New York

by Edward Rutherfurd

“When there is a little breeze, listen to the voice of the wind sighing in the pine trees. Then you will hear me.”

Like most of the local Indians, they had planted maize in March, then kidney beans, which served as useful props for the tall maize plants, in May.

he reckoned a good part of the wealth of the British Empire depended on the slaves in the sugar plantations, so it wouldn’t be ended any time soon.

As England’s mighty sugar trade had grown larger than ever, so the numbers of slaves being sold in the markets had risen. Since the days when Hudson’s grandfather was a boy, the West Indies had sucked in almost a million slaves, and the whole African slave trade was now in British hands.

There were more slaves as a percentage of population in the New York region than anywhere north of Virginia.

“I had not realized how much we colonials are despised.” “The British are angry. When people are angry, any insult will do; and prejudice is magnified into a cause.”

And when the South had negotiated that every three slaves should count as two white people in calculating the population of each state, hadn’t that neatly boosted the number of representatives the Southern states would be allotted in Congress?

The richest China trade, of course, was in drugs. British merchants, supported by their government, ran huge quantities of illegal opium into China. Recently, when the Chinese emperor had protested at what this was doing to his people, the righteous British government had sent warships to attack him, forced the Chinese to buy the drugs, and taken Hong Kong for themselves as well.

he shouldn’t be so surprised when it had managed to divide the whole country. Nor was it only the rights and wrongs of the slavery question, but the profound difference in philosophy that the argument had revealed—a