Don Wildman

So I've always tried to sort of reverse engineer this and understand where that came from.

But it's very complicated.

And we're not, of course, talking only about the Portuguese.

We're talking about the English and the Spanish, the French, the Dutch, all of those European economic powers who are now, you know, freed from their shores by the age of discovery.

And suddenly they can sail all around this world as they're finding out.

And there is land and weather that's going to make things back in Europe, you know, prosper.

Jamaica, Barbados, Brazil are a bigger part of this overhaul story than Americans usually realize, right?

Yeah, exactly.

This is something that begins in the 1400s, moves into the 1500s.

This is long before the American colonies become anything as we know them.

And this is all really planting this and creating this foundation for a whole economy and a whole marketplace that will then steer north towards the American colonies.

The interesting thing is that we're talking about plantations now.

You know, when we hear the word plantation in the American mind, it is the gone with the wind thing.

You know, it's that kind of place.

But really, that word refers to these enormous industrial level enterprises that were really started on those islands and in Brazil.

This being an American history show, we will not spend as much time as I wish we could on the African story at that point.

I desperately want to tell that story.

But what brings that free labor across the ocean, tragically, is what's called the Middle Passage.

The forced transportation of enslaved people from Western and South Central African coast, often working through intermediaries, these slave factors or traders, they were called, of course, worked for companies.

And they placed these folks captive onto these slave ships under the most horrific and lethal conditions.