms is necessary for a better society. Turning the clock back to feudalism under the Qing dynasty, the new serfs were forbidden to own property, lease, sell, or make use of land that had once belonged to them, to perform non-agricultural work, to protest, or to flee famine. Tens of millions died from starvation, cannibalism, militia violence, torture, and suicide. The destruction of private homes to resettle serfs into labor communes exceeded the scale of destruction caused by the bombing of Europe during World War II.

J. Market Update and End of Game

The Dark Age. The game ends in defeat if all Anarchy is on the world map at the very end of this phase.
The Modern World. The game also ends if every Sphere becomes a Modern State.

J1. Market Update

To finish your turn, fill every gap on the Market by following this procedure:

Slide cards down. Move cards (and any Agents on them) down to fill each gap in their market column, starting with the lowest gap.
Deal new cards. Draw cards from the corresponding Eastern or Western deck and fill the column from its lowest empty slot. This restores the Market so each column again has 6 cards. If one deck (East or West) runs out, start dealing from the other deck instead. Fill gaps in the East first. This may place Western cards into the Eastern market, or vice versa.⁸⁴

Important note: If the Market cannot be refilled because both decks are empty, the cooperative (J3) or competitive (J5) game ends immediately, and scoring occurs.

⁸⁴ THE CONTRADICTIONS OF EASTERN MYSTICISM. The in-game situation, where Western ideas run dry while Eastern ideas begin flooding the Western market, might be considered an occult quirk, popularized by Swedenborg, Mesmer, and other spiritualists. Mesmer's name inspired the term "to mesmerize," but his séances were debunked by a committee headed by Benjamin Franklin (#44).

J2. Reset Market Agents

Move all Agents sitting on Operation symbols (G) to another spot on that Market card (so they can be used again on later turns).

Revolutions on the Market. Move a Revolutionary who has acted back to the empty Engagement spot (F6) it came from, so it doesn't lose its place in line.

J3. End of the Cooperative Era and Counter-Enlightenment⁸⁵

Red Player's Counter-Enlightenment. At the end of the cooperative phase, the Red Player scores no VP if there are more Slavers in play than red Agents (British colonists, Administrators, Marines) and default red Administrators (K8).
White Player's Counter-Enlightenment. At the end of the cooperative phase, the White Player scores no VP if the game ends with fewer than 15 Freedmen of any player on the World Map (Dissidents don't count).
Green Player's Counter-Enlightenment. At the end of the cooperative phase, the Green Player scores no VP if more than 25 Barriers remain in play (there are 39 to start).

⁸⁵ WAS THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY INEVITABLE? Abolitionists could not have known they were racing against time. Emancipation could only find a moral foundation during the Age of Reason, when morality was regarded as being just as absolute as any other law of nature. This could not have happened under today's "cultural relativism," which judges a person's decisions and actions according to local culture, rather than by objective criteria. Contrast individual rights, which sanction the inalienable right to life, liberty, and property, with "human rights" as "defined" by the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "a person is free only when he lives as his society defines freedom." In other words, a local authority can artfully redefine any form of slavery as "freedom"! (Something that changes at whim is the opposite of a definition.) Although slavery (broadly defined) is now illegal worldwide, other coercive practices (such as caste systems, female infanticide (abortion), forced birth control, ritual genital mutilation, spousal abuse, and nationalization) still flourish. Missionaries who once fought this evil are retreating, accused by multiculturalist intellectuals of "Eurocentrism" or "disrespect for native cultures." Had the Industrial Revolution not occurred, and had abolitionists shown slightly less zeal, slavery would still be, not a "peculiar institution," but the dominant way of life.

⁸⁶ THE COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENT refers to the philosophy that overthrew the Age of Reason in favor of an age of Romanticism and, eventually, an age of Subjectivism. Isaiah Berlin, summarizing the Counter-Enlightenment as relativist, anti-rationalist, vitalist, and organic, lays the blame on German idealists such as Kant and Hegel, who rejected reason as the authority for knowledge and morality. Other historians, such as Everdell and Meltzer, cast Rousseau as the founder of the Counter-Enlightenment and of the philosophy of terror during the French Revolution. Whatever the case, without any good reason that I can see, intellectuals abandoned the Enlightenment at the very moment of its most spectacular successes in liberating humanity. "I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith." — Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 1781.

J4. Cooperative and Solo Scoring / Victory

Scoring. Each token or disk in your Victory Pool is worth 1 VP, except Disease disks, which are worth 3 VP. Each token of your color on the map (Freedman, Administrator, Factory, Marines, and default Administrators (K8)) counts for 1 VP. All Dissidents, regardless of color, are counted for the White Player (they follow a cult of Martyrs).
Victory. If the game does not continue into the competitive era (J5), the game ends. Add together the combined VP of the "Enlightened" players: 50–74 counts as a minor victory, 75 or more as a decisive victory.

J5. The Competitive Era

Decks. Shuffle together all Western Ideas discarded during the cooperative era with any previously unused cards, and place 5 cards face up into the deck (2-player game) or 7 (3-player game). Do the same for the Eastern Ideas. Then continue play from where you left off.

J6. Competitive Scoring

Note: VP earned at the end of the cooperative era (J4) do not count toward the final victory!

f. Globalized Revolutions. Revolutions in a Splay with a visible VP value are counted for the indicated player.

