The Grand Model - A Colony of a Colony

American Political History · Oct 16, 2021 · 22m · transcript

To understand Carolina, you have to leave it — and sail to a single small island in the eastern Caribbean. Carolina was not really founded from England; it was the child of Barbados. And Barbados, in the middle of the seventeenth century, became the richest piece of ground in the English-speaking world on the strength of one crop. This episode sits with the planter and follows his arithmetic: why sugar made such staggering fortunes, why a crop that had to be manufactured around the clock demanded so much labor, and how the sheer profitability of it scaled an old, ordinary institution — the…