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Reviews of Books
Cara Anzilotti, Loyola Marymount University
| Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina. By S. Max Edelson. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2006. 399 pages. $45.00 (cloth).
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This brilliant blending of economic and cultural history provides a powerful corrective to the prevailing view of southern plantations as static, tradition-bound sites of entrenched paternalism. S. Max Edelson's work is a study of the evolution of a colonial venture and of the plantation, both in image and in fact. Those who journeyed to Carolina in the late seventeenth century expected to enrich themselves as they furthered Britain's imperial agenda by recreating English agricultural practices essentially intact and by molding the landscape to conform to their notions of a civilized space. They were always conscious of the quest for wealth, Edelson argues; rather than remaining on the periphery of an expanding transatlantic marketplace, the Carolina planters were intimately tied to the market through their agricultural endeavors and were in fact "early modern capitalists" (4). |
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In making this compelling argument, Edelson sets aside the image of the plantation as unchanging and wedded to its remote locale and redefines it as a dynamic place, adapting to local conditions and to the market in innovative ways. The image of the planter is redrawn here too, as Edelson envisions him not merely as the colonial equivalent of an English gentleman but as the active "man of trade, who put the demands of commerce at the center of his social world" (8). To that end South Carolina's settlers modified their expectations of establishing Englishstyle farms throughout the colony and effectively accommodated to the unique landscape of the low country. |
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Refining that landscape presented challenges and opportunities. The Lords Proprietors' carefully articulated vision of English husbandmen forging communities in a wilderness made orderly through the imposition of traditional settlement patterns and farming techniques and the careful control of commercial activities was essentially ignored by the settlers themselves. Edelson shows that for low country colonizers the plantation became a vehicle of personal, not collective, advancement. And the planter became an innovator, modifying a traditional English agricultural model to meet the challenges and the opportunities South Carolina's lowlands presented. "For planters determined to acquire wealth rapidly in early Carolina, adapting to the environment meant reaching beyond a pool of British practices and enhancing husbandry with foreign techniques" (48). |
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The simple answer to the question of South Carolina's economic success was rice. The colony's proprietors had envisioned agricultural innovation, but the search for a salable commodity progressed fitfully. Ultimately, rice cultivation wedded the desire for a marketable staple to the low country's unique topography. When settlers first encountered the region's extensive swamps, they seemed nothing more than wastelands to be avoided. But Edelson charts a dramatic shift in local appraisals of Carolina's various geographic zones, noting that those regions that had been dismissed in the colonists' first estimation over time became the most desirable real estate. This reevaluation necessitated a physical and psychological shift away from English crops. Settlers learned to embrace foreign foodways to survive and to prosper. And as they appropriated an exotic crop, they redefined it as an extension of English husbandry rather than a departure from it. As Edelson puts it, "they applied the innovative approaches of 'improved' British agriculture to make this foreign crop their own" (54). |
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