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From 1754 to 1755, the slave shipHarecompleted a journey from Newport, Rhode Island, to Sierra Leone and back to the United States-a journey that transformed more than seventy Africans into commodities, condemning some to death and the rest to a life of bondage in North America. In this engaging narrative, Sean Kelley painstakingly reconstructs this tumultuous voyage, detailing everything from the identities of the captain and crew to their wild encounters with inclement weather, slave traders, and near-mutiny. But most importantly, Kelley tracks the cohort of slaves aboard theHarefrom their purchase in Africa to their sale in South Carolina. In tracing their complete journey, Kelley provides rare insight into the communal lives of slaves and sheds new light on the African diaspora and its influence on the formation of African American culture.In this immersive exploration, Kelley connects the story of enslaved people in the United States to their origins in Africa as never before. Told uniquely from the perspective of one particular voyage, this book brings a slave ship's journey to life, giving us one of the clearest views of the eighteenth-century slave trade.

Mangrove rice farming on West Africa's Rice Coast was the mirror image of tidewater rice plantations worked by enslaved Africans in 18th-century South Carolina and Georgia. This book reconstructs the development of rice-growing technology among the Baga and Nalu of coastal Guinea, beginning more than a millennium before the transatlantic slave trade. It reveals a picture of dynamic pre-colonial coastal societies, quite unlike the static, homogenous pre-modern Africa of previous scholarship. From its examination of inheritance, innovation, and borrowing, Deep Roots fashions a theory of cultural change that encompasses the diversity of communities, cultures, and forms of expression in Africa and the African diaspora.

Europe's indigo imports grew rapidly from the 1720s, but the mid-century wars (1739–48, 1756–63 had a devastating effect on the European textile industries and hence on the indigo trade. Britain's indigo market, however, boomed in wartime on the bases of prize indigo captured from France and Spain and of indigo imported from South Carolina. The rise of South Carolina's trade from the mid-1740s was not caused, as the historiography claims, by its monopoly of the British market—such a monopoly never existed—but because the depression in South Carolina's major staple, rice, compelled a remodelling of the South Carolina plantation system, which produced an elastic supply of indigo. Carolina indigo was blighted by a poor reputation, not, as is usually argued, because British merchants maligned unfairly its quality, but because Carolina planters failed to achieve consistent production standards. Carolina indigo nevertheless succeeded in displacing French and Spanish indigo in the British and in some continental markets, reflecting the demand for cheap dyestuffs from manufacturers of low-cost textiles, the fastest-growing sectors of the European textile industries at the onset of industrialization.

Charleston, South Carolina is one of the most acclaimed tourism destinations in the United States, but until recently there have been few effectively inclusive representations of African American history and culture in the city’s highly trafficked public history landscape. As the dominant North American port during the trans-Atlantic slave trade, in a plantation region with an African American population majority from the early 1700s into the mid-1900s, comprehensively acknowledging and representing African American history in “Historic Charleston” is long overdue. For over a decade, developers of the International African American Museum (IAAM) have worked to address this glaring oversight in Charleston and the Lowcountry region, but they relied predominantly on funding from the federal government to launch this eighty million dollar project. In 2010, IAAM lost twenty-five million dollars of federal start-up support due to the economic downturn, which forced the museum board to reassess their development strategies. The result is a new design and implementation plan that suggests a significantly downsized museum building, but also introduces a range of innovative uses of various physical and virtual spaces throughout the Charleston area for implementing an influential African American history museum. This paper presents a case study of IAAM’s fluctuating development process, with a particular focus on outlining these new, more cost- effective development strategies, which include: collaborating with existing historic tourism sites to improve their African American history representations; operating as a trailhead to inclusive history sites in the region; developing digital interpretation projects such as online tours, interactive maps, and online exhibitions; and interpreting the landscape around the museum, rather confining interpretation to the interior of the building.

In \"Slave Prices and the South Carolina Economy, 1722-1809\" (hereafter MRW), our focus here, they combine a slave price series, based largely on probate records, with a price series made up of the main export goods that slaves produced--indigo, cotton, and most importantly rice--to infer trends in average slave productivity. Both Lewis Gray and Coclanis report estimates of land yields increasing by 50 percent, and it appears output per worker was going up as well: \"a good working hand on a rice plantation [prior to 1748] produced about 2,250 pounds of clean rice per year, the figure for the average hand had apparently grown to about 3,000-3,600 pounds yearly during the second half of the eighteenth century, with good hands capable of even more.\"

Based on data from probate inventories we construct and analyze an annual time series of slave prices for South Carolina from 1722 to 1809. Comparison of South Carolina slave prices with those in other parts of the Western Hemisphere and the relationship between slave prices and slave imports indicate that while the long-run supply of slaves was highly elastic, over periods of one to two decades the supply curve was upward sloping. Comparison of our slave price series with an index of agricultural export prices indicates that labor productivity growth in agriculture was modest over the eighteenth century.