South Carolina and the Atlantic Economy in the Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Many historians agree that the most powerful force in the expansion of the economy of British colonial America was the rapid growth of regional export sectors. This is usually seen in the light of the staples thesis, which predicts that the course of colonial exports is mainly shaped by secular increases in metropolitan demand. The first section presents new evidence on the export markets for South Carolina's major staple, rice, and shows that demand changes played a subsidiary role in expansion. More important was a series of supply changes in the international cereals trade, and in the colonial rice industry. The second section provides a survey of the reorganization of plantation agriculture in eighteenth-century Carolina, and the paper concludes by briefly comparing developments in the rice trade with those in sugar and tobacco.