Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchBy What Authority - The King's Diagnosis
Season 7 Episode 4
For six years Edward Randolph tried to collect the king's customs in Boston, and for six years the city beat him — every ship he seized returned by a…
4 years, 4 months ago
By What Authority - Accounting Empire
Season 7 Episode 3
There was a man in London who knew more about America than almost anyone alive, and who never crossed the ocean to see it. William Blathwayt sat in t…
4 years, 4 months ago
By What Authority - The Duke's Colony
Season 7 Episode 2
In 1681, the king's own customs collector stood trial for treason in New York — charged by the colony's merchants with levying war on free Englishmen…
4 years, 4 months ago
By What Authority - The Dutch Problem
Season 7 Episode 1
England planted the colonies. The Dutch carried the goods — and kept the profit. By 1640 Dutch trade was double England's, run on three inventions no…
4 years, 4 months ago
The Grand Model - Ungovernable
Season 6 Episode 8
In 1690 a man stepped off a ship in Charles Town and made himself governor of Carolina by overthrowing the governor — and the strangest part was that…
4 years, 4 months ago
The Grand Model - Flesh and Deerskin
Season 6 Episode 7
Before Carolina grew rich on rice, it grew rich on a commodity pulled out of the southern interior: people. Deerskins were the steady business, but s…
4 years, 9 months ago
The Grand Model - Charles Town
Season 6 Episode 6
Three ships left England in 1669 to plant a colony designed in a London drawing room. Eight months later, only one of them reached the Carolina coast…
4 years, 9 months ago
The Grand Model - Locke's Colony
Season 6 Episode 5
Before he was the philosopher of the Glorious Revolution or the intellectual father of the Declaration of Independence, John Locke was a thirty-seven…
4 years, 9 months ago
The Grand Model - The Plantation Machine
Season 6 Episode 4
The institution was ancient and universal. The machine was new. This episode traces how the specific apparatus of Atlantic slavery — industrial, perm…
4 years, 10 months ago
The Grand Model - Older Than Writing
Season 6 Episode 3
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 st…
4 years, 10 months ago