Planting the lowcountry: Agricultural enterprise and economic experience in the Lower South, 1695-1785

"Planting the Lowcountry" explores the economic experiences of plantation owners in South Carolina and Georgia during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It examines planters' strategies of adaptation as they confronted the natural world, carved it into a plantation landscape, marshaled land and labor towards production, managed plantations as enterprises, marketed commodities, and came to terms with new identities as colonial producers. Studies of planter and merchant correspondence, contemporary commentaries, land records, plantation plats, plantation accounting records, advertisements in colonial newspapers, and other sources support this inquiry into the patterns of behavior that shaped plantation commodity production.;This examination of planters' economic experiences presents three key characterizations of planter engagement in the lowcountry economy. Volatile forces buffeted plantation enterprise in ways that forced planters to confront the systems that encompassed their pursuits. To bring this world of extremes into conceptual order, commodity producers accumulated economic experiences and set collective standards for expertise that invested plantership with claims to special instincts and understandings gained through participation in production. This reliance on individual and cumulative experience to amass a pool of unique economic knowledge accompanied a broader process of adaptation, by which planters translated a largely English cultural inheritance into productive initiatives tailored to the Lowcountry's unique demands. Planters fashioned lowcountry plantations to be surprisingly malleable systems of production and consumption. Within a general plantation form that was part labor camp, part community, and part country estate, planters elaborated a variety of distinctive settlement types. The adoption of sophisticated rice-growing methods made plantations sites of constant transformation at which planters struggled to mold slave labor to match the pace of agricultural innovations, balanced a reliance on their core staple with alternative commodities, and distanced themselves from patriarchal roles and direct oversight.;Planters weathered volatile environments, adapted aspirations to conditions from a stance of experiential confidence, and deployed a flexible plantation form that evolved new features as it spread across the lowcountry landscape. Strong commitments to commercial imperatives influenced this process and distinctive identities, that balanced experiences with production on the colonial periphery against metropolitan cultural ideals, emerged from it.