Robin Wigglesworth

speaker

1,983 appearances 13 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 12 Aug

Robin Wigglesworth’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 13 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 5.

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The Story of Money · The canal that shaped American finance · 29 Jul 2026 podcast

So w why did the Era Canal Commission

come up with this this project specifically.

Can you explain that link a little bit?

What was the the link to slavery?

And we are back.

It's 1815, and it's already been shown that these kind of waterway projects, whilst they're needed to help unify the country economically, to foster trade, all that good stuff, they're just too expensive for private companies to do.

Many have tried and they all basically failed.

And the federal government has said that it isn't eager to jump in either, because while they mostly consider

concerned about at the time, this Virginia dynasty, led by Thomas Jefferson, well, they want to preserve the peculiar institution of slavery.

And of course, well, there's also war going on with with Great Britain at the time, uh which I think actually at one point led to Britain burning down the White House, right?

At what point there was like they had this big drive, you you mentioned that they sort of they campaigned for this quite uh persuasively, and uh ten percent of New York's population, it was only a million people at the time, but ten percent basically sam signed up in favor of this project, right?

I want to go back to the financing bit, because obviously that's one of my obsessions, and to use that uh terrible American CEO phrase, let's double click on that.

Uh, and find out where the money came from.

Because, like you say, this is a massive, massive construction and engineering project, unlike anything we've ever seen.

I mean, it's not really even a GoFundMe, it's like an Apollo program for the era.

Uh it's the canal is what three

three hundred and fifty miles long, which is an order of magnitude bigger than any canal ever built in America before.

How exactly did they pay for all this?

Was it just oh we'll just sell some bonds and that was it?

Europe

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