S. Max Edelson has written a book of enormous importance for those interested in the economy of the southeast of the mainland Anglo-American British colonies. Though this is not a traditional work of economic history, it offers much to economic historians. With poignant prose and a keen eye for detail, Edelson shows how and why the colony developed as it did, and provides a compelling account of the spread of the colonial economy across the land. He infuses his work with insights about the environment, planter culture, agricultural patterns, and both local and long-distance trade.

Edelson is not the first historian to tackle the specific challenges of the southeastern economy in the colonial period. In 1974 Peter Wood's Black Majority (New York: Knopf, 1974) brought colonial South Carolina into the academic mainstream, which was then dominated by studies of New England and the Chesapeake. In subsequent years scholars offered important studies of aspects of the Carolina economy, notably the development of its slave economy, including foundational works by Peter Coclanis (The Shadow of a Dream. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), Joyce Chaplin (An Anxious Pursuit. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), and Philip D. Morgan (Slave Counterpoint. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

Edelson is less interested in writing an economic history of the region than in showing how its economic culture emerged and functioned. To be sure, he does provide some tables and statistical estimates that advance our knowledge of certain areas of the economy, such as the ways that planters acquired land, the size of landholdings, and details about the sales of the prominent planter Henry Laurens. But he is more interested in how the economy developed, which he traces to four interrelated phenomena. First, Anglo settlers in the region imported British ideas about land use, just as they had in other parts of eastern North America. Second, they learned how to grow rice, a crop that these immigrant planters soon made the most important staple of the regional economy. Third, to produce rice they reshaped the environment, an effort that forced them to learn how to manipulate the flow of water to create the right conditions. Fourth, as they developed the rice economy planters created distinctive milieus within the region, establishing plantations dominated by slaves and a local center of commerce and consumption in Charlestown, which became in the eighteenth century one of the most important cities in the Anglo-American colonies. South Carolina's natural environment, which had long been home to indigenous peoples with their own economic practices, became what Edelson calls “a landscape of possibility” (p. 13) for the English, who transformed it in the search for profits and a secure place in the British Atlantic world of commerce.

Edelson's research reveals that the English had to be adaptive in order to succeed. The planters of Carolina were not the only English migrants to learn that lesson, but he reveals that they perhaps more than any other mainland newcomers embraced the need for flexibility. These Carolinians were “agricultural omnivores” (p. 15) eager to make sense of an environment that posed unique challenges to them. The early settlers needed to rely on trade with local natives, but over time the area began to lure colonists. The immigrant population grew from 1,000 to 6,000 during the last two decades of the seventeenth century, even before English planters began to take full advantage of the Atlantic slave trade; by 1730, 10,000 colonists dominated a colony which by then had 20,000 slaves. Edelson shows how planters moved from early economic ventures, such as cattle, toward the triumvirate of cotton, indigo, and, especially after 1720, rice.

Edelson is alert to the costs of this economic venture. The English succeeded only because they managed first to wrest land from its indigenous occupants and second to people, much of it with slaves. “As rice became a commodity in early South Carolina,” he aptly writes, “racial repression went hand in hand with agricultural exchange” (p. 64). For the English, the development of this system offered extraordinary rewards, especially for planters who managed to transform multiple low-lying plantations into efficient productive organizations. They faced trials, of course, including wartime disruptions of trade and periodic environmental catastrophes such as droughts. Yet, as Edelson reveals, each planter's actions further secured the new economic culture of the region or, as he puts it, “[e]very plantation was a site of colonization writ small” (p. 113). By 1770 planters had reshaped most of the lowcountry, especially the river valleys that sustained rice plantations.

One of the persistent strengths of Edelson's book is the material relating to the regional environment. He demonstrates more carefully than earlier historians the links between Charlestown and other “zones of settlement” (p. 128). Planters congregated in the city, but they needed the hinterland to produce the goods that enabled them to live richly and participate in long-distance trade. During the colonial period this plantation system did not reach much beyond a distance of 100 miles from the coastline, but it still flourished. Those who succeeded did so because they mastered a body of local knowledge, which enabled them to overcome the sense of provincial inferiority that many felt. Countering charges that their reliance on slavery had lowered the level of their culture, Carolina planters reoriented prevailing custom by incorporating discussion of business into their society. Buying and selling, vulgar topics to elite Britons, became acceptable in the intimate commercial world of Charlestown. Edelson examines Lauren's life in detail to show how this economy worked and, as he reveals, contracted during the Revolution.

Edelson demonstrates the falsity behind the legend of the timeless southern plantation shaded by live oaks draped with Spanish moss. This was myth, not reality. Edelson reveals the Carolina planter as a dynamic agent of change who succeeded only by adapting to shifting circumstances. This world was often brutal, as Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur discovered first hand when he saw slaves sentenced to death suspended in cages in trees. Such systemic violence fit an age in which human rights mattered less than profits in ledger books.