Set Sail for the Levant: A Board Game About Debt (or a Social Satire), 2007

game with board, dice and cards

The board game tells the story of the enclosure of the commons, a process that began in Britain during the sixteenth century and continued into the nineteenth century. As described in the game’s rules, it was symbolic of the shift from feudalism to modernity and was essentially a privatisation of the land, whereby ‘commoners’ lost their traditional rights of access to the meadows and forests that had previously sustained them. Subsequently, the now impoverished rural poor were forced to migrate from the countryside into the factories of the newly industrialised cities in order to work for wages. In this rigged game, debt is the only feasible option with the sole avenue of release from the downward cycle being to ‘set sail to The Levant, where the law can’t reach you’. A player makes their fortune by reproducing this system of exploitation in the colonies, following which they are allowed back into the game at the top of the hierarchy: as the owner of the bank.

Set Sail for the Levant: A Board Game About Debt (or a Social Satire) (2007) is on permanent display in the collection of Tate Britain, London. One of several interventions by contemporary artists, it sits in the room titled ‘Troubled Glamour 1760-1830’ among historical works by Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, George Stubbs and others.