⁸⁷ "FREEDOM should be distinguished from democracy, with which it is often confused. The British had many rights that were lacking through much of Europe and the rest of the world, long before they acquired the privilege of controlling their government. Only a small fraction of Members of Parliament were popularly elected before the Reform Act of 1832. Nevertheless, freedom of speech, separation of powers, the right to trial by jury, and other hallmarks of a free society had existed in Britain for generations before this." —Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures, 1998, p. 91.

⁸⁸ SLAVERY IN ISLAM. At the time of the game, no region was as thoroughly gripped by slavery as the Ottoman Empire. The Quran sanctions slavery, but only for non-Muslims. Slaves were everywhere: sex slaves from Circassia, Syria, and Nubia; galley slaves (including Europeans abducted in Barbary pirate raids); Zanj household and plantation slaves; Mamluk slave-soldiers; African eunuchs and Christian harem-women for the sultan; and Turkish boys seized in the devshirme to serve the state. Even the lower classes could afford slaves in markets close to the sources of slaves, such as Tripoli, Egypt, Arabia, and the Persian Gulf. After the British suppressed the slave trade in 1857, petty traders (such as pilgrims returning from Mecca, army officers on leave, colonial administrators in Tripoli, and Istanbul vacationers in Africa) often brought back a few slaves for sale to cover their travel costs. — Ehud R. Toledano, The Ottoman Slave Trade and Its Suppression, 1983.

Book 2 — Advanced Game, Tips, Glossary

Book 2 covers the Revolution Phase (K), Bonus Petitions (L), Impacts (M), Strategy (N), the Example of Play (O), and the *Glossary.

K. Revolution Phase

Order. If several Revolutions launch or succeed on your turn, you choose the order in which to resolve them.

K1. Launching a Revolution

¹ A slave revolt is a kind of de facto suffrage: if slaves make up an overwhelming majority, as in China or the Caribbean nations, majority rule is possible purely through numerical strength. Before the Enlightenment, a slave was characterized by hopeless fatalism and no notion that she could improve her lot in life. But a slave given missionary instruction in reading and writing, and familiar with Enlightenment ideas, could spark a revolt. The first successful slave revolt in history led to the founding of the independent, slave-run Republic of Haiti in 1804 (#12). This inspired other slaves, such as the Jamaican Sam Sharpe (#16). Having read that Parliament was considering emancipation, he led a general peaceful strike in 1832. His last words were: "I would rather die upon yonder gallows than live in slavery." His death helped spur Parliament to pass the Slavery Abolition Act the following year.

² THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION is classified as left-wing because its Constitution upholds intellectual freedoms but permits economic chattel slavery. (The left wing is defined in this game as a state where your mind is free but your labor belongs to society or the politburo.) The Constitution's glaring contradictions led the uncompromising abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison (#16) to denounce it as "a covenant with Hell." And yet, to be fair, it was written at a time when the Enlightenment was still raw, and the obvious abolitionist implications of "all men are created equal" had not yet been spelled out. One of the earliest official condemnations of slavery was Jefferson's first draft of the Declaration of Independence (#52), which criticized King George III for enslaving Africans and for vetoing colonial Virginia's attempt to ban slavery. In a draft Virginia state constitution prepared by Jefferson in 1776, he proposed banning the importation of slaves, and in 1783, the gradual emancipation of slaves. He was defeated in both attempts. The following year, Jefferson proposed a bill declaring slavery illegal in all Western territories, including Alabama and Mississippi. The bill lost by a single vote, since one legislator was too ill to attend and vote. "Thus we see the fate of millions unborn hanging on the tongue of one man, and Heaven was silent in that awful moment!" — Thomas Jefferson, 1786.

K2. Revolution Failure

K3. Write Manifesto

The Current Revolution. Manifestos are only effective for the currently visible side of the Revolution.
Supreme Revolutionary. You may join a Revolution even if all its Engagement spots are already filled.
World Revolution. A single Manifesto trigger can add Agents to several Revolutions.

K4. Revolution Success

K5. Modernization

Flip the World card corresponding to the Revolution to its modernized side. Keep Freedman meeples and Agents on Administrator posts in their original positions.³

Dissidents in the new modern state move to slave spaces of your choice. If there is no space, they emigrate (next bullet).
Emigrants. If there is no room for a Dissident because all slave spaces are full, move them to become a Freedman in another Sphere. Choose a disease-free Sphere with the fewest Barriers among Spheres that still have at least one slave.⁴ You choose in case of a tie.
The Elephant. If the Elephant is in the modernized Sphere, move it one Sphere clockwise (skipping modernized Spheres and Spheres with Disease).

Example: The 13 Colonies Sphere from the previous example flips to its modernized side: the United States of America. The colonial Agent in Virginia and the citizen in Virginia are kept.

³ THE FOREIGN POLICY of Victorian Britain generally supported constitutional monarchies. Canning's recognition of the South American Republics can be seen as part of this policy. Britain had virtually no physical presence there. This method became more important as free trade developed. — Dr. Marjie Bloy, 2002.

