In 67 BCE Rome declared the Mediterranean its sea. Every colonial maritime claim that followed — every Papal Bull, every Navigation Act, every treaty dividing the non-Christian world — descended from that moment. Roman law gave colonialism its vocabulary: dominium, imperium, and the legal concept that some peoples stand outside the law entirely.
In 1754 BCE, Hammurabi carved 282 laws into black diorite and divided humanity into three legal tiers. Three thousand years later, that same architecture — transmitted through Assyria, Persia, Greece and Rome — would be deployed against sovereign African peoples transported across the Atlantic as maritime cargo. The runaway slave laws of Babylon became the runaway slave laws of Jamaica.
Before Hammurabi carved his laws into black stone, the world already had legal systems — built on balance, dignity and collective sovereignty. Ma’at, the Manden Charter, the Great Law of Peace. Colonialism did not arrive in an empty legal world. It arrived in a full one. And it spent five centuries trying to erase what it found.
You are living under a legal system built on ships. The passport in your pocket, the border agent demanding your papers, the property deed that traces to stolen land — all of it descends from a three-thousand-year legal lineage built to control sovereign peoples. This is where that story begins.