Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina
Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina

Author: S. Max Edelson

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2011-05-15

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 0674263189

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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.

Planters, Merchants, and Slaves
Planters, Merchants, and Slaves

Author: Trevor Burnard

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2019-02-22

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 022663924X

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"As with any enterprise involving violence and lots of money, running a plantation in early British America was a serious and brutal enterprise. Beyond resources and weapons, a plantation required a significant force of cruel and rapacious men men who, as Trevor Burnard sees it, lacked any better options for making money. In the contentious Planters, Merchants, and Slaves, Burnard argues that white men did not choose to develop and maintain the plantation system out of virulent racism or sadism, but rather out of economic logic because to speak bluntly it worked. These economically successful and ethically monstrous plantations required racial divisions to exist, but their successes were always measured in gold, rather than skin or blood. Burnard argues that the best example of plantations functioning as intended is not those found in the fractious and poor North American colonies, but those in their booming and integrated commercial hub, Jamaica. Sure to be controversial, this book is a major intervention in the scholarship on slavery, economic development, and political power in early British America, mounting a powerful and original argument that boldly challenges historical orthodoxy."--

The Overseers of Early American Slavery
The Overseers of Early American Slavery

Author: Laura R. Sandy

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-04-03

Total Pages: 415

ISBN-13: 1000048969

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Enmeshed in the exploitative world of racial slavery, overseers were central figures in the management of early American plantation enterprises. All too frequently dismissed as brutal and incompetent, they defy easy categorisation. Some were rogues, yet others were highly skilled professionals, farmers, and artisans. Some were themselves enslaved. They and their wives, with whom they often formed supervisory partnerships, were caught between disdainful planters and defiant enslaved labourers, as they sought to advance their ambitions. Their history, revealed here in unprecedented detail, illuminates the complex power struggles and interplay of class and race in a volatile slave society.

The New Map of Empire
The New Map of Empire

Author: S. Max Edelson

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2017-04-24

Total Pages: 481

ISBN-13: 0674978994

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After the Treaty of Paris ended the Seven Years’ War in 1763, British America stretched from Hudson Bay to the Florida Keys, from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River, and across new islands in the West Indies. To better rule these vast dominions, Britain set out to map its new territories with unprecedented rigor and precision. Max Edelson’s The New Map of Empire pictures the contested geography of the British Atlantic world and offers new explanations of the causes and consequences of Britain’s imperial ambitions in the generation before the American Revolution. Under orders from King George III to reform the colonies, the Board of Trade dispatched surveyors to map far-flung frontiers, chart coastlines in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, sound Florida’s rivers, parcel tropical islands into plantation tracts, and mark boundaries with indigenous nations across the continental interior. Scaled to military standards of resolution, the maps they produced sought to capture the essential attributes of colonial spaces—their natural capacities for agriculture, navigation, and commerce—and give British officials the knowledge they needed to take command over colonization from across the Atlantic. Britain’s vision of imperial control threatened to displace colonists as meaningful agents of empire and diminished what they viewed as their greatest historical accomplishment: settling the New World. As London’s mapmakers published these images of order in breathtaking American atlases, Continental and British forces were already engaged in a violent contest over who would control the real spaces they represented. Accompanying Edelson’s innovative spatial history of British America are online visualizations of more than 250 original maps, plans, and charts.

A New Plantation World
A New Plantation World

Author: Daniel Vivian

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-03

Total Pages: 367

ISBN-13: 110841690X

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Examines the creation of 'sporting plantations' in the South Carolina lowcountry during the first four decades of the twentieth century.

Carolina's Golden Fields
Carolina's Golden Fields

Author: Hayden R. Smith

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-10-31

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 110842340X

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"The basis for this book began twenty years ago when I enrolled in the College of Charleston's summer archaeological field school. After spending the first half of the semester honing our technique by digging five-foot by five-foot units, identifying soil stratigraphy, and collecting artifacts at the Charleston Museum's Stono Plantation, the archaeologists reoriented us students to a new site. For the remainder of the field school we investigated Willtown Bluff on the Edisto River, an early-eighteenth century township surrounded by plantations. My interest in inland rice cultivation grew from our work at the James Stobo site, a 1710 plantation located on the edge of the Willtown township and one mile from the tidal river. For three archaeological seasons between 1997 and 1999, I participated in excavations of the Stobo Plantation house foundation located on a hardwood knoll surrounded by a sea of low-lying Cypress wetlands. During this time, I had a unique opportunity to walk off the dry terra firma and explore miles of inland rice embankments sprawling to the east and to the south of the house site. Major embankments traverse the wetlands on a magnetic north/south and east/west axis, intersected by smaller check banks and drainage canals as far as the eye can see under the dense cypress and hardwood canopy"--

