Download Free The Development Of Market Agriculture In South Carolina 1670 1785 Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online The Development Of Market Agriculture In South Carolina 1670 1785 and write the review.

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.
A standard source on one of the most enigmatic colonies in North America In this modern and complete history, Robert Weir explicates the apparent paradoxes that defined colonial South Carolina. In doing so he offers provocative observations about its ascension to the pinnacle of mid-eighteenth-century prosperity, escalating racial tension, struggles for political control, and push toward revolution.
Coclanis here charts the economic and social rise and fall of a small, but intriguing part of the American South: Charleston and the surrounding South Carolina low country. Spanning 250 years, his study analyzes the interaction of both external and internal forces on the city and countryside, examining the effect of various factors on the region's economy from its colonial beginnings to its collapse in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
In this exhaustive biography, Keith Krawczynski details the political and social career of William Henry Drayton (1742–1779), an ambitious, wealthy lowcountry planter and zealous patriot leader who was at the center of Revolutionary activity in South Carolina from 1774 until his death five years later. Considered the most effective Whig polemicist in the lower South, Drayton served on all his state’s important Revolutionary governing bodies, commanded a frigate of war, was elected chief justice in 1776, co-authored South Carolina’s 1778 constitution, and represented the state in the Continental Congress from 1778 until his demise. Although Drayton was a leading radical and the central figure of the American Revolution in South Carolina, historians have largely ignored his contributions. With William Henry Drayton, Krawczynski removes this fascinating man from the shadows of history. Drayton was an improbable rebel. After receiving his formal education in England, the South Carolina–born Drayton returned to his birthplace as a planter and continued to espouse Royalist ideals. During a later visit to Britain, he was hailed as a champion of British sovereignty. In fact, South Carolina harbored few early revolutionaries, as low-country planters and merchants remained entrenched in the imperial system of trade, backcountry residents strongly identified with the king, and whites feared showing division lest their slaves launch a rebellion. Yet, disgruntled with the king’s increasing infringement on American liberties, Drayton embraced the rebel cause with the zealotry of a recent convert and eventually did more to resist British rule than any other resident of the Palmetto State. Because he entered the Revolution as a supporter of the Crown, Drayton’s life sheds light on why the planter-mercantile gentry rebelled against the mother country on which it relied for its economic status. His energetic attempts to preserve the provincial hierarchy and keep the reins of government firmly in the hands of the local aristocracy also help to explain why South Carolina’s rebellion was more politically conservative than that of other states. By raising the profile of this South Carolina patriot, William Henry Drayton brings new depth to our understanding of the American Revolution.
In An Anxious Pursuit, Joyce Chaplin examines the impact of the Enlightenment ideas of progress on the lives and minds of American planters in the colonial Lower South. She focuses particularly on the influence of Scottish notions of progress, tracing the extent to which planters in South Carolina, Georgia, and British East Florida perceived themselves as a modern, improving people. She reads developments in agricultural practice as indices of planters' desire for progress, and she demonstrates the central role played by slavery in their pursuit of modern life. By linking behavior and ideas, Chaplin has produced a work of cultural history that unites intellectual, social, and economic history. Using public records as well as planters' and farmers' private papers, Chaplin examines innovations in rice, indigo, and cotton cultivation as a window through which to see planters' pursuit of a modern future. She demonstrates that planters actively sought to improve their society and economy even as they suffered a pervasive anxiety about the corrupting impact of progress and commerce. The basis for their accomplishments and the root of their anxieties, according the Chaplin, were the same: race-based chattel slavery. Slaves provied the labor necessary to attain planters' vision of the modern, but the institution ultimately limited the Lower South's ability to compete in the contemporary world. Indeed, whites continued to wonder whether their innovations, some of them defied by slaves, truly improved the region. Chaplin argues that these apprehensions prefigured the antimodern stance of the antebellum period, but she contends that they were as much a reflection of the doubt inherent in theories of progress as an outright rejection of those ideas.
Brings together the most recent and essential writings on slavery. Spanning almost five centuries - the late fifteenth until the mid-nineteenth - the articles trace the range and impact of slavery on the modern western world.
In this innovative study of the South Carolina Low Country, author Stephanie McCurry explores the place of the yeomanry in plantation society--the complex web of domestic and public relations within which they were enmeshed, and the contradictory politics of slave society by which that class of small farmers extracted the privileges of masterhood from the region's powerful planters. Insisting on the centrality of women as historical actors and gender as a category of analysis, this work shows how the fateful political choices made by the low-country yeomanry were rooted in the politics of the household, particularly in the customary relations of power male heads of independent households assumed over their dependents, whether slaves or free women and children. Such masterly prerogatives, practiced in the domestic sphere and redeemed in the public, explain the yeomanry's deep commitment to slavery and, ultimately, their ardent embrace of secession. By placing the yeomanry in the center of the drama, McCurry offers a significant reinterpretation of this volatile society on the road to Civil War. Through careful and creative use of a wide variety of archival sources, she brings vividly to life the small worlds of yeoman households, and the larger world of the South Carolina Low Country, the plantation South, and nineteenth-century America.
Reflecting the burgeoning interest of colonial historians in South Carolina and its role as the economic and cultural center of the Lower South, Money, Trade, and Power is a comprehensive exploration of the colony's slave system, economy, and complex social and cultural life. The first six chapters of this essay collection focus on the formative decades of South Carolina's history, from 1670 through the 1730s. Contributors Meaghan N. Duff, Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, and Gary L. Hewitt explore the colony's early settlement. R. C. Nash, Stephen G. Hardy, and Eirlys M. Barker investigate the rapidly expanding economy. Turning to the colony's reliance on slave labor, William L. Ramsay analyzes the institution and abandonment of Indian slavery; Jennifer Lyle Morgan examines the reproductive capabilities of slave women; and S. Max Edelson looks at the distinctive social position of skilled slaves. Robert Olwell considers how South Carolina public officials adapted the office of justice of the peace to the needs of a slave society, while Matthew Mulcahy shows how calamities of fires and hurricanes exacerbated the problem of slave control. Finally, Edward Pearson describes the ways in which South Carolina's emerging elite asserted their new status; G. Winston Lane and Elizabeth M. Pruden review the surprising economic independence of women; and Thomas Little examines the colony's religious life and spread of evangelicalism.