On the Rim of the Caribbean: Colonial Georgia and the British Atlantic World

Introduction

How did colonial Georgia,an economic backwater for much of its existence, find its way into the burgeoning Caribbean and Atlantic economies where trade spilled over national boundaries, merchants reacted to rapidly shifting conditions in multiple markets, and the transport of enslaved Africans bound together four continents and three races? Scholarly interest in comparative and interdisciplinary approaches to studying the past has produced a deep and rich understanding of the role of the Carolina lowcountry within the British Atlantic economy. Considerably less attention has been paid to placing Georgia within that same context, in part because its coastal area seemed a simple extension of the Carolina lowcountry. As a recently created colony, Georgia seemed to contemporaries and historians alike to be a peripheral region, a “fledgling province” of little weight, more acted upon than an active participant in colonial affairs, as one scholar has so well phrased it. Created as a utopian experiment for redeeming the “worthy poor” of England , it ended its first nineteen years nearly bankrupt.Thereafter, it lagged behind developments elsewhere in North America and only reluctantly embraced the American Revolution. Yet the colony was also a microcosm of broader forces at work in the Atlantic world. Its experience speaks to the spread of a plantation system that reflected the greater Caribbean world,the growing importance of the African Diaspora in transforming the lowcountry , the emergence of a merchant community that had its roots in a transatlantic world,and the continuing importance of the deerskin trade in knitting together the West Indies, native towns, and the London leather market. Georgia sat on the outer edge of a plantation complex that dominated the Caribbean and reached from the rivers of Brazil in South America to the southeastern coast of the North American mainland, one of the last territories in that vast area to be incorporated into the larger whole. When James Oglethorpe and a band of like-minded philanthropists obtained a charter from the Crown in 1732 to found a colony for humanitarian as well Introduction 2 introduction as military and mercantilist reasons, they were swimming against the tide. The worthy poor gathered from the urban centers of Great Britain, together with German peasants deeply rooted in a simple Pietist culture, presented a striking contrast to the hypercompetitive,grasping emigrants from Barbados who had been so instrumental in the founding of South Carolina in 1670. With a steadfast sense of purpose, the colony represented a resounding repudiation of that Caribbean world: the prohibition of slavery and rum; the commitment to subsistence farming; a population composed primarily of artisans, minor officials, and indentured servants; the deliberate choice not to produce an exportable commodity—in short a refusal to participate in the Atlantic economy, while being deeply engaged in the Atlantic world. Members of the charter generation, about two thousand strong, made their way into the royal period, and if most were ready for the change, their frame of mind still reflected their earlier experiences. How Georgia’s original population merged into the new order after the adoption of slavery is an important part of a larger story. In the years after 1750, it is not too extreme to speak of the “Carolinization ” of Georgia as a model of plantation development took hold that was rooted in the West Indies and transformed by South Carolina.That colony owed its social and cultural system to Barbados, cradle of the sugar revolution in the mid-seventeenth century and “cultural hearth” of the British West Indies.The Barbadians who settled there were a potent mix of planters , adventurers, artisans, indentured servants, and enslaved people who faithfully replicated their world: capitalist exploitation of land, intensive slave labor, a highly stratified society, and the production of a staple commodity for export. From there, a lowcountry cultural core radiated from Charles Town, stretching north to include the Cape Fear region of North Carolina and into coastal Georgia. The end of the prohibition of slavery in 1750 opened a fresh chapter. David Chestnutt has described the migration of 359 Carolina planters across the Savannah River in successive waves between 1746 and 1766, carrying with them a work force and capital that primed the growth of rice plantations. If South Carolina was the colony of a colony, then its younger sibling could claim an even longer lineage through a succession of three colonies. Because the raw and young Georgia was influenced by multiple cultural and economic forces, it is important to put...