Episode Details

In this episode, we explore the thirteen colonies were corporate startups. So, ah, picture this. It's 1758. A young George Washington is just, he desperately wants to win this local election for the House of Burgesses down in Virginia. And, you know, so he does what literally any self -respecting founding father would do. He goes out and buys... 39 gallons of rum. Naturally. Naturally. He throws this massive, just completely chaotic party for the local voters. And he wins the election by an absolute landslide. It's a great story. It really is. And, you know, welcome to the deep dive, everyone, because today we are taking you way past those traditional textbook paintings, you know, like the ones with the perfectly orchestrated Symphony of Men and pristine powdered wigs standing in those tidy little rows exactly like they're all just reading from the exact same sheet music of liberty and unity We are we're tearing up that mythology today to By 1775, the English only made up about 49 % of the population. You had massive influxes of Germans pouring into Pennsylvania. the Scots -Irish pushing out onto the dangerous Western frontiers, and the Dutch maintaining a really strong cultural hold in New York. It was incredibly diverse. But when we look at this demographic data, it also reveals the darkest engine of this prosperity. Because by 1775... 20 % of the colonial population was African, and chattel slavery was a legal practiced institution in all 13 colonies. Yes. The historical records point out that about 287 ,000 enslaved people were imported into the 13 colonies over a 160 year period. Wow. And there's a grim mechanical difference here compared to the sugar colonies in the Caribbean or Brazil. How so? Well, in those places, the labor conditions were so universally lethal that the enslaved populations had to be continually