Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina.(Book review)

Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina. By S. Max Edelson. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2006. Pp. [xvi], 383. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-674-02303-1.)

S. Max Edelson's Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina describes a plantation culture in a state of flux. Edelson first traces the colonization of South Carolina, a process that involved promotional literature lauding the land's fertility and the idea that the colony would replicate English farms in a New World setting. Then he examines changes over time in agriculture: how South Carolina's colonists first herded cattle and grew corn, then made the transition to rice culture, and finally, in the late colonial period, divided the landscape into three complementary zones of production. These zones consisted of a core centered in Charlestown and its environs, a secondary zone of inland swamp rice plantations that received intermittent watering from overflowing…