I'm John Bachelor, Daniel Rood, Professor here, his new book is in the shadow of the great house.

The great house is the plantation. It's a system to exploit a cash crop with enormous margins.

We're headed now to the Carolinas because what worked in the Caribbean, sugar, is now going to work in the Carolinas for rice.

And this fact, the slave system, the big house,

the brutality, all will come from Barbados and Jamaica. But I learned that what we have here is a revelation to everybody about the profit margins. And they didn't ask, and the question is still

debatable, where does rice come from? Who brought the rice to America, Professor?

There's been a lot of debate about that. But could I just trace back really quick and just talk about, and just talk briefly about where the great house metaphor came from?

Of course.

Oh, so that the title of my book came from a sermon given by a formerly enslaved preacher to his recently emancipated congregants, I think,

in 1866. And someone observes him giving this sermon, and he says to the men and women and

children listening to him, if you will never feel like a free woman, you will never feel like a free man

if you don't escape the shadow of the great house. And that becomes impossible. They build a system

to make that not credible until the crisis of the 19th century?

Well, what I'm arguing in the book is like the shadow of the great house is the way in which there are these, there's this boom and these short-term profits and all these plantations are built.

And then, because this is how plantations work, they sort sort of ravaged the labor and ravage the land and very quickly profit margins go down. And but the, it's always, it's never,

oh, geez, maybe we shouldn't do that again. It's what's the next big chance? And so we've got this kind

of unending cycle of plantations, booms, and bus,

and we are still not out of the shadow of the great house.

There's more irony here, Professor.

John Locke, I learn, is celebrated by the founders in America.

We know this from our readings.

At the same time, John Locke is one of the philosophers

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