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  • Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina
  • Tom Downey
S. Max Edelson. Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2006. xii + 383 pp. ISBN-10: 0-674-02303-1 (alk. Paper); ISBN 13: 978-0-674-02303-1 (alk. Paper), $45.00.

One of the latest books to reappraise the economy of the American South is also one of the best. In Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina, S. Max Edelson presents an examination of the colonial plantation society that is remarkable both for the depth of its research and the nuance of its arguments. Taking aim at the stubbornly persistent image of stagnant plantations and planters more interested in being patriarchs than entrepreneurs, Edelson details the rise and maturation of a society that was anything but staid.

Edelson presents colonial planters as economic opportunists, willing to adapt their methods to the opportunities and limits of their environment. As their economy developed in the latter decades of the 1600s, planters appropriated, amended, or abandoned alternate visions of South Carolina. They amassed knowledge of crops and planting fromEnglish agriculturalists, native Americans, and enslaved Africans, as well as their own accumulated experience. The advent of commercial rice production spurred a series of technological innovations and adaptations, leading planters to embrace lowland swamps (previously disdained by English agricultural models) and oversee their conversion into astonishingly productive rice fields. Nor did planters rest on their laurels. They aggressively bought and sold lands, developed new plantations, altered existing ones, bought all the slaves they could lay their hands on, engaged in sophisticated financial arrangements, and meticulously calculated the costs and profits of their plantations enterprises. [End Page 977]

By the early decades of the eighteenth century, the success of rice production enabled South Carolina's planters to expand their plantation society beyond the immediate confines surrounding Charleston. Vast, new plantation settlements expanded northward toward North Carolina and southward into the Georgia lowcountry, focused almost exclusively on the production of rice for export. These "frontier" plantations were little more than labor camps where slaves labored under brutal conditions and material depravations, transforming swamps into rice fields one shovelful at a time. Planters, in turn, managed these plantations from afar, usually from Charleston, whence they transmitted instructions to hired overseers and dispatched provisions and supplies from diversified "core" plantations in the Charleston hinterlands. The lucrative specialization in rice production in the frontiermade possible an increasing degree of material and social refinement in the core region. Planters built elegant city townhouses and developed stately rural retreats along the Ashley and Cooper rivers, which varied their production to take advantage of the diverse demands of Charleston consumers. This growing urban component made planting, in Edelson's words, "an activity initiated from the city and enacted in the countryside" (p. 129).And, as planters created multicomponent plantation complexes across the lowcounty, "their roles shifted from direct mastery to distanced management" (p. 152). This removal from the day-to-day oversight also insulated planters from the seamier aspects of slavery that were all too manifest in their frontier plantations.

Despite the undoubted economic success of their region, planters nevertheless received neither credit, nor respect from—what they considered—their peers in England, who turned up their noses at swamp farming and African slaves. Planters countered by creating a self-image that took pride in their accomplishments and valued accumulated experience over agricultural theories. This self-satisfaction only increased as planters watched British attempts to "anglicize" the lowcounty with yeomen and slaveless enclaves in the South Carolina interior, Georgia, and Florida that failed miserably. These failures left plantation slavery as "the only effective mode of extending British dominion over the Southeast", and enabled planters to claim that their society had become "an indispensable asset to empire" (p. 196).

As the exemplar of thisworld, Edelson puts forward Henry Laurens, a successful Charleston merchant-turned-planter whose published papers provide arguably themost significant record of the lowcounty's plantation economy. From his urban retreat in the Ansonborough suburb of Charleston, Laurens directed an agricultural empire that [End Page 978] stretched from the Santee to the Altamaha, which included five plantations, some 300 slaves, and a small fleet...

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