The cotton plantation was America’s first large business

Evidence

The cotton plantation was America’s first big business, and the overseer was the nation’s first corporate Big Brother. And behind every cold calculation, every rational fine-tuning of the system, violence lurked. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 577

Categorization

• XREF: Core reframing claim: slavery as birthplace of American corporate management — links directly to the foundational-vs-peripheral distinction the reader is tracking.