page_title: Economy of South Carolina
section_title: Colonial South Carolina
hierarchical_section_title: Economy of South Carolina / Early colonial economy and background / Colonial South Carolina
caption_attribution_description: English: 7 College Way, Charleston, South Carolina
context_page_description: The economy of South Carolina was ranked the 26th largest in the United States based on gross domestic product in 2020. Tourism, centered around Myrtle Beach, Charleston, and Hilton Head Island, is the state's largest industry. The state's other major economic sector is advanced-manufacturing located primarily in the Upstate and the Lowcountry. Several foreign-invested automotive manufacturing plants are located in the state which make South Carolina the leading exporter of cars in the country.
  Before rapidly industrializing in the 1950s, South Carolina primarily had an agricultural economy throughout its history. During the antebellum period, the state's economy was based almost solely on the exportation of cotton and rice cultivated using the labor of enslaved Africans. By the time of the American Revolution, the exportation of rice to Europe made the lowcountry the wealthiest region in North America. But, South Carolina's economic importance in the union began to decline following the Panic of 1819 and the expansion of cotton cultivation in the Old Southwest.
context_section_description: Like most American colonies, the development South Carolina relied on the West Indies as a major market for exports and imports. English settlers were originally attracted to the region by two cash crops, tobacco and sugar cane. By 1660, entrepreneurs colonized the North American coastline below the Chesapeake in order to supply Barbadian consumers with both timber and produce. The colonists (numbering 4,000 by 1690, mostly through immigration) were unable to produce commodities for European markets so they traded with Barbados for "slaves, sugar, bills of exchange, and European goods." By the 1690s, South Carolina began cultivating rice. Its centrality to the colony's economy played a similar role as tobacco did in Virginia. The demand for this new staple crop grew continuously in the succeeding decades. By 1740, rice accounted for "nearly 60 percent of total exports by value" of the lower southern colonies and nearly "10 percent of the value of all commodities shipped from British America."
  The economy of South Carolina was relatively diverse and wealthy compared to the other colonies in the beginning of the 18th century. South Carolinian settlers exported rice and naval stores to Great Britain, traded with Native American tribes for deer skins and enslaved people, and continued their commerce with the West Indies. During this time, Charleston was the fourth largest on the continent. But rice transformed South Carolina into a rice monoculture with a growing demand for enslaved laborers in the colony's rice belt. In effect, the scalability of rice led to diversified farms being replaced by specialized plantations with a large number of enslaved workers, greater wealth alongside greater wealth inequality, the emigration of capital-less and skilled labor, and finally an increased focus on trade with Great Britain at the expense of trade with the Caribbean. It is estimated that "between 1700 and 1775, approximately 40 percent of all Africans brought to the United States entered through Charleston's harbor."
  The rice plantations in the lowcountry made it the wealthiest region on the continent. The state benefited from its relationship with the British Empire. But, the restrictive efforts by the British to curtail sedition in the colonies and the rumored possibility that one of those efforts would be to encourage a slave insurrection led South Carolinians to declare for independence.
  Ultimately, less is known about the economy of the lower Southern colonies (South Carolina, Georgia, and the Cape Fear portion of North Carolina) than any other section of British America. In the case of South Carolina, this may be because the rise of an elite planter class in the lowcountry along with their concentration of power was more similar to Britain's West Indian colonies than it was to the other mainland colonies.
caption: Charleston single homes were influenced by the state's Barbadian settlers.[5]
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