Latest Articles — Volume 0
The Price · 1607
The Jamestown Gamble
Virginia Company investors bet £6,000 on a colony that nearly starved. The share price held. The people inside the fort did not.
The Price · 1609
The Starving Time
How America's first corporate scandal ate its own people — and why the share price held.
The Price · 1612
The Stolen Seed
John Rolfe’s tobacco found a London buyer. The famous theft story is legend. The export boom was real.
The Price · 1615
The Monoculture Trap
Tobacco saved Jamestown. Then it began consuming everything around it — soil, land, people, and eventually the corporation that built it.
The Price · 1630
The Nutrient Vampire
Tobacco didn't just exhaust the land. It turned exhaustion into a system — converting soil depletion into territorial conquest.
The Market · 1650
The Triangle That Built Everything
Three continents. Three commodities. The first global arbitrage economy — and it ran on human cargo.
The Decision · 1640
The Leaf That Became Money
When Britain starved the colonies of gold, the colonies invented their own currency. It was green, perishable, and paid judges' salaries.
The Operator · 1640
The Plantation Balance Sheet
The plantation was not a farm. It was a financial instrument — vertically integrated, debt-financed, built on the bodies of people who received nothing from it.
The Price · 1676
Bacon's Rebellion
A structural detonation — the inevitable consequence of a plantation economy that had eliminated the middle class and created two classes of desperate people.
The Market · 1672
The First Slave Trade IPO
A chartered company, with shareholders, held a monopoly that included the slave trade. When the monopoly opened, the trade grew.