⁴ INDEPENDENCE FROM COLONIALISM can have catastrophic consequences. Leaders of newly independent states in Africa and India were often Western-educated, but unfortunately were taught the untested assumptions born of the era following the Age of Reason. The freedoms once enjoyed under colonial law were lost in the new independent socialist democracies and petty dictatorships, which trampled the Enlightenment principles of individual rights. The renewal of economic and intellectual enslavement was often accompanied by a renewal of intertribal bloodshed. Food production plummeted, turning Africa from a nearly self-sufficient continent into a mass importer of food. Uganda, Tanzania, Chad, Zambia, Ghana, Senegal, Madagascar, Zaire, Niger, Benin, the Central African Republic, Burundi, Rwanda, and Equatorial Guinea experienced negative per-capita production growth, leaving Africans poorer a generation after independence than they had been under imperial rule (Alpine & Pickett, 1993). The answer is not a return to colonialism, but rather a return to the Western traditions honored in the Age of Reason. After independence, most British colonies founded during the Enlightenment era became today's centers of freedom and prosperity, including the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Hong Kong. Even the African colonies of South Africa, Mauritius, and Botswana appear to have benefited from their British colonial experience. Botswana has been exceptional in protecting property rights for 30 years since independence, and has shown a striking 8% per-capita GDP growth, all while avoiding coups, civil wars, and dictators. These examples refute the exploitation theory of income inequality.

K6. Laws of a Victorious Revolution

Claim one Barrier in the revolutionary Sphere.
Claim one Anarchy in the revolutionary Sphere.
Claim one Slaver on a border adjacent to the revolutionary Sphere.
Regress one Barrier (from any Victory Pool into the revolutionary Sphere). This is corruption (E7).
Place one of your Revolutionary Agents into an unoccupied Administrator post in any Sphere (except the modernized Sphere, and any Sphere with Disease unless you have a Factory). Return any Revolutionaries not used for a Post appointment to their owner's Wealth.
Place one meeple (any color) into an empty slave space in the revolutionary Sphere, from the reserve pool.
Build your Factory cube (if not already built).⁵ Place a cube of your color on the Sphere card representing the Industrial Revolution; see J6 and the Glossary for its benefits. Once built, your factory can only be removed by a Pogrom (I4).
Globalization & Purge. Globalize the Revolution into a Splay in which it is Viable, without flipping it to its other side. You choose the orientation, which will grant VP to the indicated player at game end. When added to the Bill of Rights, this placement purges (K7) that Splay, removing from the game all earlier Ideas, leaving only the starting card placed by the Founding Father and any earlier Revolutions.

Note: If no one chooses Law #8, remove this Revolution from the game.

⁵ FREEDOM AS THE CAUSE OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION. As far as I can tell, the Industrial Revolution could have occurred centuries earlier or later. Likewise, abolitionism could have arisen centuries earlier or later. It is surely no coincidence that the two lived on the same small island a generation apart! And yet, despite this, many modern intellectuals blacklist the Industrial Revolution as a cause of slavery rather than a triumph over it. In fact, both phenomena share the same root: the Enlightenment. Although the Industrial Revolution made slavery economically obsolete, it ended serfdom in England centuries earlier with no special legislation at all, and ended the movement to abolish slavery half a century earlier still. Enriched by overseas trade and Enlightenment freedoms, demand for urban labor rose sharply. As migrants flocked to the cities, wages rose sharply too. High wages spurred inventors to find ways to replace expensive labor with cheap machinery. Inventors, who were mostly of humble origin and would themselves have been slaves in another society, enjoyed freedom of thought and thrift within an independent legal system. They also benefited from two British innovations in political freedom: common law and the patent system. They benefited only marginally from Enlightenment science and mathematics, such as Newton's laws or mathematical calculation.

⁶ THE 13TH AMENDMENT of 1865 abolished slavery and forced labor in the antebellum United States, except as punishment for a crime. In the game, this is the removal of the Fugitive Slave Law (a left Barrier).

K7. Bill of Rights Purge

K8. Modern State

Neither the Elephant nor Dissidents may be added to a state that has been flipped to its modernized side.⁷

Default Administrator. In a modern state, every Administrator post is always considered occupied. In cases where no Agent has actually been placed, the Administrator of the color indicated for that space is assumed present for the purposes of determining victory results.

Note: Corruption during Gunboat Diplomacy, and Refugees/Emigrants, are the only ways to affect a modern state's status.

Example: In the modern United States from the previous examples, there is an unoccupied red Administrator post in the Caribbean. During end-of-game scoring (J6b), it counts as a Red Player token.

⁷ Dissidents, of course, exist within a modern state, but only in a modern state is the right to protest respected and lawful. The game minimizes British interference in the affairs of modern states, reflecting the historical decline of colonization. But those states that modernized selectively along Enlightenment ideals, freeing some but not their own slaves — as in the U.S., Brazil, and India — would later pay for it in blood.

L. Bonus Petitions

L1. Red, Black, or Red-Black Petitions

Nationalization/Privatization (red circular symbol). If you are the Red Player, Nationalize (E2) a white or green Syndicate Agent. The target Agent must be in the Syndicate on the card being Globalized by the Lawsuit or Plebiscite. If you are the Green or White Player, you may Privatize (denationalize, E2) a Nationalized Agent of your color, Divesting it from the Red Player's Finance board.
Out-of-Turn Bill (black circular symbol). Perform one Legislate action (F5) on an Idea that carries your Syndicate and is Viable on the Market. Then draw a random card from a random unused deck (roll a D6 to determine the deck) and use it to fill the resulting gap.
Subsidized Fundraising (half-red, half-black symbol). Perform one bonus Fundraiser (F1).

