Episode Details

Before we can understand what Carolina became, we have to understand the thing the Barbadians carried onto its shore — and it is far older and far stranger than the story usually told. This episode steps back from the colony to look at slavery itself: an institution practiced on nearly every inhabited continent, by nearly every civilization in recorded history, and experienced by almost none of them as wrong. It was the order of things. And the key to why it looked so different from place to place — a Roman galley at one extreme, a half-absorbed captive at the other — turns out to be a single idea: slavery exploits people exactly as far as the society holding them has the power to, and no further. The milder forms were not kinder. They were weaker.

From Hammurabi’s Babylon and the captives who wrote Psalm 137, through India and China, to a Rome that industrialized slavery with no notion of race at all; from the Islamic world’s twelve-century trade and the Barbary corsairs who enslaved a million Europeans, to the sophisticated, gold-rich kingdoms of West Africa that ran a vast slave trade of their own — this is the whole world the Atlantic trade was about to transform. And by the end, a quiet inventory: each piece of what would become American slavery already existed somewhere. No one had ever combined them. Something genuinely new, and genuinely worse, was about to be made.