Then: The Odyssey
Now: Rosy-fingered Dawn: Turn Any Business Trip into the Journey of a Lifetime (in Ten Years or Less)!

Or: He’s Leaving – She’s Weaving: How today’s long-distance relationships are redefining love and commitment.

Then: The Iliad
Now: Feel the Flaw and do it Anyway: Anger Management and the New Art of Making a Killing.

Then: The Anabasis (Xenophon)
Now: Never Turn Back: Wisdom on a Tough Road, by History’s Most Daring Leader (with a new introduction by Ben Bernanke).

Then: Thorstein Veblen (1899) The Theory of the Leisure Class
Now: Timothy Ferriss (2007) The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich
…just goes to show you can’t beat the real thing.

76: also, I suppose we could make a distinction between “torture by private actors, though technically illegal, generally goes unpunished by the state” and “torture is used by agents of the state”.
To use an analogy, it’s not good that cars get stolen all the time and the police generally don’t do much to investigate it; but it would be worse if the police themselves regularly stole cars.

As for slavery, there is copious evidence from the British Atlantic empire, pre and post 1776, that the very few slaveoweners who were disciplined for maltreating their slaves were a tiny minority of the far larger group who got away with it. There was a lot of unpunished torture going on, much of which was really imaginatively horrible.

1) Yes, he was, because he wasn’t an absolute monarch but subject to Parliament’s control of the purse strings, to the provisions of the Act of Settlement on (for example) preservation of judicial independence, and ultimately to trial and execution by Parliament in the event of tyranny (precedent: 1649).

2) Judicial torture, both as an interrogation technique and as a punishment, was abolished in the 17th century in Britain, and this presumably applied to slaves as well as freemen; by 1776, public execution was still used as a punishment, as was corporal punishment, but not torture. And slavery had been abolished in Britain (Summersett’s Case) though not yet in the colonies. I’m not sure how one would draw a dividing line between torture and mere brutality; but in this context it’s worth noting that slave-owners were occasionally hanged under British law for killing their slaves.

I was thinking lack of a central government, oligarchy, Puritanism, and state-sponsored religion.

Off topic: was King George accountable, and was there a ban on torture? Torture and slavery go together, and I thought there was public execution and torture for convicts.

Now: Havvah-ban-Annah Under the Pudendascope: The Sowiveall of the Prettiest when they were Yung and Easily Freudened