In the Shadow of the Great House: A History of the Plantation in America by Daniel Rood

Credit: W. W. Norton & Company

Plantations often evoke images of grand Southern homes framed by columns and oak trees, but historian Daniel Rood argues the real story is much larger and far more enduring. In this episode, Peter Biello and Orlando Montoya discuss Rood’s book In the Shadow of the Great House: A History of the Plantation in America, tracing the origins of plantation systems from Portuguese sugar islands off the coast of Africa to the rise of rice, tobacco, and cotton economies in the American South.

The conversation explores how plantations relied on exploited labor, monoculture farming, and global trade networks that connected places like Barbados, New England, South Carolina, and Georgia. Along the way, the hosts examine Georgia’s early anti-slavery experiment, the expansion of cotton agriculture, and the economic pressures that fueled westward expansion and ultimately intensified the conflicts leading to the Civil War.

But the discussion does not end in the nineteenth century. Rood’s work challenges listeners to consider how plantation-style systems may still exist today in industrial agriculture, corporate food production, and even the infrastructure powering artificial intelligence. The result is a wide-ranging conversation about capitalism, labor, land, and the ways history continues to shape modern life.