L2. Separation of Church & State⁸ (half-red, half-black symbol)

The White Player may file any bonus Petition (Privatization, Out-of-Turn Bill, or Fundraising) using either a red or a black Parliamentary law.

⁸ SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE is another principle discovered by John Locke. He argued that government lacks authority over the sphere of individual conscience, since a rational person cannot cede her opinion to the government. This principle allowed religious minorities to take up abolitionist positions that a state religion, largely oriented toward preserving the status quo, would never have entertained. The major state religions of the period promoted a hierarchy of obedience, with supreme authority at the top and slaves at the bottom, including Christianity in the West, the caste-based Hinduism of India, the Shinto blend of local kami worship and mystical Buddhism in Japan, the more this-worldly Neo-Confucianism governing bureaucrats in Qing China and Korea, and Islam in the Ottoman Empire and North Africa.

M. Impacts

New Agents. Impacts M1–M4 add a new Agent of your color from the pool onto the World Map, the Market, or the Finance board. This represents growth, so add it from the reserve pool (not from your Finance board).

M1. +Syndication

Take a new Agent from the pool and place it onto any Idea, even one that already has a Syndicate, with no need to pay gold. You may use this Syndicate for Operations during the current Ops Phase.

Example: You Legislate the Social Contract Idea, which creates a new Syndicate. You take an Agent from the pool and choose to place it on the most expensive Idea in the Eastern column.

M2. +Post Appointment

Take a new Agent from the pool and place it into the Administrator space of the indicated port, even if the Sphere has Disease or is Modern. This does not move the Elephant.

Disease. If the Sphere has Disease, take its yellow-green disk into your Victory Pool (even if you don't have an Industrial Revolution Factory).
Coup. If there is already an Administrator there (even your own), they suffer Martyrdom.

M3. +Wealth

You receive a new Finance Agent from the pool, placed immediately into your Wealth.

M4. +Revolutionary

M5. +Merchantman

M6. Claim Red/White Barrier (Elephant)

Elephant Operation. This is an Elephant Operation (H1), so moving the Elephant to the chosen port assumes you have not already taken any other Elephant Actions or Operations.

⁹ LEFT AND RIGHT WING politics took their names from the seating arrangement in the Estates-General of the French Revolution. Under left-wing politics you have a duty to work for society, but you may think for yourself. Under right-wing politics, you may work for your own gain, but suffer forced submission to another's opinion.

¹⁰ THE POLITICAL DIAMOND. Players of the board game High Frontier will notice that this game's compass rose corresponds to the diamond-shaped diagram in High Frontier. The labeled directions "right," "left," "up," and "down" correspond to "right-wing family values," "left-wing equality," "Libertarian work ethic," and "authoritarian command structure," respectively. This is an adaptation of the Nolan Chart, which likewise has a freedom-slavery axis and a left-right axis, defined here in terms of intellectual and economic submission.

N. Strategy Overview (Cooperative and Competitive Games)

N1. Actions

N2. Boost Finances

¹¹ THE MONEY SUPPLY of each country corresponds to its share of world production and trade (about 50% for Britain in 1840). The money supply is tied to the demand for money to make purchases and pay bills. Assuming a fixed money supply, the money supply only increases as productivity grows, as with the Industrial Revolution or the abolition of slavery. This game models a non-inflationary increase in the money supply through an increase in the number of Agents. Britain's rapid economic growth drew an inflow of gold into Britain, as the demand for money fell in countries such as China and India. Contrary to mercantilist theory, such globalization, like any voluntary trade, brings enormous benefit to the peoples of both countries. The British beneficiaries of, say, cheap factory-made textiles exported to India are mostly British factory workers, whose wages typically make up 80% of a company's payroll (the rest going to capital equipment and shareholders). The standard of living of Indian consumers benefits enormously from cheap cloth, whose production in a British factory takes mere man-hours, compared with man-months in India. The time savings enjoyed by Indian consumers can be devoted to other purposes, such as growing food.

N3. The Victory Pile

N4. Victory Points

N5. Avoiding Counter-Enlightenment¹²

¹² THE THESIS OF THIS GAME: The Enlightenment supplied the reason-based premises and ideas that fueled anti-slavery activism. However, the Enlightenment philosophers themselves were not activists, and wrote comparatively little about slavery. (Accordingly, in this game the thinkers have few Operations, while the activists have many Operations listed on their cards.) Rather, abolition was an unexpected blessing flowing from a new concept of morality grounded in universal individual rights. One of the earliest Enlightenment activists was James Oglethorpe, who banned slavery on moral grounds in the province of Georgia in 1733. Speaking out against slavery in Parliament, he inspired his friends to form an electoral bloc of abolitionists, the "Clapham Saints" (#9). Modern accusations of hypocrisy against the Enlightenment thinkers — for instance, that Locke "profited from the slave trade" — are ahistorical. Locke (#109), one of the first to call slavery "vile and miserable," lived in an age when abolitionism as a concept still lay in the future, and could hardly have avoided profiting from the slave trade, had he invested his money in anything at all.

O. Example of Play: An Advanced Cooperative-Competitive Game for 3 Players (1776–1836)

Western Market column (bottom to top) at start: #46, #12, #23, #59, #38, #42, #66 (top of deck). Eastern Market column (bottom to top) at start: #92, #96, #71, #72, #70, #80, #76 (top of deck).