What Nature Suffers to Groe
What Nature Suffers to Groe

Author: Mart A. Stewart

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 9780820324593

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"What Nature Suffers to Groe" explores the mutually transforming relationship between environment and human culture on the Georgia coastal plain between 1680 and 1920. Each of the successive communities on the coast--the philanthropic and imperialistic experiment of the Georgia Trustees, the plantation culture of rice and sea island cotton planters and their slaves, and the postbellum society of wage-earning freedmen, lumbermen, vacationing industrialists, truck farmers, river engineers, and New South promoters--developed unique relationships with the environment, which in turn created unique landscapes. The core landscape of this long history was the plantation landscape, which persisted long after its economic foundation had begun to erode. The heart of this study examines the connection between power relations and different perceptions and uses of the environment by masters and slaves on lowcountry plantations--and how these differing habits of land use created different but interlocking landscapes. Nature also has agency in this story; some landscapes worked and some did not. Mart A. Stewart argues that the creation of both individual and collective livelihoods was the consequence not only of economic and social interactions but also of changing environmental ones, and that even the best adaptations required constant negotiation between culture and nature. In response to a question of perennial interest to historians of the South, Stewart also argues that a "sense of place" grew out of these negotiations and that, at least on the coastal plain, the "South" as a place changed in meaning several times.

African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry
African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry

Author: Ras Michael Brown

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-08-27

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1139561049

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African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry examines perceptions of the natural world revealed by the religious ideas and practices of African-descended communities in South Carolina from the colonial period into the twentieth century. Focusing on Kongo nature spirits known as the simbi, Ras Michael Brown describes the essential role religion played in key historical processes, such as establishing new communities and incorporating American forms of Christianity into an African-based spirituality. This book illuminates how people of African descent engaged the spiritual landscape of the Lowcountry through their subsistence practices, religious experiences and political discourse.

Twilight on the South Carolina Rice Fields
Twilight on the South Carolina Rice Fields

Author: Margaret Belser Hollis

Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press

Published: 2012-12-07

Total Pages: 504

ISBN-13: 1611172306

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A firsthand account of the Civil War and Reconstruction in the Old South rice kingdom from one of South Carolina's founding families The Civil War and Reconstruction eras decimated the rice-planting enterprise of the South, and no family experienced the effects of this economic upheaval quite as dramatically as the Heywards of South Carolina, a family synonymous with the wealth of the old rice kingdom in the Palmetto State. Twilight on the South Carolina Rice Fields collects the revealing wartime and postbellum letters and documents of Edward Barnwell "Barney" Heyward (1826–1871), a native of Beaufort District and grandson of Nathaniel Heyward, one of the most successful rice planters and largest slaveholders in the South. Barney Heyward was also the father of South Carolina governor Duncan Clinch Heyward, author of Seed from Madagascar, the definitive account of the rice kingdom's final stand a generation later. Edited by Margaret Belser Hollis and Allen H. Stokes, the Heyward family correspondence from this transformational period reveals the challenges faced by a once-successful industry and a once-opulent society in the throes of monumental change. During the war Barney Heyward served as a lieutenant in the engineering division of the Confederate army but devoted much of his time to managing affairs at his plantations near Columbia and Beaufort. His letters chronicle the challenges of preserving his lands and maintaining control over the enslaved labor force essential to his livelihood and his family's fortune. The wartime letters also provide a penetrating view of the Confederate defense of coastal South Carolina against the Union forces who occupied Beaufort District. In the aftermath of the conflict, Heyward worked with only limited success to revive planting operations. In addition to what these documents reveal about rice cultivation during tumultuous times, they also convey the drama, affections, and turmoil of life in the Heyward family, from Barney's increasingly difficult relations with his father, Charles Heyward, to his heartfelt devotion to his wife, the former Catherine "Tat" Maria Clinch, and their children. Twilight of the South Carolina Rice Fields also features an introduction by noted economic historian Peter A. Coclanis that places these letters and the legacy of the Heyward family into a broader historical context.

A New Plantation World
A New Plantation World

Author: Daniel J. Vivian

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-03-01

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 1108271626

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In the era between the world wars, wealthy sportsmen and sportswomen created more than seventy large estates in the coastal region of South Carolina. By retaining select features from earlier periods and adding new buildings and landscapes, wealthy sporting enthusiasts created a new type of plantation. In the process, they changed the meaning of the word 'plantation', with profound implications for historical memory of slavery and contemporary views of the South. A New Plantation World is the first critical investigation of these 'sporting plantations'. By examining the process that remade former sites of slave labor into places of leisure, Daniel Vivian explores the changing symbolism of plantations in Jim Crow-era America.