ReThink History: The Politics of Produce

Nothing an economy makes is fought over harder than the things that keep us alive: the crops we eat and the fibers we wear. This 17-part ReThink History series follows seventeen of them and finds the same story every time, a struggle between capital and labor over a plant that everyone must consume, settled again and again by force (slavery, massacre, coup, deportation) or by organizing (revolt, union, boycott, law). It opens on the Boston Tea Party, when a tax on a consumable lit a revolution, and carries every crop to the present day, 2026. Corn and the sacred maize of Mesoamerica against NAFTA and the GM-seed monopoly. Cacao, the bean that was money, and cochineal, the insect that painted the world red, turned from Aztec tribute into guarded Spanish monopolies. Balsam of Peru, the Salvadoran resin robbed even of its name. Sugar and the Haitian Revolution, the only slave revolt that ever won. Coffee and El Salvador's 1932 massacre, La Matanza. King Cotton, the fiber that made slavery