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For helpful comments I thank David Akin, Gordon Arlen, Rohit Goel, Reha Kadakal, Diana Kim, Ainsley LeSure, J. J. McFadden, Guy Mount, Tianna Paschel, Moishe Postone, Barnaby Raine, Jon Rogowski, Julie Saville, Andrew Shryock, Matthias Staisch, and Chris Tomlins, and workshop participants at the University of Chicago and the New School for Social Research. I am especially indebted to Michael Dawson, Sarah Johnson, Patchen Markell, Jonathan Obert, Jennifer Pitts, Aziz Rana, William Sewell, and Lisa Wedeen, as well as CSSH's anonymous reviewers, for their detailed and incisive feedback.
INTRODUCTION
In spite of the aspirations of Anthony Ashley-Cooper and John Locke, who framed the "Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina" in 1669, the colony settled at Charles Town in 1670 was anything but a well-ordered polity.1During the first three decades of settlement, the Lords Proprietors charged the colonists with disorganization, idleness, piracy, and the illegal enslavement of indigenous peoples.2In 1708, Rev. Gideon Johnston, the commissary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts in the colony, complained that the English in Charles Town were "the Vilest race of Men upon the Earth" and "the most factious and Seditious people in the whole World."3The colony seemed to fare no better after the colonists revolted against proprietary rule in favor of royal government in 1719. By 1724, the first royal governor of the province, Francis Nicholson, described a colony at risk of collapsing into a "Primative State of Nature."4This prediction was almost borne out when a dispute over paper money caused the collapse of regular governance in 1728-1729.5Despite this upheaval, the South Carolina colonists established a robust plantation system that boasted the highest slave-to-freeman ratio in mainland North America after 1708. Before 1720, to be sure, many Carolina plantations were relatively small "frontier" operations, where masters worked and lived in close proximity to their slaves producing livestock, lumber, and crops. However, larger plantations became increasingly common, and by 1720 half of the colony's enslaved population lived on plantations with more than twenty slaves.6South Carolina's plantation-colonial complex would go on to fuel the most prosperous of the thirteen colonies by 1775.7This paper asks how the disorderly...