Episode Details

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 owning of human beings — into something vast.

Through the flat, accountant’s eye of Richard Ligon, who watched the system assemble and wrote it down for other planters, this is the economic logic of a slave society told in its own terms: the labor calculation, the law the planters wrote when English law gave them no category for what they were doing, and the engrossing of the island that left its surplus people — the landless and the planters’ sons alike — looking for somewhere with room. They found it on the Carolina coast, and they brought the whole machine with them, complete, and set it down on a continent with no visible edge. The story of how reasonable men built it — before, in the episodes to come, we look hard at what they built.