El Cid Says:

@MonkeyBoy: A different way of viewing some of what Woodard points out: Think about British and Dutch and French colonialism in the Caribbean, and Africa, and other parts of the world.

And how they ran things, the mass production of primary products whether crops or mineral wealth, dependent upon imported slaves when geography dictated (i.e., African slaves in the Caribbean and South America) and colonial structures of forced labor when it didn’t (areas under imperial control in Asia or Africa).

We think of Pilgrims et al making their way to America from England to found colonies.

In the Southern part of the US, it’s a lot more sensible to look at it as the Northward extension of British colonialism and imperialism from the Caribbean, such as the extension of Barbados sugar plantation slave lavor systems to, say, South Carolina.

If you think about a large section of this nation as formed by the extension of British Afro-Caribbean imperialist production to these territories rather than some sort of Founding Father myth, even to the degree of it being a thought experiment about themes rather than a socio-historical model, suddenly things look a lot different.