The Grand Model - Flesh and Deerskin

American Political History · Nov 6, 2021 · 15m

Before Carolina grew rich on rice, it grew rich on a commodity pulled out of the southern interior: people. Deerskins were the steady business, but slaves were where the money was — and the colony had something its neighbors did not, a short sea road to the Caribbean sugar islands that would buy human beings in any number. This episode follows the Indian slave trade as a market: how Carolina’s bottomless demand turned slaving from a limited business into the most profitable enterprise in the region, and lifted a displaced people called the Wes-to into the dominant power of the coast — before…