Does personal liberty inevitably entail the marginalization of others? Herman Melville’s novella Benito Cereno and Greg Grandin’s manuscript Empire of Necessity illustrate the case of the San Dominick, a Spanish slave ship sailing through the wild Pacific Ocean near Chile, and its passengers to pose this question. At the turn of the 18th century, such tightly-packed multipurpose commercial ships pitted competing self-interests against each other. On board the San Dominick, the Spanish captain Benito Cereno and the American mariner Amasa Delano each sought to pursue their personal liberties through the patriarchal belittlement of the ship’s black slaves while the slaves, led by Babo, reversed such patriarchy to achieve their freedom. As slaves
