| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina. By S. Max Edelson. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. xvi, 383 pp. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-674-02303-1.)
This fine book explores plantation development in colonial South Carolina. S. Max Edelson deftly traces how some early colonists overcame their prejudice toward marshes and swamps to develop a profitable plantation system. They adapted the Carolina landscape to the Atlantic economy by learning from local Indian communities and imported Africans, and through active experimentation, refining the art of rice production, which they supplemented with indigo and other crops.	1
That transformation required careful planning and intensive labor. Planters mastered both the land and their slaves. Despite the incorporation of a task system that gave African workers more self-supervision than existed in other plantation societies, Edelson makes clear that rice plantations should be viewed as labor camps where harsh conditions and the threat of coercion typified work and living conditions. Rather than a response to slave agency, Edelson views the use of the task system as an outgrowth of the technology of rice production. For indigo cultivation, planters discarded the task system and upset slave life by shifting laborers from one crop and plantation to the next.	. . .

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