O1. Round 1 (1776–1782). The French Revolution Restores the Monarchy

O2. Round 2 (1783–1788). The American Revolution

O3. Round 3 (1789–1794). The Industrial Revolution in the USA Under King Lincoln

¹³ LINCOLN, THE GREAT DICTATOR, took widely unconstitutional actions, including treating secession as treason, declaring martial law and invading the South without consulting Congress, suspending habeas corpus, imposing press and telegraph censorship, and drafting and jailing virtually anyone who disagreed with his radical views. —Thomas DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln, 2002.

O4. Round 4 (1795–1800). The End of Eastern Isolation

The British fleet finally expands (to two ships) and ends the long isolation of Japan and China, forcing Edo and Beijing to open to free trade. A war begins between White and Red Russia.

O5. Round 5 (1801–1806). Disaster in Japan Triggers the Great British Depression

The Japanese Revolution is defeated by the assassination of three Agents. The ensuing Great Depression will last 3 rounds, to the financial suffering of all players.

O6. Round 6 (1807–1812) (Historically, the British Empire abolished the slave trade in 1807)

O7. Round 7 (1813–1818). A Countercurrent of Eastern Mysticism Toward the West Begins

O8. Round 8 (1819–1824). A Democratic Ottoman Empire

O9. Round 9 (1825–1830). The Final 3 Turns of the Cooperative Era

O10. Scoring (1831–1836) (Historically, slavery in the British Empire was abolished in 1833)

The USA becomes an industrialized theocratic kingdom with slavery abolished, as shown below:

Illustration: The modern USA with a Ku Klux Klan Barrier, a white Factory. Virginia has 2 red meeples; the Caribbean has a green one.

The Ottoman Empire becomes a rural democracy, as shown below:

Illustration: A rural Ottoman Empire with a Nobles (dvoryane) Barrier. St. Petersburg: 1 green Agent, 1 green Freedman.

Glossary

Game terms beginning with a capital letter are defined here.

Adding Agents into the game from the pool:

Shipbuilding (as an action) — an Agent is placed from the pool into the player's Finance board Debt field.
By a Legislative Impact:
1. +Syndication onto any Idea at no cost (immediately usable for Operations).
2. +Post Appointment of an Agent from the pool into the indicated port's Administrator space (with no restrictions; the Elephant does not move; a Disease token is Claimed; a predecessor becomes a Martyr).
3. +Wealth — the Agent is placed into Wealth on the Finance board.
4. +Revolutionary — an Agent is added from the pool to any open Revolution, or starts a new one (bypassing all restrictions and preconditions).
Manifesto — if Legislating, a Lawsuit, or a Plebiscite makes a Revolution Viable, add a Revolutionary to it from the pool at no cost.
Popular Hero — if, upon a Revolution's launch, all Dissident squares are occupied by one player's color, add their Agent to the revolutionaries from the pool.

Removing Agents from play into the pool:

Cultural Diffusion — discarding a Revolution card from the Market removes all Agents on it and on that Sphere's World card.
Pogroms — a D6 roll (1, 2, 3) removes an Administrator (if chosen as the target, without making them a Martyr).

Regressing Anarchy Disks. Anarchy is Regressed back onto the world map during Kills or Martyrdoms when there is no more room for Dissidents, by corruption (E7), and by pogrom rolls (I4.6).
Claiming Anarchy Disks. Anarchy is Claimed from the world map during Gunboat Diplomacy (E5) and revolutionary law #2 (K6.2). This adds it to your Victory Pool. Each Anarchy disk is worth 1 VP at game end.
Disk Management. The total amount of Anarchy in the game is fixed at 18 black disks. They never go to the reserve pool. If a disk is Regressed back onto the world map, take it from your own Victory Pool or an opponent's Victory Pool (your choice), if you have none left. If a disk is Claimed from the world map, add it to your own Victory Pool.
Refugees. The maximum amount of Anarchy in any Sphere is 2 disks. If a 3rd disk must be added, you must instead choose a neighboring Sphere to add it to. If that Sphere is also full, a cascade occurs, with Refugees moving into the next neighboring Sphere, and so on.
The Dark Age. The game ends in defeat if all Anarchy is on the world map.

Tip: Sometimes you need Anarchy to launch a Revolution, but ultimately you should try to rid the world map of Anarchy for a final victory.

Red Barriers are left-wing economic enslavements, including the forced confiscation of output produced by a slave or serf.¹⁴

¹⁴ SLAVE HUNTERS included Portuguese fortune-seekers among the bandeirantes of Brazil, the Congolese Imbangala of Africa (Europeans almost never took African slaves themselves, owing to disease risk), professional Ottoman slave traders, Blood Hounds in the U.S. (after the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act), and Blackbirders, who by force or fraud brought laborers into industries such as sugar production in Queensland and Fiji, pearl diving in Australia, and guano mining in Peru. From 1859 onward, the maritime traffic of the Blackbirders was opposed by British anti-slavery ships of the Australia Squadron. It was, however, difficult to determine how many islanders came voluntarily, driven by harsh conditions at home such as coconut-induced famine, and how many were tricked or abducted.

White Barriers are right-wing intellectual enslavements, compelling conformity of thought or belief (a forced state religion, conscription¹⁵, or censorship¹⁶).

¹⁵ CONSCRIPTION had long been considered unlawful in England, but so-called "press gangs," rounding up men for the Royal Navy, had been legalized as far back as Elizabethan times, and disappeared only after the Napoleonic Wars.

