The Long Way Back to Ourselves

5.10

Silver, Sugar, Slaves, and the First World Market

This episode follows the Atlantic slave trade as a financial system, arguing the schoolbook "triangular trade" picture hides a denser network of direct Brazil-West Africa voyages financed through shares, marine insurance, and limited liability. It centers on the 1781 case of a British slave ship, whose crew threw over 130 people overboard alive, and whose owners sued their insurer for the "lost cargo," argued as though the victims had been livestock. It tests, and narrows, Sidney Mintz's thesis that the sugar plantation, with timed, supervised labor, was an early factory form predating it by a century. You learn Virginia's 1662 and 1667 laws made enslaved status hereditary through the mother, unaffected by baptism, closing off every remaining path out.