Beyond chattel slavery, who really built the global plantation complex?

This lecture takes a global, longue durée approach, challenging the assumption that plantations relied solely on chattel slavery. Randy M. Browne reveals that planters were insidiously flexible, extracting labor from a wide variety of coerced workers, including convicts, indentured servants, and nominally free wage laborers across the Americas, the Indian Ocean, and Australia. What united these workers was the shared experience of forced migration, dispossession, and crushing violence.