Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina

by S. Max Edelson

This impressive scholarly debut deftly reinterprets one of America's oldest symbols--the southern slave plantation. S. Max Edelson examines the relationships between planters, slaves, and the natural world they colonized to create the Carolina Lowcountry.

European settlers came to South Carolina in 1670 determined to possess an abundant wilderness. Over the course of a century, they settled highly adaptive rice and indigo plantations across a vast coastal plain. Forcing slaves to turn swampy wastelands into productive fields and to channel surging waters into elaborate irrigation systems, planters initiated a stunning economic transformation.

The result, Edelson reveals, was two interdependent plantation worlds. A rough rice frontier became a place of unremitting field labor. With the profits, planters made Charleston and its hinterland into a refined, diversified place to live. From urban townhouses and rural retreats, they ran multiple-plantation enterprises, looking to England for affirmation as agriculturists, gentlemen, and stakeholders in Britain's American empire. Offering a new vision of the Old South that was far from static, Edelson reveals the plantations of early South Carolina to have been dynamic instruments behind an expansive process of colonization.

With a bold interdisciplinary approach, "Plantation Enterprise" reconstructs the environmental, economic, and cultural changes that made the Carolina Lowcountry one of the most prosperous and repressive regions in the Atlantic world.

Genres: American History, History

400 pages, Hardcover

First published October 30, 2006

About the author

A specialist in the history of colonial British America and the Atlantic world, Max Edelson is professor of history at the University of Virginia.

Reviews

[Samuel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Characterizations/conclusions based on statistical data drawn from land records, plantation advertisements, account books, and other sources—demography, economy, and society in colonial SC. 1670 English Carolina established—1780s…transformed swampy wilderness into cultivated landscapes of rice fields (1). “Occupying, cultivating, and inhabiting land was Britain’s defining strength as a colonizing society in the new world.” Plantation connoted two things during the seventeenth century: i. colonial occupation and ii. entrepreneurial agriculture (2). Tobacco, sugar, and rice (3).
“Despite the rigors of slavery, plantations in which blacks outnumbered whites by more than ten to one became preserves for the development of an autonomous African American culture.” The plantation as “a dynamic instrument of colonization and economic development”—“an intensive engagement with the natural environment and a willingness to adapt market agriculture to to its constraints and opportunities”—planters = early modern capitalists (4).

Four critical environmental adaptations that shaped the evolution of their plantation economy:
1) adapted a British model for valuing and using land to create the first plantations
2) turned a foreign crop (rice) into a lucrative staple commodity by adapting to their swampy environ
3) in response to the Lowcountry’s volatile climate, shaped land/water to secure crop from the elements
(technical innovations in irrigation/rice processing and adding indigo as a second staple crop) (5)
4) formed contrasting zones of production and consumption (black frontiers/hinterlands vs. white metropolises—Charlestown) (6).

“These dynamics of extensive settlement, agricultural innovation, and economic integration circulate as central themes in the history of Henry Laurens’s plantation enterprise, perhaps the best-documented plantation business in colonial British America….a prosperous and expanding zone for enterprise that stretched from the Caribbean to the Chesapeake.” Revolution wreaked havoc on the southern plantation vision, severing transatlantic ties, and forcing them to transform their cultural capital to an insular system in the continental South (12).

“Carolina: economic culture that was creole in character—open to cross-cultural influences and willing to shed normative models—civilizing forces of urbanity (rice, indigo, and cotton YES. silk, wine, almonds NO.) (52).
Plantations “functioned as cultural shelters that allowed planters to see the promise of cultural improvement realized in the dramatic territorial expansion of their society in the eighteenth century” (165). Plantations should be called slave labor camps.

“These persistent images of stasis [in plantations] can be scraped away to reveal colonial plantations as sites of transformation rather than as places that seem to exist outside the currents of historical time (268).

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very well-written as well as well-researched book on its topic, and while its focus is on planters in South Carolina, there's content of merit for the general scholar of the plantation era of the Americna South here, too. The focus on transforming the natural environment—which in coastal South Carolina was a pretty swampy, difficult, and alien environment for early planters—into one which could sustain viable agricultural enterprise is fascinating. We take for granted our ability to mold the land into what we desire it to be via technology today, but in the colonial days up to the Civil War of course technological means were much less advanced, and yet people were able to carve out resolute plantations nonetheless. Professor Edelson's introspection on the business side of establishing and running these plantations is especially nuanced and interesting. All in all, a fine book on South Carolina history.