We Are All Descendants of the Subjugated

Go back far enough in anyone's line and the story is the same. The names change, the languages change, the century changes, but the position does not: someone bent over a furrow that another man owned, hauled cargo up a plank for wages another man set, dug the ore, wove the cloth, minded the child, and went to bed tired in a house that was not theirs. That is not the exception in the human record. It is the overwhelming rule. The kings and the cardinals and the counting-houses fill the histories because histories are written about the few — but the few were always standing on the shoulders of a vast and mostly nameless many. You are, in all statistical likelihood, descended from that many. So am I. We are the children of the subjugated, and the sooner we remember it, the sooner we might stop mistaking the arrangement for the natural order of things.

My grandfather reported from where the weight falls. He did not call himself a great man or a chronicler of great men; he called himself, plainly, a rank-and-file journalist.⁸ He wrote about the people who do the lifting because he understood something the front page usually forgets — that the story of any place is really the story of its working many, and that when those many are pushed far enough, the ground itself seems to move. This is an essay in that tradition. It is about the long arithmetic of who has been used by whom, and about the one idea powerful enough to end the pattern: that the person hauling the load is worth exactly as much as the person who owns it.

Start with the plainest fact, because everything else grows from it. For almost the whole of recorded history, the people who owned and ruled were a sliver, and the people who labored were nearly everyone else. In eleventh-century England, free tenants — people who owed little or no service to a lord — made up only about ten percent of the peasant population; across most of medieval Europe their numbers were similarly small.¹ Take the survey the Normans made of their new conquest and the shape is stark: a great mass of tenant farmers and serfs bound by obligation, a thin band of craftsmen and freemen, and at the very top a few percent of knights, lords, and clergy who held the land and wrote the rules.² Multiply that shape across every settled society we know — pharaonic, Roman, feudal, colonial — and the conclusion is not sentimental. It is arithmetic. If your ancestors were human beings alive before the modern age, the odds are overwhelming that most of them were the ones being ruled, not the ones ruling.

And the ruled were not merely poor. Serfdom, the dominant condition of the European peasant for centuries, grew directly out of Roman slavery: as the great slave-worked estates broke up in late antiquity, many of the peasants tied to the new holdings were, in the historians' words, the descendants of slaves.³ The serf was bound to a plot of ground and could be transferred along with that ground to a new master, like a fence or a well.³ In seventeenth-century Russia the arithmetic was even harsher: as many as three-quarters of the peasants — thirteen or fourteen million people — lived lives barely distinguishable from slavery, and it took an imperial edict in 1861 to free some twenty-three million privately held serfs, who were then made to pay, through taxes, for their own liberation.⁴ This is the soil our family trees are rooted in. Not a metaphor. The literal ground.

An arrangement that unequal cannot survive on force alone. It needs a story — a story that tells the many their lowness is natural, deserved, ordained. And every age has supplied one. In parts of medieval Germany, serfs were taught they descended from Noah's son Ham, cursed to serve his brothers. In France and Spain the tale was that serfs were the children of the cowards who had refused to ride with Charlemagne against the Saracens, and so had chosen bondage. In England, bondage was blamed on the Norman Conquest — with the tantalizing, dangerous implication that somewhere there were records proving the common people had once been free.⁵ The details differ; the function is identical. Each story converts a human decision — this man will own, that man will serve — into a decree of God or nature, so that the plow-hand looking up at the manor sees not a robbery but a rule of the universe.

The stories have been retired one by one, and we congratulate ourselves for it. But look closely and you will find the same machine running under new paint. Where the old lie said you serve because your blood is cursed, the new one says you are poor because you did not hustle. Where the old lie said the lord is set above you by God, the new one says the billionaire earned every cent alone, and owes you nothing. The theology has become economics, but the work it does is the same: to make a lopsided arrangement feel like the weather. My grandfather saw one such story in full cry. When the papers of his city screamed that a strike of dockworkers was a communist plot threatening blood and ruin, he noticed that the people were unimpressed by headlines that screamed of communist violence. They knew better.⁶ The oldest trick is to name the people asking for their fair share as a danger to civilization. Watch for it. It is always the tell.

The powerful have never been many. The lie that keeps them powerful is that the rest of us were born to carry them.

Dangerous Thoughts

Here is where comfortable people reach for the past tense — were subjugated, used to be ruled — as if the whole business ended with the abolition of serfdom and slavery and the arrival of the wage. It did not end. It changed clothes. The shape-up on the San Francisco docks that my grandfather described was not medieval, but it was not free either: each morning men lined up while private contractors picked whom to hire, forcing them to beg for work and pay kickbacks to the boss for the privilege of a day's labor.⁶ Strip away the century and you have the manor again — a man who owns the gate, and a crowd hoping to be let through it.

