#21 Whose America?: Prologue
The Martyr Made Podcast
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The Poor, the Waste
Promoters of colonization imagined america not as an eden of opportunity, but as a giant rubbish heap that could be transformed into productive turain. Most settlers in the seventeenth century did not envision their forced exile as the start of a city upon a hill. The english subscribed to the idea that the poor dregs would be weeded out of english society in four ways. Either nature would reduce the burden of the poor through food shortages, starvation and disease, or drawn into crime, they might end up on the gallows. Finally, some would be impressed by force, or lured by bounties, to fight and die in foreign wars, or else be shipped off to the colonies
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