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8 cze 2016 · Carolina indigo was the fifth most valuable commodity exported by Britain’s mainland colonies and was England’s primary source of blue dye in the late-colonial era. South Carolina experimented with indigo production as early as the 1670s but could not compete with superior dyes produced in the West Indies.
16 sie 2019 · The cultivation of indigo in colonial South Carolina was but a cog in that macroeconomic wheel of fortune that revolved around the hub of London. As with tobacco in Virginia and sugar cane in the Caribbean, indigo was quite literally a foreign commodity to the early settlers of South Carolina.
Cereals (such as rice, millet, and sorghum), yams, black-eyed peas, sesame (benne), muskmelons, okra, and Guinea squash were all subsistence crops transferred from West and Central Africa to English New World colonies, including Carolina.
20 cze 2016 · Although South Carolina planters grew a little tobacco in the early years, rice became the colony’s most important staple, and in the years prior to the Revolutionary War, a full-scale plantation culture worked by African slaves emerged along the rivers of the Carolina lowcountry.
Carolina gold rice is named for the magnificent golden color of the ripe plants in early autumn. However, so wealthy did it make the early planters of the lowcountry, it could also refer to its financial importance. By the early 1720s rice had become the major crop in the colony, with some 6 million pounds shipped to England annually.
They quickly identified land ideal for growing rice—the Carolina colony’s most lucrative crop. The landscape of Stono Preserve was ideal for rice cultivation because of its low, swampy land, numerous tidal creeks and marshes, and proximity to the Stono River.
Plantation owners took full advantage of the young colony’s growing cash crop and were able to satisfy Europeans’ demand for the grain through profitable exchanges and trade. It didn’t take long for Carolina to become the British empire’s powerful rice colony.