¹⁶ FREEDOM OF THE PRESS was another idea of Locke's. In 1695, Locke successfully campaigned against the Licensing Act, a state monopoly on printing and censorship. Once the press no longer required a license, books and newspapers proliferated and became affordable. Unfortunately, state licensing (and censorship) still persists even in the West, for example with respect to broadcast licenses. "In those wretched countries where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarce call anything his own. Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech... Without freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty, without freedom of speech, which is the right of every man..." — Benjamin Franklin, 1722.

Purple Barriers are mercantilist embargoes, obstructing free trade.
Slavers and Anarchy are not Barriers.

³⁵ REFUGEES fleeing pogroms sometimes go on to form their own successful nations, as attested by Liberia (#104) and Israel.

¹⁸ TROPICAL MOSQUITO-BORNE VIRAL FEVERS originally devastated European colonists in Africa to much the same degree that Eurasian epidemic diseases devastated the native peoples of Australia and the Americas. However, medicines (such as quinine) and steamship technology, developed with the help of Industrial Revolution technology, kicked off the "Scramble for Africa" between 1881 and 1914. Even today, however, malaria remains the number-one killer of human beings, and following the regrettable ban on DDT, millions die each year, especially in Africa.

Tip: The Green Player starts with a Majority in Nantes, France.

²³ "A SLAVE is one who is coerced into labor against his will by chains, whips, and guns, i.e., by physical force applied by other men. Were it not for such things, he would escape. The free worker, by contrast, is one who works by his own choice, and who can be prevented from working only by the actual use of physical force against him." — George Reisman, Capitalism, 1998.

²⁸ CONSUMPTION, in this game, is modeled by moving Agents downward. Thus Capital is spent to produce Wealth, and Wealth is spent to create Debt. Enlightenment economists recognized two types of consumption: unproductive and productive. The former includes eating bread (from Wealth to Debt), while the latter includes consuming flour and wearing out ovens to bake the bread (from Capital to Wealth). Flour and ovens are examples of Capital — anything productively consumed to produce Wealth (here, bread, but Wealth includes any human value from food to freedom). If the share of labor devoted to producing capital goods is large enough to more than offset productive consumption, then Capital Accumulation occurs, i.e., the supply of capital goods grows.

²⁹ THE GOLD STANDARD. After the introduction of the gold sovereign by the new Royal Mint in 1816, the British Empire established history's first gold standard with 100% reserve backing (full-reserve banking) in 1821. Such a standard helps prevent government interference in the monetary system. Unlike today, the government could not simply inflate away debt at the expense of everyone holding a bank account.

Globalizing via a Lawsuit or Plebiscite (G6, G7). This does not require Viability to Globalize, and grants a bonus Petition (L).
Globalizing via Legislation (F5). This requires Viability and triggers Impacts (M).
Founding Father. If you are the first to Globalize into a particular Splay, you permanently set the orientation of the starting card (Locke's or Rousseau's).
Manifesto. After Globalizing, check every Revolution to see whether a Manifesto is triggered (K3).

Border is the gap between two World cards. For example, Brazil has two Borders: one to the east and one to the north. If it is marked with a ship-shaped symbol, it is a Sea Border.

Action is one of two game processes you may perform each turn, during Phase F.

Important: No card is Viable until the first Globalization, which forms the first Freedom Pair!

Idea (B4) is an elongated card with a Firebrand rating. Along with the Revolution, this is a type of Market card.³⁰

³⁰ THE CLASSICAL THEORY OF IDEAS was introduced by Locke (1690) as deriving from observed entities and their relations in the natural world, mentally manipulated in consciousness as verbal units. These words and definitions capture the essence of an idea or concept, including everything known and not yet known. Valid ideas, such as "freedom," are grounded in natural law and are therefore generally true across all cultures. Kant (#47) argued the opposite — that ideas were artificial cultural constructs having nothing to do with the objective world. Thus "idea" or "concept" are identical to their definition, thought is identical to language, and neither has any component of reality. Following Kant, almost all modern philosophers rejected the classical theory. Postmodern fallacies, such as Whorfianism, hold that it is impossible to communicate with a person of another culture or language, and so the missionary task is pointless, slavery is neither good nor evil, and a foreigner will never understand you talking about the weather, let alone Shakespeare.

Claim (A4.4) — move a token or disk into your Victory Pool. Each is worth 1 VP at game end (Disease is worth 3 VP).

Morality is a black Freedom symbol, either Enlightenment (a candle) or Mysticism (a comet). A morality icon supplies the natural or supernatural foundation for a red symbol (activism).³³

³³ MORALITY is a code for decision-making, traditionally held to be God-given (the comet symbol in the game). However, the drawback of a supernatural or mystical authority for ethics is that, by definition, reason, science, or logic cannot be used to study it; instead, one must wait for sacred texts or other revelations from an unknowable supreme being. Enlightenment philosophers, emboldened by the success of reason-based inquiry in physics, also undertook reason-based inquiries into ethics and sociology (the candle symbol in the game), with staggering success that thoroughly revolutionized human society, including global emancipation. Although Enlightenment thinkers such as Descartes (#35), Newton (#39), Locke (#109), Franklin (#44), Paley (#55), and Darwin (#66) made syncretic, deist attempts to reconcile the natural and the supernatural, the two are fundamentally incompatible. Either the universe is governed by a supreme supernatural consciousness, or by supreme natural law. Both cannot be supreme. Spinoza (#37) took the next logical step, defining a remarkable ethical system grounded entirely in reason, with no theological/supernatural involvement whatsoever. For this he was excommunicated from the Jewish faith, and one Counter-Enlightenment critic called his work "a book forged in hell by the devil himself."

