"He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare…is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And..he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them…"--the famous deleted passage about the slave trade from the Declaration of Independence

This episode explores plantation economies and slave labor on plantations throughout British North America and the British Caribbean. Topics include the following:

-efforts to curb the slave trade in Virginia in 1769 and 1772

-the difference between colonists' opposition to the slave trade and their acceptance of the institution of slavery

-the origins of the integrated planation model in the Caribbean, specifically Barbados, in the 16th century

-the expansion of the plantation model throughout the Caribbean and the 13 Colonies

-an overview of the tobacco trade which stretched from the Chesapeake to Scotland and to continental Europe

-the debt crisis facing Virginia tobacco planters in the middle of the 18th century

-Jefferson's and Madison's competing visions of the economic future of America

-the constant fear of slave rebellions and differing attitudes about British troops in the sugar islands versus the 13 Colonies

-Dunmore's proclamation (1775), which offered freedom to enslaved people who joined British lines during the Revolutionary War

-debates in the new US about the role slavery should take in the economic future of the country

-the emergence of the cotton industry and the role of the Haitian revolution in providing economic rationale for the continuation of slavery in the US after the Revolutionary War

Prof. Musselwhite's most recent book can be found here:

Urban Dreams, Rural Commonwealth

The cover image, courtesy of the Colonial Williamsburg foundation, is likely from 1750.