Don Wildman

And that has always fascinated me.

And I've not done enough study to understand that.

the chain reaction of thinking that goes on with those European powers that say, hmm, we want to make a lot of money here.

How are we going to do that if we have to, you know, take laborers over there and pay them?

That's not going to work.

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.