Sea Border (B2) is one of the 9 Borders marked with a ship-shaped symbol. Each may hold one Slaver and one ship token.

Dissident. Martyrdom always generates one Dissident of the Agent's color, placed in any Dissident square in the Sphere with the Elephant.
Anarchy. If there is no room for the generated Dissident because all Dissident squares are full, the player whose turn it is Regresses Anarchy instead.

Liberate — to place a meeple onto a slave square on the world map, as a result of Manumission or Westernize Operations. This meeple, called a Freedman³², is added from the reserve pool.

³² BICAMERAL-MIND SLAVES. What sets us apart from other animals? How can we simply choose to benefit from our moral system, while other animals are enslaved to behavior with their own gene as the sole payoff? Why do we crave authorization for our moral systems? Why are we born, regardless of culture, with some notion of a higher being vested with such authority — with the attributes of worship, obedience, unconditional devotion, the power of suggestion, and the authority of charisma? Psychologist Julian Jaynes's remarkable theory concludes that both consciousness and free will are technological inventions (not products of natural selection), created through language technology. Because of the mental hierarchy in the human bicameral mind, obedience and slavery are artifacts of how consciousness is formed. Consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, recurring each time a child learns language — any language. More detail on bicameral-mind theory can be found in my game Bios: Origins. —Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1990.

Black-Black. Enlightenment philosophers grounded themselves in religious morality (comet-comet), rationalism (candle-candle)²⁴, or logical positivism (comet-candle). The latter includes empirical scientists such as Franklin and Newton, who used a covert pantheism (a philosophical doctrine uniting god and the world) to reconcile a syncretic (a blending of disparate philosophical origins into one system) mixture of faith and reason.²⁵ These people are thinkers, not doers (so they have few Operations).

²⁴ RATIONALISM is the idea that everything can be deduced from reason alone. The trouble is that it tends to overlook facts supplied by the senses. Thus Descartes's physics, built on rationalist assumptions about motion, is deeply mistaken, while Newton's physics, derived under the motto "I frame no hypotheses [in the absence of facts]," is essentially correct and remains part of the scientific canon to this day. —Shawn E. Klein, 2010.

²⁵ ETHICS was regarded by the Enlightenment thinkers as a natural law, derived from the scientific method applied to human nature, as opposed to something ineffable, God-given, or beyond scientific inquiry. In this way, Newtonian science had a greater influence on morality and the abolition of slavery than it did on the Industrial Revolution! Most Enlightenment thinkers (#27, #31, #37, #38, #39, #43, #44, #45, #46, #47, #49, #52, #54, #56, #60, #61, #63, #66, #102, #119, #120) were deists, meaning they rejected miracles and divine intervention but regarded the Law of Nature as divinely created. Deism attempts to sidestep questions such as "must God follow his own laws?" or "is ethics knowable because it is Lawful, or unknowable because it was decreed by an inscrutable supreme being?"

Red-Red. Amoral activists adhering to pragmatism (i.e., doing whatever seems practical for now, without regard to principle or doubt), polylogism (i.e., the view that reason and morality are subjective or culturally biased), and behaviorism (i.e., the view that there is no free will, only animal instincts governing human behavior). This includes egalitarians (feather-feather)²⁶, idealists (feather-unlock)²⁷, and militants (unlock-unlock).

²⁶ EGALITARIANISM here means the de facto egalitarianism of social classes with state ownership of personal abilities and property, as opposed to de jure egalitarianism, which means equality before the law.

²⁷ IDEALISM is an epistemology (the philosophical-methodological discipline studying knowledge as such — its structure, function, and development) that puts consciousness first and reality second, and ultimately unreal or unknowable. Popular films such as The Matrix or Inception are idealist in the sense that they portray the objective world as illusory, dominated by worlds created by subjective consciousness. The German idealists were responsible for the Counter-Enlightenment that ended the Age of Reason, and laid the groundwork for today's dominant subjectivist philosophies.

Black-Red. Principled activists grounded in supernatural (comet) or natural (candle) principles, promoting intellectual (feather) or economic (unlock) freedoms. (A principle is an objective truth, true across all times, places, and cultures, regardless of human wishes or opinions.) The Freedom Pair (comet-feather) points to an artist who creates emotional/humane depictions of social ills.

³⁴ IS SLAVERY GOOD FOR THE ECONOMY? No. By this theory, the economic and military centers of the 19th century should have been the most enslaved: the Ottomans, India, China. Just the opposite: the countries that undertook mass abolition experienced an economic boom, including Western Europe, the U.S., the British colonies, and Brazil. Even small doses of freedom consistently stimulate the economy as a whole, while every new act of enslavement consistently harms it. "Slavery is an institution hostile to the production of wealth, because it deprives slaves of the incentive to produce it." — George Reisman, Capitalism, 1998.

Port (B2) is a black dot printed on a World card, labeled with the name of a city or country. Tokens (pawns and meeples) are never placed in a port.

³¹ "For a very long time, everything was awful, and then the Industrial Revolution happened." Luke Muehlhauser, Three Wild Speculations from Amateur Quantitative Macrohistory, 2017.

