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The Grand Model - The Plantation Machine
The institution was ancient and universal. The machine was new. This episode traces how the specific apparatus of Atlantic slavery — industrial, permanent, hereditary, and racial — was assembled and carried west until it reached the Carolina coast. It begins not in Africa but in a Mediterranean that Europeans were being pushed out of by Ottoman power, follows a caravel down the African coast to the first auction at Lagos, and lands on the volcanic island of Sao Tome — the African proving ground where Europeans first watched the plantation model pay, and built its lethal mortality math into…
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