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Chapter Seven The Making of the Lowcountry Plantation In the third quarter of the eighteenth century, important new frontiers for the plantation complex opened up in the British Caribbean as the demand for sugar and Africans surged and the region consolidated its position as the most valuable territory in the empire. The islands that France surrendered at the end of the Seven Years’War—Dominica, St. Vincent,Tobago, and Granada—attracted eager planters who displaced the French and increased sugar production several times over for an insatiable British market. The territories the English had implanted within the Spanish empire, the Mosquito Shore and the Bay of Honduras, took on new life while in Jamaica planters pushed into the interior, expanding the area of cultivation and creating a more diversified economy. One of the largest of the new frontiers lay on the northern edge of this expanding world. Adopting the competitive and exploitative ethos of the Caribbean, a young and feisty Georgia would attempt to create within 25 years a version of the world that the sugar islands had fashioned over 125 years and South Carolina over 80 years. The rise of a plantation economy was considerably more complicated a story than that of a small group of men who made themselves into “rice barons” overnight. That story included small planters who rose to become medium-sized ones and merchants who had choices about plantation models and showed themselves leaders in a highly adaptive economic culture open to agricultural innovation. Simultaneously, how the thirteen thousand Africans imported into the colony and another forty-eight hundred Africans and African Americans brought by their masters would be deployed remained a critical issue. The question of African agency in the development of rice culture took on a different meaning in a colony where one-quarter of the black population came from an adjacent province and were experienced cultivators while the white men who brought them were knowledgeable planters. In the broadest sense, Georgia would follow the same evolution that the The Making of the Lowcountry Plantation 135 Caribbean world had undergone in the preceding century: from subsistence farming by small planters to a monoculture based on staples,from small- to large-scale units of production, from low- to high-value output, from free labor to slavery,from a focus on the local market to dependence on external trade. And if its rice plantations fit a lesser scale of things, they acquired their heart and soul from the culture that grew up around the sugar plantations : fields of cane laid out in neat geometric figures; factories built to crush, mill, and boil cane into brown sugar, molasses, and rum; the concentration of hundreds of African slaves in one spot; a brutal work regime; a black-to-white ratio that reached ten to one; reliance on the transatlantic slave trade; and the ecological transformation that accompanied the inevitable deforestation of the islands.The sugar plantations of the West Indies had evolved into one of the most intensive capital enterprises in the world, consumed black people at a frightening rate, and churned out the single most valuable good imported into Great Britain,sugar,worth more than all the exports of the North American mainland. Along with this gargantuan wealth came the most stratified society in British America. Georgia traced direct descent from this hyperactive and jaundiced culture .First articulated in Barbados during the middle part of the seventeenth century, the practices and attitudes associated with the plantation complex spread to the nearby Leeward Islands in the eastern Caribbean, then to Jamaica after its capture by the English, and from there to the southern part of the North American mainland, all by the end of that century. As historians Jack Greene and Peter Wood have articulated, South Carolina was as much the offspring of Barbados as was Jamaica or other English Caribbean colonies. Its Caribbean connections ran deep: the concentration on a single staple crop, the high ratio of blacks to whites, heavy mortality, the intensely profit-minded and secular attitudes of whites, the massive accumulation of wealth, and the great social disparities within the colony. In the years after its founding in 1670, more than half of the settlers came from Barbados; blacks outnumbered whites by 1710,the first slave society in North America. Carolina’s slave code, refashioned after the stunning Stono Rebellion when twenty or more whites were killed by “New Negroes,” was the most repressive on the continent. In...

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