And the gate is narrower now than it has been in living memory. Consider the arithmetic of our own moment, which would have made a feudal lord blush. The richest one percent of humanity now hold more wealth than the bottom ninety-five percent put together.⁷ Roughly fifty-six thousand people — the top one-thousandth of one percent — now control more wealth than the poorest four billion human beings combined, a share that has nearly doubled since 1995.⁹ The top one percent own forty-three percent of all the financial assets on Earth.⁷ A pharaoh commanded a province. Today a few dozen thousand people command more than half the species. The pyramid did not fall. It grew.

Nor is this an abstraction floating somewhere above ordinary life. It lands in the paycheck. In 1965, the chief executive of a large American company was paid about 21 times what a typical worker earned. By 2024 that gap had widened to roughly 281 times — and at the hundred largest low-wage employers, more than 600 times.¹⁰ The union federation put it in terms a person can feel in the chest: to match what the average big-company CEO now makes in a single year, a typical worker would have had to start working around the year 1740 — before the republic existed — and never stop.¹⁰ Meanwhile, between 2019 and 2025, workers worldwide saw their real wages fall about twelve percent, while pay for the fifteen hundred highest-paid executives on Earth rose fifty-four percent.¹¹ The load did not get lighter. The people carrying it simply got a smaller cut of what they carried.

Someone will object that none of this is anyone's fault — that the modern rich are not lords with whips, that the worker signs a contract freely, that the whole comparison to serfdom is theatrical. Fair enough; let me answer it squarely. The point of remembering that we descend from the subjugated is not to nurse a grievance or to paint every wealthy person as a villain. It is to inoculate ourselves against the story in Section II — the story that says the arrangement is natural, that the people at the bottom belong there, that the ones asking for a fairer share are a threat. Once you know that nine in ten of your forebears worked and owed, you stop reading the pyramid as destiny. You start reading it as a choice that human beings made, and can therefore make differently.

And it matters because the case for equality was never really economic. It is older and simpler than that. The reason the plow-hand is worth as much as the lord, the reason the longshoreman is worth as much as the shipowner, is not that they produce equal value or hold equal skill — often they do not. It is that a human being's worth does not run through their usefulness to someone above them. This is the dangerous thought, the one every hierarchy has had to suppress to survive: that the person at the bottom is a full person, entire, with a life as vivid and a claim on dignity as total as anyone who has ever worn a crown. Every genuine advance in human decency — the end of chattel slavery, the end of serfdom, the union hall, the vote, the eight-hour day — began when enough people refused, at last, to accept that some lives were raw material for others.

My grandfather lived to see one of those refusals up close, and he never got over the beauty of it. When the dockworkers of his city finally laid down their tools in the summer of 1934, something happened that the owners had insisted was impossible: the many discovered they were the many. He described the eerie power of it — an uncanny quiet settling over acres of buildings, not a wheel turning nor a lever moving, the din of commerce giving way to a murmur of voices in the streets.⁶ The whole machinery of a great city stopped, because the people who actually ran it decided, together, to stop it. And in the same hour, across the bay in the wealthy enclave of Piedmont, two hundred and fifty frightened businessmen swore themselves in as special deputies and — as he recorded it, with a reporter's merciless eye — stood guard through the night clad in golf knickers and hunting jackets, and flourishing revolvers, shotguns, and rifles, blocking their own streets against a danger that never came.⁶ The image is the whole argument in miniature: the few, armed and terrified behind their barricades; the many, unarmed and orderly, simply declining for once to carry the weight.

Historians have since called that strike, and others like it, a festival of the oppressed — a phrase worth holding onto, because it corrects the sourness that so often attaches to the word.¹² The demand for equality is not a demand born of hatred. At its best it is a kind of joy: the joy of people discovering, sometimes for the first time in generations, that they matter, that they are not alone, that the arrangement is not eternal. That is the inheritance worth claiming. Not the bondage — the refusal.

So here is the plain conclusion, in the register my grandfather would have wanted. We are all, nearly every one of us, descended from people who were used — bound to land they did not own, paid wages they did not set, told by priest or paper or economist that their lowness was written in the stars. That is not a reason for despair. It is a reason for kinship. The person beside you in the checkout line, the one cleaning the office after you have gone home, the one hauling the freight and minding the child and digging the line — that person carries the same inheritance you do, and is worth exactly what you are worth, which is to say: everything. The whole moral history of our species is the slow, contested, unfinished work of getting more and more people to believe that sentence and to build a world that acts as though it were true.

The pyramid is taller now than it has been in a hundred years. The stories defending it are as fluent as ever. But the arithmetic underneath has not changed since the Domesday clerks counted the serfs: the ones at the top are few, and they are held up by the many. My grandfather knew which side of that he stood on, and he never pretended it was the neutral one. Neither will I. We are the descendants of the subjugated — and the debt the living owe the dead is not to stay bent, but to stand, together, and finish what the strikes and the abolitions and the long refusals began. The state of a just world cannot be ordered into being by decree. But the conditions can be prepared — one remembered kinship, one refused lie, one shared load at a time.