²² WHY THE INDIVIDUAL? Classically, the basic social unit (BSU) was the caste: kings, nobles, or serfs/slaves. These castes are hereditary and immutable, regardless of individual preference, ability, or choice. (Strikingly, unchangeable, racially defined caste systems are still upheld by the supreme courts of countries such as Haiti and India.) The Enlightenment thinkers argued that individuals were the basic decision-making units of society. Deist Enlightenment thinkers argued that only individuals have souls, sin, and are judged for their sins in the afterlife. (For instance, slaves would be judged by their willful words and deeds, not by their status as slaves.) Secular Enlightenment thinkers likewise argued that only the individual can be praised for achievements, punished for crimes, and is, in general, responsible for their own words and deeds. The collectivist philosophers of the Counter-Enlightenment proposed new BSUs. For instance, under Marxism and trade unionism, all people within the worker caste are interchangeable units and should receive equal pay regardless of individual merit or effort. Other collectivist BSUs are "society" (socialism), a master race (fascism), the majority (democracy), or the human species (eugenics and social Darwinism). Under every form of collectivism, the individual may be morally sacrificed or enslaved if someone judges it good for the collective.

Victory Pile (A4.4) is each player's open pile of tokens and disks, each worth VP at game end (J6).

Slaver (E6) is one of the 9 brown, ship-shaped tokens that historically captured/transported slaves and blood products. Sink them by making a Piracy Roll (E6) during Gunboat Diplomacy (E5).

³⁶ FREEDOM VS. EQUALITY traces back to the second and third phases of the French Revolution. After the initial aristocratic protest against royal absolutism, a Lockean phase (including the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, drafted with Jefferson's input) gave way to the final egalitarian phase — the Terror — grounded in Rousseau's philosophy. (Capaldi and Lloyd, Liberty and Equality in Political Economy: From Locke Versus Rousseau to the Present, 2017.) Rights, like morality, can have only one foundational meaning, and freedom and equality are fundamentally incompatible. (By "equality" here I mean the sort of egalitarianism a doctor would practice if he made a patient with a broken leg feel better by breaking the legs of ten other people. I am not speaking of de jure equality, such as equality before the Law.) Redistributing wealth at gunpoint — regardless of whether the gun is held by politicians, the mafia, or the Terror — always enslaves individual liberties. Since people hold different views and make different choices, material inequality is a mark of a healthy, developing society, invariably wealthier than societies without freedom. Every person finds their own path, and gives or receives charity on terms of their own choosing.

Gap is an empty slot in the 6×2 Idea Market matrix, arising in the course of play.

Massacre (I4) — to remove a token to the reserve pool without creating a Dissident or Anarchy. This occurs during a failed Revolution (K2) or a pogrom (I4).

Revolutionary (K1c) is an Agent placed in one of a Revolution's Engagement spots. A Revolution succeeds when it is filled with Revolutionaries and is Viable.

¹⁹ SKIN COLOR plays no role in this game, because it has nothing to do with slavery. Only in the Ottoman Empire, or in certain European colonies, could a person's former slave status be inferred from appearance, and this was a result of historical accident — Africa being the last place from which slaves could be easily obtained (see the footnote "BEYOND AFRICA"). Consider the Korean emperor's description of his own slaves (exported as tribute to China) as "a different race," despite the fact that they were Koreans, physically indistinguishable from himself: "Our ancestors taught us that these enslaved beings belong to a different race, and so it is impossible for them to become normal people. To challenge the teachings of our ancestors would endanger our social order." — Emperor Chungnyeol, circa 1300.

²⁰ THE ELEPHANT was used during Lincoln's campaign as the symbol of the Republican Party, and was popularized largely by the great cartoonist, Republican, and abolitionist Thomas Nast. Moreover, the elephant has a whimsical tradition in Sierra Madre Games of appearing in cameo across Bios: Megafauna, Greenland, Neanderthal, Pax Renaissance, and John Company.

¹⁷ THE COST OF BARRIERS. "Economic growth associated with commercial expansion, known as Smithian growth, gave rise to rent-seekers, tax farmers, mercantilist protectionists, state-sponsored monopolies, and sometimes outright robbers and marauders. Such parasites often killed the geese that laid the golden eggs." Joel Mokyr, The Industrial Revolution and the Netherlands: Why Did It Not Happen?, 2000.

Dice-Squared Cost — the cost of a piracy roll (E6). Take the number of dice you want to roll and square that number to get the gold amount. So if you decide to roll 2 dice, it costs 4 gold.

Factory — see Industrial Revolution.

²¹ "GIVE ME YOUR TIRED, YOUR POOR…" In the 19th century, emigrants preferred America. This was a golden age for the U.S. North, and, after the fall of slavery in 1865, for the South as well. Its borders were fully open; everyone was welcomed. Its rapidly growing economy was free of inflation, and during the two periods of greatest growth, 1820–1850 and 1865–1900, prices actually fell by half. All this ended in the early 20th century, when America turned from a republic into a democracy. The first racist immigration laws were passed, and the Fed (Federal Reserve System) seized control of the money supply. With the loss of the gold standard came permanent inflation and periodic depressions.

What Are Freedom and Slavery?

— life expectancy — GDP per capita — % not living in extreme poverty — energy capture (kcal/cap/day) — war-making capacity — % living in a democracy

A Personal Journey

Phil Eklund, 2017